Fall 2018

OTHER FEMINISMS: FOUR INDIAN WOMEN ARTISTS

a lecture by Gayatri Sinha

September 11, Tuesday, 6:30 to 8 pm

Institute of Fine Arts, 1 East 78th Street

Gayatri Sinha, art editor, critic & curator

Beginning in 1985, Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh, Arpita Singh and Madhvi Parekh organized exhibitions of their work in Bhopal, Bombay and Delhi, designing their own installations and commissioning catalogues. Three decades later they are viewed as the first if not the only women’s artist collective in South Asia. Coming together in their 40s, and working in an intensely patriarchal society, they addressed domestic and bodily experience along with political issues. Drawing from images of the female figure in Indian myth and history, they created a model for a new, transnational feminism.

Each artist developed her own unique language: the Chinese scroll and Persian-Indic miniature in Nilima Sheikh, painted rotating Mylar ‘prayer-wheels’ in Nalani Malani, the figure of the middle aged woman as witness in Arpita Singh, and an invented folk style in the work of Madhvi Parekh. Working individually and collaboratively, they combined grass roots feminism, classical Indian art, artisanal materials and theater design, defining an alternative artistic tradition, outside the canon of modernism, that could embody women’s experience.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; and Institute of Fine Arts.

Gayatri Sinha is an art editor, critic and curator. Her primary areas of enquiry are in gender in contemporary and classical art, media and South Asian social history. She has taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Lady Shriram College, and the Bhau Dajji lad Museum, and is the founder of criticalcollective.in, India’s first web based archive and news magazine on art.

Her edited volumes include: Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists (Marg, 2010), Art and Visual Culture in India 1857- 2007 (Marg Publications, 2009); Indian Art: an Overview (Rupa Books, 2003), Expressions and Evocations Contemporary Women Artists of India (Marg, 1996). She has written monographs on Krishen Khanna, Himmat Shah and M F Husain, and is currently editing a volume on modern and contemporary Photography.

She has curated exhibitions in New Delhi, Mumbai, Frankfurt, Liege, Newark, Minneapolis, Shanghai, and Seoul, including: Part Narratives, 2017; Diary Entries, 2015; Water, 2013; Ideas of the Sublime, 2013; Cynical Love: Life in the everyday, 2011; Looking Glass: The Existence of Difference, 2010; Constructed Realities, 2010; Failed Plot, 2009; Public Places, Private Spaces: Contemporary Photography and Video Art in India, 2007-2008, Watching Me Watching India, 2006; Middle Age Spread: Imaging India 1947–2004, 2004; Vilas: The Idea of Pleasure, 2000; Woman/Goddess, 1998-2001; The Self and the World, 1997.

This event is free & open to the public. For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Institute of Fine Arts at ifa.program@nyu.edu or 212-992-5800.



FROM ABJECT PERFORMANCES TO AESTHETICS IN RELATION

a Decolonizing Vision Series talk with Leticia Alvarado

September 17, Monday, 6:30 to 8 pm

CSGS, 285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

Leticia Alvarado, American Studies, Brown University

Presenting her recently published book, Abject Strategies: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production, Leticia Alvarado proposes a critical engagement with aesthetic theory to enrichen our political imaginings in Latino studies, centering aesthetics beyond the representational in style, composition, and political ideation. Animating a diverse expressive archive that ranges from performance art to performative testimonies of personal faith-based subjection, Alvarado offers an account of politicized aesthetics distinct from those we’ve come to understand as politically efficacious. A focus on abject aesthetics, she contends, captures experiences that lie at the edge of the mainstream Latino-centered social justice struggles to illuminate modes of community formation and social critique defined by a refusal of identitarian coherence that nonetheless coalesce into affiliation and possibility. Pivoting from her book, in this talk Alvarado will also mobilize theories of brownness to further explore non-identitarian affiliation conjured by aesthetic engagement. Pairing the work of Dominican born artist Firelei Báez and Nairobi born artist Wangechi Mutu, Alvarado begins to develop a theory of relational black and brown aesthetics, reading femme gestures as practices of informed and resistant engagement to query structuring ontologies of the present and ultimately provide models for being within and outside of colonial pasts and presents.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; and Contemporary Art Research Collective

Leticia Alvarado is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. Her interdisciplinary research is situated at the nexus of Latina/o/x, visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies. Alvarado’s research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Smithsonian, and Brown University’s Wriston Fellowship for “excellence in teaching and scholarship.” Her scholarly publications appear in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies as well as the award winning museum catalogue, Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.. Her first book, Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production is now available from Duke University Press.

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible. For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgsnyu@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.



ZANELE MUHOLI: SOMNYAMA NGONYAMA, HAIL THE DARK LIONESS

a book launch with Muholi

September 27, Thursday, 6:30 to 8 pm

Silver Center, Jurow Hall, 100 Washington Square East, 1st floor

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (Aperture) includes one hundred self-portraits created by one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. In each of the images, Muholi drafts material props from their immediate environment in an effort to reflect their journey, explore their own image and possibilities as a black person in today’s global society, and—most important—to speak emphatically in response to contemporary and historical rascisms. As they state, “I am producing this photographic document to encourage people to be brave enough to occupy spaces, brave enough to create without fear of being vilified. . . . To teach people about our history, to re-think what history is all about, to re-claim it for ourselves, to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.” More than twenty curators, poets, and authors offer written contributions that draw out the layers of meaning and possible readings to accompany select images.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; and Institute of African American Affairs & Center for Black Visual Culture.

Muholi is a South African artist and visual activist. For over a decade they have documented black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people’s lives in various townships in South Africa. Responding to the continuing discrimination and violence faced by the LGBTI community, in 2006 Muholi embarked on an ongoing project, Faces and Phases, in which they depict black lesbian and transgender individuals. These arresting portraits are part of Muholi’s contribution towards a more democratic and representative South African homosexual history. Through this positive imagery, Muholi hopes to offset the stigma and negativity attached to queer identity in African society.

This event is free & open to the public. For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Institute of African American Affairs & Center for Black Visual Culture at 212-998-2130.

 

AESTHETICS THROUGH THE PENAL HOLE

a Decolonizing Vision Series lecture by Nicole R. Fleetwood

October 1, Monday, 6:30 to 8 pm

CSGS, 285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

Nicole R. Fleetwood, American Studies, Rutgers University

The talk will focus on art making and aesthetic practices of incarcerated people held in solitary confinement and other types of isolation units. To make art in solitary confinement is to deliberately engage the sensory deprivation that occurs in isolation cells as a mode of assault. With solitary confinement, the carceral state attempts a totalizing control over the bodies and minds of imprisoned people, largely through structuring their sensory experiences with excruciating detail and calculated indifference to their suffering. How do such restrictive mobility, sensory control, and lack of human contact impact the aesthetic experiences and practices of prisoners in solitary confinement?

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Contemporary Art Research Collective; Institute of African American Affairs & Center for Black Visual Culture; and the Prison Education Program.

Nicole Fleetwood is a professor in the Department of American Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is co-curator and contributing editor of “Prison Nation,” a special issue of Aperture magazine on the role of photography in documenting mass incarceration. She also recently completed a book on art and mass incarceration that will be released in 2019. Her two previous books are Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011) and On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015). Fleetwood is the recipient of awards and fellowships from NYPL’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, American Council of Learned Societies, Whiting Foundation, Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible. For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgsnyu@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.


QUEER MIGRATIONS & DIASPORIC INTIMACIES FILM SERIES

October 3, Monday: The Lulu Sessions (S. Casper Wong, USA, 2011) with director S. Casper Wong and New School professor Lana Lin
November 7, Wednesday: Experimental films by Aykan Safoğlu & Sylvia Schedelbauer
November 27, Tuesday: Lesbian Factory (Susan Chen, Taiwan, 2010)
November 28, Wednesday: Rainbow Popcorn (Susan Chen, Taiwan, 2013)

Click HERE for full programming information.

All screenings begin at 6 pm.

Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th Floor

The film series Queer Migrations & Diasporic Intimacies runs throughout the fall, foregrounding intimate queer worlds that often get eclipsed in narratives of migration and diaspora. Reaching from experimental shorts, to personal stories, to activist documentaries from Asia and the Asian diasporas, the series features forms of world-making that while shaped by the forces of global capital and patriarchal nationalism, move beyond the latters’ limiting paradigms. Come join the filmmakers as they present their works on love, loss, and relishing silliness that include a Turkish homage on James Baldwin (Safoğlu), a retrieval of unremembered interracial intimacy through found footage (Schedelbauer), an exploration of the tumultuous love life of lesbian Filipina migrant workers (Chen), and a NY-based filmmaker’s capturing attempt to document the last days of her closest person (Wong).

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian Film & Media Initiative, Department of Cinema Studies; Asian/Pacific/American Institute; and Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible. For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Department of Cinema Studies at 212-998-1600.

Click HERE for full programming information.


SEXUAL POLITICS IN A TRANSNATIONAL FRAME

a roundtable with Sa’ed Atshan, Sara Mourad, Jyoti Puri, & Evren Savci

October 11, Thursday, 6 to 8 pm

CSGS, 285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

Sa’ed Atshan, Peace & Conflict Studies, Swarthmore College
Sara Mourad, Media Studies, American University in Beirut
Jyoti Puri, Sociology, Simmons College
Evren Savci, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University

Taxonomies of identity and histories of activism in the U.S and Europe cannot be seamlessly mapped onto other societies. To think of sexual politics, broadly, is to suspend the rubrics of feminist, LGBT, and queer activism, in our attempt to understand how gender and sexuality get politicized both as categories of identity, and as categories of analysis in a particular society. This panel is an invitation to think comparatively about sexual subcultures across South Asia and the Middle East (and specifically in India, Turkey, Israel/Palestine, and Lebanon), which we will examine in their opposition to formal authority, their coalitional politics, their redefinition of social stigmas in political terms, and their re-orientation of the individual towards the social and the collective.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute; Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies; and South Asia @NYU

Dr. Sa’ed Atshan is an Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College. He previously served as a postdoctoral fellow in international studies at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. He earned a joint Ph.D. in anthropology and middle eastern studies and an MA in social anthropology from Harvard University, and a Master in Public Policy (MPP) degree from the Harvard Kennedy School. He received his BA from Swarthmore in 2006. His research interests are at the intersection of peace and conflict studies, the anthropology of policy, critical development studies and gender and sexuality studies. Atshan has been awarded multiple graduate fellowships, including from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Woodrow Wilson National Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. He is also the recipient of a Soros Fellowship and a Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace. He has worked for the American Civil Liberties Union, the UN High Commission on Refugees, Human Rights Watch, Seeds of Peace, the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department, and the Government of Dubai. He is Quaker, grew up in Palestine, and is also an LGBTQ rights activist.

Sara Mourad is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and the coordinator of the Women & Gender Studies Initiative at the American University of Beirut. She works at the intersection of media and cultural studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies. Her current research explores identity formation, cultural translation, and the politics of assembly in postwar subcultures in Lebanon, with a focus on feminist and queer formations. Mourad earned a B.A in Political Science from the American University of Beirut and a PhD in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in the International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media and Communication, the Journal of Communication Inquiry, and Jadaliyya.

Jyoti Puri is Professor of Sociology at Simmons College. She writes and teaches at the crossroads of sociology, sexuality and queer studies, and postcolonial feminist theory. Her book, Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle against the Antisodomy Law in India, was published by Duke University Press (February 2016). Her other publications include Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India (Routledge 1999) and Encountering Nationalism (Blackwell Publishers 2004), as well as articles, book chapters, and journal special issues on sexuality, state, gender, and nationalism. She is currently working on a project on death and migration.

Evren Savcı is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Savcı’s work on the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism and religion has appeared in Journal of Marriage and the Family, Ethnography, Sexualities, Political Power and Social Theory, Theory & Event, and Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and in several edited collections. She has contributed op-eds, blog entries and interviews to Jadaliyya, The Feminist Wire, make/shift, and Middle East Research and Information Project. She is currently finishing her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (under contract with DUP), which analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey’s AKP regime. As she wraps up her first book, she is starting a new research project on “failures of Westernization,” analyzing sexual practices that were deemed “uncivilized” and either heavily discouraged or outlawed by the Turkish Republic, such as Islamic matrimony, cousin marriages, arranged marriages and polygamy, yet are still practiced today.

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible. For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgsnyu@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.

Facebook event page here.


ON YOUR MARX: luciana achugar: BRUJX

a dance by luciana achugar

October 19, Friday, 7:30 pm

NYU Skirball, 566 LaGuardia Place

luciana achugar, choreographer

Brujx, a world premiere, ritualizes the labor of the dancers, exposing and transcending it to unearth the powerful and primal magic brujx within them. As in all of luciana achugar’s work it proposes DANCE as the necessary transformational healing for our time. Brujx resists western assumptions of beauty and hierarchical order, freeing the dancers both of their role as worker in the power structure within the creative project and of the universal shame of being animal-sexual-powerful-instinctive creatures. This piece is recommended for ages 16+.

After Brujx, join us for Let Us Eat Cake: a dance party and marathon reading of Marxist texts in the NYU Skirball lobby, in celebration of Marx’s 200th birthday. This birthday party will feature DJ AndrewAndrew, spinning the finest Marxist tracks, plus readings from the masterworks Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, performed by a revolving cast of thinkers, artists, Marxists and celebrities. (Stop by even if you can’t make it to the show!)

Let Us Eat Cake dance party: featuring DJ AndrewAndrew and special guests
9:30pm

luciana achugar, a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay, has been making work in NYC and Uruguay independently and collaboratively since 1999. She is a two-time Bessie Award recipient and was nominated for a 2016 Bessie for Outstanding Production for her latest An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love. She was a 2017 Alpert Award recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee, amongst other accolades. She was one of DanceMagazine’s 2012 “25 to Watch” and her Bessie Award-winning work PURO DESEO was named one of 2010 Time Out/NY’s “Best of Dance.” Her works also include The Pleasure Project and OTRO TEATRO.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; and Skirball Center.

For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Skirball Center at skirball.center.info@nyu.edu or 212-998-4941.


QUEER TROUBLE IN CARIBBEAN ART & ACTIVISM

a conversation with Rosamond S. King & Angelique V. Nixon

October 23, Tuesday, 6 to 8 pm

CSGS, 285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

Rosamond S. King, English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Angelique V. Nixon, Institute for Gender & Development Studies, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad

Two award winning artist-scholars reflect on the intersections of LGBTQI and feminist arts, activism, and politics in the Caribbean. King and Nixon address how their own work moves between these different registers. They also discuss how they see contemporary queer Caribbean performance, literature, and visual art engage and resist the ongoing violences of colonial and postcolonial histories, and how these works offer us vibrant models of desire, embodiment, and collectivity.

Rosamond S. King is a critical and creative writer whose scholarly work focuses on sexuality, performance, and literature in the Caribbean and Africa. Her book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination received the Caribbean Studies Association best book award, her poetry collection Rock|Salt|Stone won a Lambda Literary Award, and she has performed around the world. King is Co-Chair of the Caribbean International Resource Network, President of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, creative editor of sx salon, and Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York.

Angelique V. Nixon is a Bahamas-born, Trinidad-based writer, artist, teacher, activist, and poet. She is a lecturer and researcher at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. She earned her Ph.D. in English with specialisation in Caribbean literature, postcolonial studies, women and gender studies from the University of Florida (2008); and she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Africana Studies at New York University (2009). She is author of the art & poetry chapbookSaltwater Healing – A Myth Memoir & Poems (Poinciana Paper Press, sold-out limited edition, 2013). Her scholarly book Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2015) won the Caribbean Studies Association 2016 Barbara T. Christian Award for Best Book in the Humanities. And she is co-editor of two multimedia online collections: Theorizing Homophobias in the Caribbean: Complexities of Place, Desire, and Belonging (2012) and Love | Hope | Community: Caribbean Sexualities and Social Justice (2017). Angelique serves on the working board of CAISO: Sex and Gender Justice in Trinidad and Tobago, as well as co-chair of the Caribbean IRN, which connects activists, researchers, and artists who do work on diverse genders and sexualities.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies; Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Contemporary Art Research Collective; Institute of African American Affairs & Center for Black Visual Culture; and the Program in Africana Studies, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible. For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgsnyu@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.

Facebook event page here.


AFTER THE PARTY: A MANIFESTO OF QUEER OF COLOR LIFE

a Decolonizing Vision Series talk with Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson

October 29, Monday, 6:30 to 8 pm

CSGS, 285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Performance Studies, Northwestern University

Presenting material from the new book After the Party: A Manifesto of Queer of Color Life, Chambers-Letson presents a eulogy and a manifesto that stakes out the life-sustaining and worldmaking powers of minoritarian performance. Written in the folds between queer of color life and death, the author brings the work of José Muñoz and Karl Marx to bear on a set of performances by Nao Bustamante and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The talk describes performance’s capacity produce a communism of incommensurability geared towards the sustenance of black, brown, queer, and trans life—a queer of color commons that aids the work of keeping our dead alive and with us as we struggle to survive a relentlessly precarious present.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; and Department of Performance Studies.

Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson is associate professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University who researches and teaches courses in performance studies, critical race theory, political theory, and queer of color critique. He is the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (NYU Press, 2018) and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America (NYU Press, 2013). His academic writing has appeared in edited volumes and journals including Social Text, Political Theory, Criticism, MELUS, TDR, and women & performance. Art writing has appeared in catalogues for Teching Hsieh’s exhibition at the 2017 Venice Bienale and the Chrysler Museum/Grey Art Gallery’s Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera, as well as Dirty Looks, The Brooklyn Rail, ASAP/J, and the Walker Reader. With Ann Pellegrini and Tavia Nyong’o he is a series co-editor of the Sexual Cultures series at NYU Press.

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible. For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgsnyu@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.

Facebook event page here.


UNRULY VISIONS: THE AESTHETIC PRACTICES OF QUEER DIASPORA

a book launch & roundtable with Licia Fiol-Matta, Gayatri Gopinath, Lisa Lowe, Ritty Lukose, Manijeh Moradian, & Tavia Nyong’o

November 15, Thursday, 6 to 8 pm

PLEASE NOTE NEW LOCATION: Jurow Hall, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East, 1st floor

Licia Fiol-Matta, Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Literatures, New York University
Gayatri Gopinath, Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University
Lisa Lowe, English, Tufts University
Ritty Lukose, Gallatin, New York University
Manijeh Moradian,Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Barnard College
Tavia Nyong’o, Theater Studies, Yale University

Panelists will discuss Gopinath’s Unruly Visions (Duke UP, 2018), which brings queer studies to bear on studies of diaspora and visuality, tracing the interrelation of affect, archive, region, and aesthetics through an examination of a wide range of contemporary queer visual culture. Spanning film, fine art, poetry, and photography, the book stages unexpected encounters between work by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian, and Latinx artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Chitra Ganesh, Akram Zaatari, and Allan deSouza. Unruly Visions shows how their art functions as regional queer archives that express alternative understandings of time, space, and relationality.

The roundtable will be followed by brief comments by Gayatri Gopinath (NYU), and reception.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute; Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Contemporary Art Research Collective; Department of Social & Cultural Analysis; and South Asia @NYU.

Licia Fiol-Matta is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She received an AB from Princeton University and a PhD from Yale University, both in Comparative Literature. Prior to joining NYU she taught at Barnard College and the City University of New York. She is the author of A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (Minnesota) and The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music (Duke). Fiol-Matta is co-editor of the series New Directions in Latino American Cultures (Palgrave) and The Puerto Rico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (under contract, Duke). She is the recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Fiol-Matta writes on Latin American cultural studies, women’s and gender studies, and music.

Gayatri Gopinath is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke UP, 2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke UP, 2018). She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and queer diasporic cultural production in journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, Social Text, positions, and Diaspora.

Lisa Lowe is a scholar of race, colonialism, migration, and globalization, whose most recent book, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), examines the nexus of settler colonialism, transatlantic African slavery, and the East Indies and China trades in goods and people as the conditions for modern European liberalism and empire. She is Distinguished Professor of English and Humanities at Tufts University, and a member of the Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora there. Since 2001, Lowe has co-edited with Jack Halberstam, Perverse Modernities, the book series for Duke University Press, which includes Gayatri Gopinath’s first book, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (2005), as well as the new Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (2018).

Ritty Lukose is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Gender/Sexuality/Feminist Studies, and South Asian Studies at The Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. She is the author of Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India (Duke, 2009/Orient Longman, 2010) and co-editor of South Asian Feminisms (Duke, 2012/Zubaan 2012).

Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. She received her PhD in American Studies at NYU. From 2008 to 2011, she co-directed the Association of Iranian American Writers. Her book, Neither Washington, Nor Tehran: Iranian Internationalism in the United States, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Her essays and articles have appeared in the Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, Scholar & Feminist online, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Comparative Studies of South Asian, Africa, and the Middle East, Social Text online, jadaliyya.com, and Callaloo.

Tavia Nyong’o is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of American Studies at Yale. His new book, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life is forthcoming in November 2018 from NYU Press. He co-edits Social Text, the Sexual Cultures book series, and is an original Bully Blogger.

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible. For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgsnyu@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.

Facebook event page here.


CALL HER GANDA (93 min., 2018, dir. PJ Raval)

a film screening & discussion with PJ Raval

November 16, Friday, 7 pm

Hemmerdinger Hall, Silver Center, 31 Washington Place, 1st floor

A modern David and Goliath story, Call Her Ganda follows a cast of willful women as they take on some of the most powerful institutions in the world. Fusing personal tragedy, human rights activism and the little known history, and complex aftermath, of U.S. imperial rule in the Philippines, Call Her Ganda forges a visually daring and profoundly humanistic geopolitical investigative exposé.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute; Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program in the NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis; Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies; Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; and Native Studies Forum.

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible. For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute at apa.institute@nyu.edu or 212-998-3700