After Tiller
a film screening & discussion with Faye Ginsburg, Martha Shane, & Lana Wilson
Friday, January 31
6 to 8 pm
Post-screening discussion with co-directors and -producers Martha Shane and Lana Wilson.
Moderated by Faye Ginsburg, Center for Media, Culture & History, New York University
After Tiller (85 min, 2013, Dirs: Martha Shane, Lana Wilson). A documentary exploring the controversial subject of third-trimester abortions in the wake of the 2009 assassination of Dr. George Tiller. The procedure is now performed by only four doctors in the U.S., who risk their lives daily in support of their patients.
Michelson Theater
Department of Cinema Studies
721 Broadway, 6th Floor
For more information about this event, please visit the CRM website here.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Media, Culture & History and the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.
Remembering José Esteban Muñoz
Please join Tisch School of the Arts and the Department of Performance Studies in remembering the life and work of José Esteban Muñoz
Saturday, February 8
11 am to 1 pm
Eisner & Lubin Auditorium
Kimmel Center
60 Washington Square South
Reception to follow
1 to 2pm
Kimmel Center
Rooms 405 & 406
Co-sponsored by the NYU Tisch School of the Arts; Department of Performance Studies; Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Department of Social & Cultural Analysis; Program in Gender & Sexuality Studies; Program in Latino Studies; Program in Religious Studies; Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics; NYU Press; and the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
The Public Life of Love
a duet with David Kyuman Kim & Martha M. Umphrey
with moderator/discussant P.A. Skantze
Thursday, February 13
6:30 to 8 pm
David Kyuman Kim, Religious Studies and American Studies, Connecticut College
Martha M. Umphrey, Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought, Amherst College
P.A. Skantze, Performance Practices, University of Roehampton, and CSGS Global Visiting Scholar
On the eve of Valentine’s Day, join us for an interdisciplinary conversation about the paradoxes and possibilities of The Public Life of Love. Love is often understood as a matter of “private” life that belongs to the registers of intimacy, sentimentality, and the irrational. As such, love is the opposite of, or at least in tension with, such “public” values as law and reason. But is this opposition adequate or even historically accurate? US patriotism is a discourse of love—of country. There is also a strong African-American tradition that valorizes the social power of love, as in Martin Luther King’s prophetic message of love and social justice. And, of course, love American style is actively constructed and constrained by public arrangements. Laws regulate whom we may love and under what conditions. Public ceremonies, both secular and religious, render some forms of love imaginable, and consign some others to the margins. What happens if we resist assigning love to any one place or any one discourse and instead consider its multiple public lives, for better and for worse?
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.
Queer Canada
part of the Globally Queer? series
a lecture by Rinaldo Walcott
with discussant Tavia Nyong’o
Thursday, February 27
6:30 to 8 pm
Rinaldo Walcott, Sociology and Equity Studies, University of Toronto
Tavia Nyong’o, Performance Studies, New York University
The final installment of this year’s Globally Queer? series features the pioneering, interdisciplinary scholar of Black Canadian culture-making and experience, Rinaldo Walcott. For Rinaldo Walcott on YouTube.
Department of Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, Room 612
Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Performance Studies.
The AIDS Generation
a panel discussion with Eric Bartley, Jack Drescher, & Perry N. Halkitis
Thursday, March 6
7:30 to 9:30 pm
Eric Bartley, AIDS activist and Housing Works, Inc. Board of Directors member
Jack Drescher, psychiatrist & psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City
Perry N. Halkitis, Applied Psychology, Public Health & Medicine and Global Institute of Public Health, New York University
This panel moves off from Perry Halkitis’s recently published book, The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience, to discuss some of the strategies for survival and coping employed by the first generation of gay male long-term survivors of the disease. Through interviews conducted by Halkitis, the book narrates the stories of gay men who have survived since the early days of the epidemic; documents and delineates the strategies and behaviors enacted by men of this generation to survive it; and examines the extent to which these approaches to survival inform and are informed by the broad body of literature on resilience and health.
Kimball Hall
246 Greene Street, Ground Floor
Hopefully Devoted, or the Feminist Lyre
a lecture by P.A. Skantze
Tuesday, April 1
6:30 to 8 pm
P.A. Skantze, Performance Practices, University of Roehampton, and CSGS Global Visiting Scholar
This lecture, born of P.A. Skantze’s project The Flaneur at Her Devotions, makes use of a new methodology Skantze has been experimenting with: lyric theory, questions of gender, wandering, longing, and devotion as “temporal insurgency,” to use Fred Moten’s term. Who is allowed to take their time? Can we be an ethical thorn in the side of the businessification of learning if we insist on being inconvenient, digressing, getting lost? What does attending to the accidental auditory — what might, in a bad pun, be thought of as the practice of flanearing — produce against the visual grain of the flat screens, mini and grand, constantly jostling the present aside? As with all Skantze’s work, in this talk she is interested in the breath of “something like a universal,” as deployed by those of us too often assumed to be hindered by the specific: the specifics of gender, of race, of sexual orientation. Is it feminist to sing theory? Is it queer to write in meter? Let’s find out.
Department of Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, Room 612
Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Performance Studies.
Perverse Ambitions, Deviant Careers: A Queer History of the Modern American Workplace
a lecture by Margot Canaday
Thursday, April 10
6:30 to 8 pm
Margot Canaday, History, Princeton University
While historians of sexuality have explored working class cultures, an assumption that workplaces were “straight spaces” in which queer people passed has limited inquiry into the workplace itself. Yet the workplace shaped queer life as much as the bar or the street. Fear of job loss was a central fact of queer life for most of the twentieth century. Moreover, because of a modern equivalence between work and personal identity (the job makes the person, said Marx), occupations have been central to establishing sexual identity. This talk—part of a larger book project that centers the workplace in queer history—offers a preliminary ethnography of LGBTs working in mainstream occupations during the American economy’s “golden age” of the 1950s and 1960s.
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Living Labor: Marxism and Performance Studies
a conference with keynotes by Fred Moten and Sianne Ngai
Friday through Sunday, April 11-13
To live labor is to negotiate the extended processes of reproducing ourselves and others. To live labor is to engage the material conditions that traverse personhood and thinghood. To live labor is to attend to the forces, resonances, and energies that intertwine in the affects and objects of everyday life. For this reason, Living Labor: Marxism and Performance Studies invites submissions that explore the intersections of performance studies and Marxist philosophies. Papers may intervene at points of seeming incompatibility, address convergences, or look forward to emerging discourses relating to this nexus.
Department of Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, Room 612
Panel times and other details to follow.
For more information, please visit livinglaborconference.tumblr.com.
On the Gelatinous: Three Movements
a lecture by Kyla Wazana Tompkins
This talk has been postponed until October 7th, 2014 — stay tuned for more information in the Fall 2014 calendar!
Kyla Wazana Tompkins, English and Gender & Women’s Studies, Pomona College
Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ work in critical race and queer theory, food studies, and American cultural and literary history has thus far focused on the objects, people, and spaces where sociality and materiality meet, spaces where we can begin to limn the outlines of biopolitical world as it is experienced in the granular qualities of the everyday. This lecture, which Tompkins is developing as part of a new project (tentatively titled “So Moved”), will look at multiple forms of movement – affective, emotional, political and physical – as they coalesce in and around particular food textures, in this case, the soft squishiness of gelatin. “On the Gelatinous” considers three texts – Martin Delany’s Blake, Herman Melville’s Poor Man’s Pudding, Rich’s Man’s Crumbs, and a recent pornographic screensaver by Afro-Canadian artist David Findlay entitled “Generous Gesture” – in which the haptic, movemential, and tactile quality that we might term “the gelatinous” allows for authors and artists to theorize different forms of movement and sociality.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, & Public Health, the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, and NYU Press.
“I Use My Love to Guide Me”: Surviving and Thriving in the Face of Impossible Situations
a panel discussion with Reina Gossett, CeCe McDonald, & Dean Spade
Monday, April 21
7:30 pm
Event is free, but registration is required — click here to register!
For more information about this event, please contact the Barnard Center for Research on Women at bcrw(at)barnard.edu.
In 2011, CeCe McDonald was a fashion design student at Minneapolis Community and Technical College when while walking to a grocery store, she and her friends were attacked by a group of white people shouting racist and transphobic slurs. When CeCe fatally stabbed one of their attackers in self defense, she was arrested and eventually imprisoned for 19 months. As she awaited trial and experienced incarceration, the Transgender Youth Support Network in Minnesota created the Free CeCe campaign, inspiring an international community of activists to support CeCe and rally for her freedom. Throughout, CeCe updated community members with her evocative and thoughtful writing on police brutality, transphobia, homophobia, racism, and the power of love against systems of injustice.
Recently, CeCe joined prison abolition activists Reina Gossett and Dean Spade in a conversation about her own experiences surviving trauma and impossible situations, and the importance of collective organizing for people facing systems of violence. Videos from this conversation will be available here shortly.
On April 21, CeCe, Reina, and Dean will share additional excerpts from their discussion and continue the conversation, responding to questions from the audience and online. Join us to support CeCe and the continued push for an end to the prison system and the institutionalized structures of violence throughout our society which support it.
CeCe McDonald is an activist living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is a creative and energetic person who, before her life was so unjustly interrupted, was studying fashion design at MCTC. She had a stable home where she lived with and helped support four other African American youth, her family. CeCe’s family describes her as a leader, a role model, and a loyal friend. She is known as a wise, out-spoken, and welcoming person, with a history of handling prejudice with amazing grace. She is currently working with actress Laverne Cox and director Jac Gares on a documentary about her experience.
Reina Gossett lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn and believes creativity & imagination are vital in movements for self determination. She is a trans activist & artist, working as membership director at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and blogging at reinagossett.com. Reina’s work has been featured in BCRW’s The Scholar & Feminist Online, as well as Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment & The Prison Industrial Complex. She is an activist fellow at BCRW.
Dean Spade is the founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of the Law, and an associate professor at Seattle University School of Law. He is currently a fellow in the Engaging Tradition Project at Columbia Law School.
The Auditorium at The New School
66 West 12th Street
This event is part of the series No One is Disposable, which features conversations on trans activism and prison abolition with BCRW activist fellow Reina Gossett.
Co-sponsored by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, the Office of Social Justice Initiatives at The New School, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU.
Event is free, but registration is required–click here to register!
For more information about this event, please contact the Barnard Center for Research on Women at bcrw(at)barnard.edu.
Religious Freedom “versus” Equal Rights? Emerging Dilemmas in Law and Policy Across the Americas: Gender, Sexuality, Religion
a forum with Lori G. Beaman, Benjamin Berger, Katherine M. Franke, Marco Huaco, Louise Melling, Julieta Lemaitre Ripoll, Pam Spees, Nelson Tebbe, Juan Marco Vaggione, Rev. Winnie Varghese–and more
Thursday, April 24
2 to 6 pm
For a preview of the day’s conversation, click HERE.
Lori G. Beaman, Classics and Religious Studies, University of Ottawa, Canada
Benjamin Berger, Osgoode Hall Law School, Canada
Katherine M. Franke, Columbia Law School
Marco Huaco, President & Founder, Institute Pro Religious Freedom and Public Affaires (PROLIBRE), Peru
Louise Melling, Center for Liberty, American Civil Liberties Union
Julieta Lemaitre Ripoll, Legal Theory, University of the Andes, Colombia
Pam Spees, staff attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights
Nelson Tebbe, Brooklyn Law School
Juan Marco Vaggione, Sociology, School of Law, National University of Córdoba, Argentina, and the Argentinean National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET)
Rev. Winnie Varghese, Rector, St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery
This forum is part of a larger multi-year initiative on “Managing Religious Diversity in the Neoliberal Americas,” based at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. For this April event, we are gathering leading legal scholars, policy practitioners, and religious studies scholars from across the Americas to consider tensions—real and alleged—between religious freedom and social equality.
This framing – religious liberty “versus” social equality for women and LGBT people – is happening across the Americas, but its specific forms, policy solutions, and vocabularies are not taking the same shape in each national context.
In the United States, for example, we see an amplification of rhetoric that pits the claims for equality and rights of LGBT people and women “against” the religious liberty of traditionalist opponents of, for example, homosexuality and abortion. But this is more than rhetoric: in March 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a major “religious liberty” challenge to the contraceptive provisions of the Affordable Care Act, and religious exemptions are the next frontier in the political and legal fight over same-sex marriage in the United States.
In Argentina, the Asosiación de Derechos Civiles (ADC) has challenged the compulsory teaching of Catholic education in public schools in the Province of Salta, calling it a violation of students’ rights to receive a secular education. In June 2013, the provincial Supreme Court upheld the Catholic curriculum. In their ruling, the Justices based their decision in part on the fact that a majority of citizens in that province are Catholic. The ADC is appealing the decision. Meanwhile, Christian communities in Chiapas and other parts of Mexico are demanding the right to home school children in a context where secular elementary education is compulsory.
These disputes across the Americas reveal the fractures and realignments that occur when the dominance or hegemony of particular religious institutions come under challenge, whether due to an increase in religious diversity and/or to changes at the level of the state. How are we to make sense of and respond to these phenomena? What critical tools are being used by local actors to respond to their specific national debates? How might we together develop analyses and activist tool-kits capable of thinking and acting across national boundaries and legal differences?
Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics
Conference Room
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
Co-sponsored by the NYU Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics; funding provided by the Henry Luce Foundation.
Temporality in Question: Psychoanalysis Meets Queer Time
a panel discussion with William Auerbach, Carolyn Dinshaw, Katie Gentile, & Ann Pellegrini
Friday, May 2
4 to 6 pm
William Auerbach, psychologist in private practice in New York City
Carolyn Dinshaw, English and Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University
Katie Gentile, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis, New York University
Ann Pellegrini, Performance Studies and Religious Studies, New York University
This forum stages a paradox: Over the past 15 years, scholars in queer studies have produced a rich and richly heterogeneous body of work linking temporal and sexual dissidence. In order to rethink and interrupt “straight,” or linear, time, much of this scholarship draws on and critically reworks psychoanalysis—prominently: Freud’s conceptions of melancholia, repetition compulsion, trauma, and the ongoing affective and erotic force of the past in the present more generally. In the main, however, and despite the arguable centrality of time for psychoanalysis as theory and as practice (in the form of the clinical hour, for example), psychoanalysts have only recently begun to address themselves to questions of time or temporality as such. This event brings together scholars and clinicians to explore what queer theories of temporality and untimely bodies might say to psychoanalysis and its conceptions of time.
Great Room
19 University Place, Ground Floor
Co-sponsored by Studies in Gender & Sexuality.