Spring 2019

SCHOLAR & FEMINIST CONFERENCE: THE POLITICS & ETHICS OF THE ARCHIVE


a two day conference featuring Diana Carolina Sierra Becerra, La Vaughn Belle, Maria Cotera, Jarrett Drake, Akwaeke Emezi, Jennifer Guglielmo, Michelle Joffroy, Justin Leroy, Laura McTighe, Chinelo Okparanta, Cameron Rowland, Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, C. Riley Snorton, & more


February 8 & 9, Friday & Saturday
Barnard College, The Diana Center, 3009 Broadway


For more information, click here.

This year’s Scholar and Feminist conference builds on BCRW’s close collaboration with the Barnard College Archives to address the complex questions that circulate around the politics and ethics of archival work. Central to traditional scholarly work in reconstructing and interpreting the past, archives are perhaps even more crucial to the preservation of the stories and legacies of marginalized communities and political movements.
The S&F Conference will bring together archivists, librarians, artists, activists, and scholars to discuss the particular political and ethical challenges that reside in the project of creating archives for communities and social justice movements. How do we move beyond the notion of the archive as indifferent repository of textual, material, and digital materials and toward an archive of engagement? How can archival material be put to use to draw attention to muted histories and otherwise invisible networks of affiliation and connection? What difference do recent digital tools and capabilities make in the archiving and accessing of the past? How can archives empower communities to tell their own stories and offer others access to those stories without falling into the trap of appropriation? What political and ethical questions weigh most heavily on the contemporary work of the archive?
In addition to traditional keynotes and panels, the conference will feature workshops and exhibits with the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College, Librarians and Archivists for Palestine, the NYC Trans Oral History Project, Torn Apart/Separados, XFR, and more, to introduce participants to the wide array of work taking place among communities and their archivists at the current moment.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; and by the Barnard College Consortium of Critical Interdisciplinary Studies; Department of Africana Studies; Department of English; Department of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies; Digital Humanities Center; Library & Archives; Program in American Studies; and by the Columbia University Institute for Religion, Culture, & Public Life; and by many more to be announced.

For more information, click here.
Facebook event page here.

 

NEW BOOKS, OLD SINS: EARLY-MODERN SODOMY, BESTIALITY, CROSS-DRESSING

a conversation between Greta LaFleur & Zeb Tortorici, moderated by Justin Abraham Linds

February 14, Thursday, 6 to 7:30 pm
CSGS, 285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

Greta LaFleur, American Studies, Yale University
Justin Abraham Linds, Doctoral Candidate, American Studies, New York University
Zeb Tortorici, Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Literatures, New York University

Colonial taxonomies of sexual behavior emerged in the early-modern Americas through the category of nature; however, even as these taxonomies sorted sex acts with racializing logics, they imploded disciplinary categories with their (mis)inscribing of bodies. In celebration of their new books, Sins Against Nature and The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, Tortorici and LaFleur present their analyses of the settler colonial imbrication of sex and the (un)natural, which fiction writers, archivists, and judicial figures from distinct European empires employed — and continue to employ — as they represented and archived aberrant bodily acts such as sodomy, bestiality, masturbation, captivity and more. By queering the archives of New Spain and locating sexuality in the Early American environment rather than in discrete bodies, both authors offer new insights and methods for analyzing the histories of sexuality.
The book presentations will be followed by a conversation moderated by Justin Abraham Linds, a PhD student at NYU.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies

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.


Greta LaFleur is Associate Professor of American Studies. Her research and teaching focuses on early North American literary and cultural studies, the history of science, the history of race, the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer studies. Her first book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), brings together the history of sexuality and early environmental studies to explore how sexual behaviors were understood in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. She is currently at work on a new book project on the relationship of cultural and legal responses to sexual violence to the history of sexuality. She is also the editor (with Kyla Schuller) of a special issue of American Quarterly, organized around the theme of “Origins of Biopolitics in the Americas” (forthcoming Sept. 2019).

Justin Abraham Linds is a third-year PhD student in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. He researches Early American empire, focusing on the American tropics, and works at the intersection of science, queer, postcolonial, and environmental studies.

Zeb Tortorici is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. He is the author of Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (Duke University Press, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 John Boswell Prize on LGBTQ history, and he is the editor of Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America (University of California Press, 2016). He recently co-edited Centering Animals in Latin American History (Duke University Press, 2013), two special issues of Radical History Review on the topic of “Queering Archives” (2014/15) and an issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on the topic of “Trans*historicities” (2018). His current research project is on “archiving the obscene” in Latin America, from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth, for which he is receiving formal methodological training in the fields of Information Studies and Archival Science with the support of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship.

 

BRUJOS, BEYOND REPRESENTATION: DECOLONIZING & QUEERING TV

a screening & discussion with Ricardo Gamboa, Isaac Gomez, & Justin Ignatius Mitchell

February 26, Tuesday, 6 to 8 pm

CSGS, 285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

BRUJOS is a radically-politicized, queer-of-color web series following four gay Latino doctoral students that are also witches as they try and survive the semester and a witch hunt led by the straight, wealthy, white male descendants of the first New World colonizers. BRUJOS’ experimental approach to production and radical ethos has garnered the show significant recognition and a cult following. Come binge watch much of the series and talk with creator Ricardo Gamboa and cast members Isaac Gomez and Justin Ignatius Mitchell.


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.


Ricardo Gamboa is an artist, activist, and academic creating radical art, cultural, and media work in Chicago and New York City. In Chicago, Gamboa is a member of Free Street Theater. In New York City, they are an alumni of the EmergeNYC program at Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and the New York Neo-Futurists. Gamboa is finishing their doctorate degree at New York University’s renowned American studies program and received their MA in arts politics (2013) from the Tisch School of the Arts. Gamboa has won several awards (and other things that other people care about) including an Arts Matters Fellowship, Joyce Award, and an International Connections Award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Their current projects includes the underground news show The Hoodoisie, the community-based theater piece Meet Juan(ito) Doe, and BRUJOS, the ground-breaking web series about four gay Latino grad who are also witches. Gamboa has worked with over 5,000 young people in the Americas using everything from photography to theater and mural painting to web media to advance young people’s dreams and visions for social change.

Isaac Gomez is an award-winning Chicago-based playwright originally from El Paso, Texas/Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. His play La Ruta received its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theater Company this Winter. His one-woman show the way she spoke will be receiving its Off-Broadway premiere at the Minetta Lane Theatre (produced by Audible) in Summer 2019. He is currently under commission from South Coast Repertory, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Steep Theatre, and StepUp Chicago Playwrights. His plays have been supported by Steppenwolf Theater Company, Primary Stages, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Goodman Theatre, Victory Gardens Theater, Northlight Theatre, Albany Park Theater Project, WaterTower Theater, Haven Theater, Teatro Vista, Greenhouse Theater Center, Jackalope Theater Company, Pivot Arts, Definition Theater Company, Broken Nose Theater, Stage Left, The VORTEX, and Something Marvelous. He is the recipient of the 2018 Dramatists Guild Lanford Wilson Award, the 2017 Jeffry Melnick New Playwright Award at Primary Stages, an inaugural 3Arts “Make A Wave” grantee, Co-Creative Director at the Alliance of Latinx Theatre, a Resident Playwright at Chicago Dramatists, an Artistic Associate with Victory Gardens Theater, Ensemble Member with Teatro Vista, Artistic Associate with Pivot Arts, an advisory committee member of the Latinx Theatre Commons (LTC) and a core producer with the Jubilee. He is a Professional Lecturer at The Theatre School at DePaul University, and is represented by The Gersh Agency and Circle of Confusion.

Justin Ignatius Mitchell is a Chicago based DJ and multimedia artist creating under the moniker Hijo Pródigo. Mitchell’s practice is rooted in the exploration of “blood memory”,  and serves to contribute to a sonic and physical dialogue regarding queer(ed) spirituality; communal tools of survival and sustenance; and the potentiality of the night. Mitchell is currently collaborating with the Chicago born record label and artist collective FUTUREHOOD, as well as the web series platform OTV (Open Teleision). The function of both media platforms are in service to the development and exhibition of work by marginalized voices. BRUJOS marks Mitchell’s move from behind to camera to on screen acting. Libra Sun/ Leo Rising/ Pisces Moon.
 

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THE BARRIOS: RACE, CLASS, & THE UNCONSCIOUS

a book launch & roundtable with Christopher ChristianPatricia Gherovici, & Carlos Padrón

March 8, Friday, 5 to 7 pm
19 University Place, first floor, room 102
EVENT WILL ALSO BE LIVESTREAMED FROM THE FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE HERE.

Since 2009, CSGS has collaborated each year with the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality to host a cutting edge conversation at the edges of psychoanalysis and social theories of difference. This year’s annual installment showcases pressing issues raised by the anthology Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious, and features co-editors Patricia Gherovici and Christopher Christian and contributor Carlos Padrón. Among other things, this path-breaking volume argues that the clinical is political and listens for Freud with a Spanish accent in Latin America and beyond. This panel discussion will not only ask what happens when psychoanalysis goes to the Barrios, but — reversing direction — it will consider how clinical work and psychoanalytic theories can be transformed by bringing the Barrios into psychoanalysis.
Co-organized by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and Studies in Gender & Sexuality, with additional support from the NYU Department of Performance Studies.


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.
EVENT WILL ALSO BE LIVESTREAMED FROM THE FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE HERE.


Patricia Gherovici is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. She is Co-founder and Director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group; Associate Faculty, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania; Honorary Member at IPTAR; and Founding Member of Das Unbehagen. Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press, 2003), winner of the Gradiva Award and the Boyer Prize; Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010); and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2017). She has edited (with Manya Steinkoler) Lacan on Madness: Madness Yes You Can’t (Routledge, 2015), Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans* (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
Christopher Christian is Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Psychology, a training and supervising analyst, and Dean of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), a component member of the IPA. He is co-editor of the books Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Conflict with Morris Eagle and David Wolitzky (Routledge, 2017) and The Second Century of Psychoanalysis: Evolving Perspectives on Therapeutic Action with Michael J. Diamond (Karnac, 2011). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and faculty and a member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education, affiliated with NYU, School of Medicine. He is the executive producer of the documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio, winner of the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP) Video Grant award in 2015. He has a psychoanalytic private practice in Manhattan.
Carlos Padrón is a licensed psychoanalyst and has advanced training in psychoanalysis at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), a component member of the IPA. He originally studied philosophy in his home-country Venezuela. He then earned an MA in philosophy with a concentration in psychoanalysis at the New School for Social Research, and an MPhil in Latin American literature at New York University. He was a teaching fellow at NYU and has been a faculty member at John Jay College, the Contemporary Freudian Society, and the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance. He is currently a faculty member at the Harlem Family Institute and at IPTAR where he co-teaches with Dr. Yukari Yanagino a class on clinical aspects of diversity/difference. He has written and presented on the continuities and discontinuities between philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis. He was one of the founders and leaders of Crítica Latinoamericana, a collective dedicated to writing about cultural and political themes related to Latin America. He co-edited the collective’s website: criticalatinoamericana.com. Carlos participated in the documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio, and has given talks on working psychoanalytically with underprivileged Latinx patients in the U.S.He is currently a clinical associate of the New School Psychotherapy Program, supervising psychology PhD Students. Carlos has years of experience working in outpatient mental health clinics/centers and in a private setting.

¡CUÉNTAMELO! ORAL HISTORIES BY LGBT LATINO IMMIGRANTS

a book performance with Reina de Aztlán, Alexandra Cruz Delight, & Juliana Delgado Lopera

March 12, Tuesday, 6 to 8 pm
CSGS, 285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

Join us for a night of celebration featuring performances, visual art, and readings from ¡Cuéntamelo! by Juliana Delgado Lopera. ¡Cuéntamelo! is a collection of oral histories and illustrations from LGBT Latinx immigrants who arrived in the States between the 80s and 90s. Performances by Alexandra Cruz Delight and Reina de Aztlán.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Latinx Project

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 & Sexualityat csgsnyu@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Facebook event page here.

Reina de Aztlan is your favorite millennial Xicana matriarch whose end goal is to dismantle systems of oppression, redistribute resources and End the United States of America. As VP alongside our recently announced interim President, Vaginal Davis, she will seek to promote world peace via global non-interventionist strategies in order to allow countries that have long been held in states of underdevelopment to thrive. Within the near future, Empire will fall. The local, state and federal US governments will be dismantled to make room for autonomous Mutual Aid communities that fulfill the needs and desires of the people who directly live in them. We will no longer live in fear and coercion from the police state or so-called Democratic institutions that have only ever benefited those with the most wealth. We will live in peace. Reina is a DQoC (Drag Queen of Color) and she has had the opportunities to present at Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, New York Public Library, community fundraisers, bars, clubs, private weddings and Quinceañera’s. For bookings feel free to slide into her DM’s on Instagram @reinadeaztlan.
Alexandra Cruz is a transgender woman, hairdresser, and cabaret artist, who first migrated to the United States in search of her father, and a more accepting community of her gender and sexuality. Alexandra put herself through high school in San Francisco, CA, where she performed as a female impersonator with Finocchio Club’s “World Greatest Cabaret.” She has recently migrated to New York City to begin a new adventure and stage of her life.
Juliana Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer, historian based in San Francisco. The recipient of the 2014 Jackson Literary award she’s the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press 2017) and ¡Cuéntamelo! an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award. She’s received fellowships from Brush Creek Foundation of the Arts, Lambda Literary Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and The SF Grotto, and an individual artist grant from the SF Arts Commission. She’s the recipient of the 2016 Jeanne Córdova Words Scholarship. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Eleven Eleven, Foglifter, Four Way Review, Broadly, TimeOut Mag to name a few. She’s the creative director of RADAR Productions a queer literary non-profit in San Francisco.

 

CRITICAL UNIVERSITY, CRITICAL DISSONANCE: PEDAGOGIES ON ART & VIOLENCE IN THE AMERICAS

April 25 & 26, Thursday & Friday
KJCC, 53 Washington Square South

More information here.

This two-day symposium analyzes the possibilities and limits of critical practices emanating from the university. How do universities reach out to address the social urgencies of today beyond the classroom walls? How might academics strive to work with stigmatized and marginalized “others,” rather than “on” them? Critical thinking emerges when spaces that have long been separated—the University and Prison, as but one example—create a friction that changes and re-signifies disciplinary knowledge and its practices within the university and within prisons. Artistic, pedagogical and juridical critical practices are at the core of this friction. Symposium participants from the Global South analyze how the critical university (public and private) intervenes not only in prisons, but in other state institutions.



PROGRAM:
THURSDAY, APRIL 25TH | 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
7:00 PM
Welcome and Presentation
Marisa Belausteguigoitia, Spring 2019 Andrés Bello Chair in Latin American Cultures and Civilizations, New York University (NYU)
7:15 PM
Opening Keynote
Writing in Dissent: Social Suffering, Communality, and the Ethics of Care
Cristina Rivera Garza, University of Houston


FRIDAY APRIL 26TH | 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM
11:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Translucent Strategies and Dissent: Maneuvers for Access to Justice
Michael Coyle, California State University, Chico
Susana Draper, Princeton University
Haizea Barcenilla, Universidad del País Vasco
Moderator: Marisa Belausteguigoitia, New York University (NYU)
3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Prison Borders: Activation of Love and Other Artifacts
Estibaliz de Miguel Calvo, Universidad del País Vasco
Maite Zubiaurre, University of California, Los Angeles
Moderator: María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, New York University (NYU)
6:00 PM
Closing Keynote
Maneuvering Absence: The Artistic Practice as “Space of Appearance”
Rian Lozano, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
7:00 PM
“A Cell of Her Own,” performance by Estibaliz de Miguel Calvo
Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center



For more information about this event, please contact the NYU King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at 212-998-3650.
Facebook event page here.