Joseph Bristow

Race in Sexuality: The Color of LGBT

Strictly speaking, the proposed cluster of speakers should come under a much more unwieldy title--one that would probably read "Intersections between Critical Race Studies, Feminist Theory, and LGBTQI." But, in the name of concision, I have decided on a crisper title that addresses the flourishing body of recent scholarship that stands at the point where feminist-oriented studies of gender, analyses of dissident sexuality, and inquiries into race and ethnicity (often uncomfortably) meet. All of the speakers suggested for this cluster have developed pioneering research that examines how race and gender are constitutive components of insubordinate desire. Jasbir Puar's groundbreaking 2007 monograph, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, typifies this new current of innovative thinking that aims to denaturalize a number of "homonormative" assumptions about masculinity/femininity and racialized otherness. By comparison, David L. Eng's scholarship includes not only his fine book on "managing masculinity" in Asian-American literature and culture. He has also made significant editorial interventions on the racial and nationalist aspects of the mainstreaming of queer identities in an era of neoliberalism. Similarly, the recent work of Kathryn Bond Stockton--Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer" (2007)-- looks at the ways American cultural production (in particular, film and literature) have addressed racialized passivity. The two other scholars whose names I have listed on the cover sheet approach the topic of the racialized conditions and contradictions of queer desire from complementary perspectives. Karen Tongson is an emergent scholar whose current research concentrates on queers of color and suburban imaginaries, with special reference to Southern California. Roderick A. Ferguson is the author of Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2004)--a unique sociological study of avowed and disavowed queerness in African-American literature. Each ofthese scholars is responsible for redefining the respective fields in which s/he is based.

Lara Stemple &

Gail Kligman

Trafficking, Gender, Human Rights, and Health

This interdisciplinary course and speaker series will serve as one attempt to broaden and deepen the discussion about sex trafficking, situating it more widely in the context of human trafficking and exploring the complex interrelations between sex trafficking, prostitution, health, gender, and generation. The interests that drive trafficking in women and children for prostitution are closely related to those driving other dimensions of trafficking. As income disparities widen across the globe, and the service economy grows, poverty remains a resource for profit-driven entrepreneurs—and traffickers—the world over.  The persistent failure to address growing inequalities, including gendered ones, contributes to the expansion of trafficking. Paradoxically, in this era of heightened talk about globalization in which human rights discourses circulate widely around the world, trafficking not only persists but has expanded.

Schedule of Events:

Charlene Villaseñor Black &

Jennifer Flores Sternad

Women, Art, and Activism:  Perspectives from the Americas

This speaker series featured women activist-artists and cultural critics whose work focuses on feminist and other socially-engaged art practices throughout the Americas. We hope to address such issues as: How can art effect political change? What is the future of feminism in the face of post-feminist discourse? What does it mean to be a feminist, an artist, an activist in the context of the Americas? In addition to lectures, speakers will engage in more intensive exchanges with students, faculty, plus artists, activists, and other members of the community in workshops, conversations, and video screenings.

Events:

CSW Update articles about the events:

Women, Art and Activism, October 2007

Feminine Interferences: 3 Performances by Jenny Jaramillo by Christian Léon, November 2007

Public Territory | Territorio Público by Regina José Galindo, November 2007

Videocasts of the Performances:

WATCH Jenny Jaramillo, "Alcances del Acto Performático"

WATCH Regina José Galindo, "Recorrido"

Rachel Lee

Feminism, Body Theory, and Performance

Growing out of an interdisciplinary working group inaugurated last year, the series is sponsored by Rosina Becerra’s office. It brings together scholars whose research focuses on embodiment, how it is performed and represented in various media, and what issues are thereby made visible, issues that range from embodiment as a mode of social memory to its physical inscription of sites of injury, vulnerability, and disability. The public speaker series, under the auspices of CSW, began with a talk, “Transbiology: Penguin Love, Doll Sex and the Spectacle of the Non-Reproductive Body,” by Judith Halberstam, Professor of English and Director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California and author of Female Masculinity. Choreographer, dancer, and writer, Susan Foster, Professor in the Department of World Arts and Culture at UCLA and author of Choreography and Narrative, was scheduled for the Winter quarter. Poet and critic, Susan Stewart, Professor of English, Princeton University, and author of Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, gave a talk in the spring.