1) Greg Youmans: "Word Is Out and the Gay Liberal Turn"

Monday, April 23rd 2012

6:00-8:00 pm
Room C415A
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Ave
New York, NY 10016

Queer film scholar Greg Youmans presents a lecture about the groundbreaking 1977 gay and lesbian documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives. Made by a collective of six gay and lesbian filmmakers, Word Is Out is a group portrait of twenty-six lesbians and gay men who recount humorous and harrowing tales of being gay in the U.S. The film found a wide audience theatrically and also had an unprecedented national PBS broadcast, whereby it reached thousands of isolated gay people with its affirming message. Youmans argues that Word Is Out, though deceptively simple in its talking-head format, shifted the paradigm of gay representation and contributed to profound transformations in U.S. lesbian and gay life. The lecture builds on Youmans's new book about the film, just published as part of Arsenal Pulp Press's Queer Film Classics series.

During the talk, Youman will present archival materials referenced in the book, including clips from the video pre-interviews that the filmmakers conducted with more than a hundred lesbians and gay men in their search for the perfect cast. He will also develop upon a number of the book's central themes: the role Word Is Out played in the gay-rights struggles of the late 1970s, the film's contribution to the rise of a U.S. gay national imaginary and the consolidation of gay liberalism during the era, and its relationship to other queer media projects of the 1970s that took different aesthetic forms and had conflicting political aims.

About the speaker:

Greg Youmans is a scholar of queer activist and experimental filmmaking, with a particular interest in the 1970s. He received his PhD from the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches in the Film and Digital Media Department. He is currently at work on a larger book project about gay and lesbian filmmaking in the 1970s. He is also a film and video maker. In collaboration with Chris Vargas, he makes the ongoing video series Falling in Love...with Chris and Greg.

2) Chrysanthi Nigianni : "Queer Inhumanism"

Thursday, April 26th 2012

6-9pm

Room 5382

CUNY Graduate Center

"Is queer theory a reflection on what it means to be queer, or does the concept of queerness change the ways in which we theorise?"(Colebrook, Deleuze and Queer Theory).

This paper will translate from its Angloamerican roots the term queer - in the sense of carrying it across - to a continental philosophical thinking of difference (that queer theory and thinking is much indebted to) in order to push queer theory into new weird routes of theorizing, thinking and practice. There has been an increased anxiety regarding the mainstreaming of the notion of queer, with the latter having become the "hyped commercial vanguard for mainstreaming gay culture" dominated by economically privileged gay men, its academicinstitutionalization and, its absorption into neoliberal discourse ("queer liberalism")(Halberstam and Munoz). The numerical multiplication of gender variations does not seem to take us away from the political economy of sexual dialectics and the binary machine is present as ever, actually more expanded and stronger; after all, we must all have a face, a social role to perform. Against this, this paper will mobilize queer as primarily an act of jeopardizing our poststructuralist convictions and our theoretical and political edifice grounded on much secured notions of freedom, radicalism, difference, margins (the latter sustaining a humanist philosophical tradition) and will call for vital lines of escaping queer's normalisation, within the routes of the inhumam, the a-subjective, the pre-personal as alternative scripts standing outside the Law of Language, the Law of the Father, the Law of the Hu-Man. In this presentation queer will be translated along the Deleuzian lines of becoming-queer-minoritarian; rather than making claims for broader participation, or for wider recognition, a becoming-minoritarian will attempt to create the space for the singular to be voiced and heard: "I don't know what I am"! The schizo escape instead of the Oedipal impasse.

About the Speaker:

Dr Chrysanthi Nigianni is currently a Visiting scholar at CLAGS, CUNY writing her monograph on Queer Film-Philosophy. Her interests center on cinema, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis and feminist thinking. She is the co-editor of the collection Deleuze and Queer Theory (Edinburg University Press, 2009), Deleuzian Politics?, Special issue in New Formations Journal (2009) and the forthcoming collection entitled Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice (Palgrave McMillan, New York, 2012).

3) Geertje Mak:"Doubting Sex: how bodies changed and selves appeared in nineteenth century hermaphrodite case histories"

Thursday, May 3rd 2012

6-9pm

Room 5382

CUNY Graduate Center

Anna Barbara Meier and Emma R. both grew up as females in Germany, and were, in their adult lives, both medically declared as male. However, there was a time gap of more than one century between the two cases. In her lecture, Geertje Mak shows that hermaphroditism itself changed profoundly over the course of the nineteenth century. Until the 1860s, in cases of doubt, a person's sex was medically examined on the basis of outer appearance and the patient's own statements mainly. Around 1900, sex had become something turned inwards: both microscopically established and anchored in the psychic self. Moreover, dealing with such cases of doubt changed profoundly. In the first half of the century, policies of secrecy and containment prevailed, protecting a person's initial inscription as man or woman in society in order to avoid social disorder and dislocation. Increasingly, an urge to reveal the 'inner truth' of the body emerged. This had to be understood and 'managed' in its relation to an interiorised sex of self. The physician's role thereby transformed from being an expert arbiter in cases in which doubtful sex caused a social problem, into offering medical-psychological advice and therapy concerning the individualized problem of the relation between body and self.

About the Speaker:

Geertje Mak is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Gender Studies and the History Department of the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. This year she published Doubting Sex. Inscriptions, bodies and selves nineteenth-Century hermaphrodite case histories. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press 2012. She has published two books (in Dutch) and several international articles on masculine women, hermaphrodites, migrant history and gender history. Currently she is working on a project about fabrications of identity.

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