Calendar publications Letter
Newsletter Studies About
Seminars International Resource Network About CLAGS
awards Getting Involved
  SEARCH  
November 6:
FEMINIST PEDAGOGY CONFERENCE
November 12:
18th Annual Kessler Lecture
Sarah S. Schulman
November 13:
33rd Annual Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
Fall 2009 CLAGSnews
CLAGS Official Newsletter
Contact Us
CALENDAR Fall 2009
  All events on this page are open to the public. With the exception of major conferences as noted, all CLAGS events are free of charge. Pre-registration is not required unless otherwise stated in the event description.

CLAGS strives to make its events accessible. ASL interpretation can be provided for any CLAGS event if requested 10 or more working days prior to the event. All events in the Graduate Center are wheelchair accessible. We ask that attendees refrain from wearing scented products so that everyone can participate comfortably. If you have other accessibility needs, please contact the CLAGS office, with a relay operator when necessary, at (212) 817-1955 or email us at clags@gc.cuny.edu.  


CLAGS welcomes proposals for events relevant to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities and scholarship.

September 2009

October 2009

November 2009


Saturday, August 29
IView -Second Annual Film Festival -CLAGS Co-Sponsorship*
www.engendered.org

"Sexualities: Choice & Identity"

OPENING FILM: DOSTANA directed by Tarun Mansukhani
9:30am-12:30pm at the Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center

SHORTS & DOCS I: a program of experimental shorts & powerful docs exploring Queer Sexuality & Identity
11:00am-3:00pm at the Stanley Kaplan Penthouse, Lincoln Center

  • Jihad For Love, directed by Parvez Sharma
  • Searching for Sandeep, directed by Poppy Stockell
  • Two Men In Shoulder Stand, directed by Paul Knox
  • Beauty Parlor, directed by Mehreen Babbar
  • I AM, directed by Sonali Gulati
  • Madhuri Girl Star, directed by Ayesha Sood

SPECIAL SCREENING: LET’S TALK, directed by Ram Madhwani
4:00pm – 6:30pm at the Stanley Kaplan Penthouse, Lincoln Center

PAPER TO FILM I: An Evening with Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla: From Book to Screenplay, Screenplay to Screen, “Ode to Lata”
7:00pm – 9:30pm at the Stanley Kaplan Penthouse, Lincoln Center

*In order to receive $3.00 CLAGS discount please use the promotion code: 91104 at the shopping cart check out cart where you’ll be prompted to apply any promotion codes. For full schedule of the festival and screenings please visit: www.engendered.org

back to top


Thursday, September 3
Camp Aesthetics and Queer Kinship in an Ancient Roman Satire

LGBTQ Studies Colloquium Series

In Juvenal’s ninth satire (130 C.E) a male sex worker provides pleasure to an effeminate, sexually submissive husband while fathering two children with the man’s sexually frustrated wife. This poem about an unconventional Roman household was omitted from most 19th century editions. In the 20th century, most commentaries assumed, explicitly or implicitly, the poet’s condemnation of homosexual behavior. Taking a fresh look at the text through the lenses of queer theory, Broder offers a reading of the poem as a campy exploration of social, cultural, and legal conditions that provide opportunities for unconventional formations of sex, gender, and kinship.

Michael Broder, PhD candidate, Classics Department, CUNY Graduate Center

Graduate Center
Room 9207
7-9 PM

back to top


Tuesday, September 10
The Believers

CLAGS/FRAMELINE Film Screening
USA, 2006, 80 min.


The Believers is an unprecedented feature documentary that shatters assumptions about faith, gender and religion. Built around the world’s first transgender gospel choir, the film portrays the choir’s dilemma – how to reconcile their gender identity with the widespread belief that changing one’s gender goes against the word of God.

The intimate personal stories of the choir members shed light on the complexity of balancing social change, family history, religion and identity. At the heart of their dilemma is a struggle for acceptance within two worlds historically at odds with one another. As one of the film’s subjects eloquently says, “I’m living in a window. I get to see both sides.” Audience Award, Best Documentary, San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival.

Todd Holland, Director

Graduate Center
Rooms 9206-9207
7-9 PM

Co-sponsored by Frameline, the leading nonprofit educational media distributor solely dedicated to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender film and video with a collection of more than 200 titles for colleges, K-12, schools, libraries, and community groups.

back to top


Monday, September 14
Reframing Queer Sexualities in the Middle East

CLAGS-IRN Seminars in the City
-Axes of Desire: Gender, Sexuality, & Human Rights

The Internet embodies both the promises and challenges of queer organizing and empowerment in the Middle East. The anonymity and invisibility it provides can be useful as well as harmful in a region that has historically overlooked same sex contact in privacy while privileging heterosexuality through family and kinship ties in public domain. Sub-topics of our discussions will include debates on media literacy (e.g., technology use as citizenship versus erotic practice); private, public, and cyber spaces; queer and social movements in the region; and local queer representations prior to the advent of the Internet and Western queer identities.

Presenter: Serkan Gorkemli, English Department, University of Connecticut, Stamford

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
208 West 13th Street
Room 101
New York. NY 10011


Please stop by the CLAGS office to pick up a free Seminars Packet. Call prior to arrival at 212-817-1955. The attendance of past seminars is not required.

back to top


Thursday, September 24
Queer Protest (1979-2000)

LGBTQ Studies Colloquium Series

Drawing on extensive archival research, historical data, original photographs, interviews with key activists, and more than a thousand news articles, Amin Ghaziani’s presentation analyzes four major lesbian and gay demonstrations between 1979 and 2000. Ghaziani places these demonstrations in their cultural context focusing on the political currents that prompted the protests, and the role played by internal dissent within (as well as between?) the participating organizations. Ultimately, Ghaziani concludes that infighting can contribute positively to the development of social movements, and that the debates over the marches helped define what it means to be gay in the United States.

Amin Ghaziani, author of Dividends of Dissent currently teaches at the Princeton University Society of Fellows.

Graduate Center
Room C197
7-9 PM

back to top


Friday, September 25
Women Loving Women: LGBT Organizing in Central Asia

Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe Workshop

Anna Kirey is a 2009 fellow in Columbia University's Human Rights Advocates Program. She has been active in women's and human rights organizations for almost 10 years, currently a senior adviser to Labrys, an organization focused on LGBT issues in Kyrgyzstan, which she cofounded and served as an executive director. She has been a consultant to the Sigrid Rausing Trust of the Open Society Institute and the Sexual Rights Initiative of the UN Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review.

In the past two years, Anna has participated in NGO delegations to the UN, lobbied for initiatives related to sexual orientation and gender identity, and presented reports about the situation of LGBT people in Central Asia. She has a degree from the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and a master's from the United Nations-mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica, and is just completing her thesis in the international social work program at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

Anna Kirey, co-founder and senior adviser, Labrys, in Kyrgyzstan;
2009 participant, Human Rights Advocates Program, Columbia University

Presented by New York University, Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, the Network of East-West Women. Cosponsored by CLAGS.

Center for European and Mediterranean Studies
New York University
285 Mercer Street, 7th floor 4-6 PM

back to top


Thursday, October 1
Rare Form: Crafting Queerness in Contemporary Literature

LGBTQ Panel Discussion

This panel explores contemporary queer literature and culture with an emphasis on form. Situating North American literary and theoretical texts in a diasporic frame, the panelists will analyze forms of literary expression through the generic lenses of language, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and race and will also consider richer and stranger forms of difference. One of the central questions raised and discussed will be: How do representations of difference impose formal restrictions upon or create new formal possibilities for a text? Taking up contemporary work on futurity, the body, motherhood, sovereignty, and visibility and voice, these presenters ask what difference it might make for contemporary queer studies to make questions of form and craft central.

Panelists: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ph.D. candidate, English, Africana Studies and Women's Studies, Duke University; Sarah Dowling, Ph.D. candidate, English, University of Pennsylvania; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D. candidate, English, University of Pennsylvania

Moderator: Jennifer Williams, Assistant Professor of English, Michigan State University

Graduate Center
Room 9207
7-9 PM

back to top


Monday, October 5
Neither Heaven Nor Hell: The Realities of Sexual Minority Organizing in the Caribbean

CLAGS-IRN Seminars in the City
-Axes of Desire: Gender, Sexuality, & Human Rights

The Caribbean is stereotyped as heaven for tourists and hell for sexual minorities. This session will explain how these two mistaken beliefs are connected - and will describe some of the exciting activism happening within the region, including specific strategies, successes, and challenges. It will use the recent development of the Caribbean IRN subregion to discuss how the internet can help build local and regional movements. Finally, we will discuss how the diaspora and others positioned outside of the region can create their own movement, support work within the region, and respond to stereotypes of and boycotts against the Caribbean.

Presenters:Angelique Nixon, Department of Social & Cutltural Analysis, New York University

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
208 West 13th Street
Room 101
New York. NY 10011

back to top


Friday, October 9
The History, the Historian, the History Maker: A Conversation with Martin Duberman

LGBTQ Studies Panel

Join us to welcome Martin Duberman, the founder and executive director of CLAGS (1986-1996), for a conversation based on his recently published, Waiting to Land, A (Mostly) Political Memoir. An award winning historian, biographer, playwright and gay rights activist, Duberman will focus on the struggle for the founding of CLAGS, and an exploration of what it means to be Queer in post-Stonewall America. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear and engage with this living icon of queer scholarship and activism who believes, to quote from his latest book, “The essence of gayness is having grown up, or tried to, without the motivating, certifying power of established social norms—and hence skeptical of their validity. To be gay is to be a political saboteur.”

Moderator:
Moderator: Sarah Chinn, Executive Director, CLAGS

Graduate Center
Skylight Room
7-9 PM

back to top


Tuesday, October 13
In Amerika the Call Us Dykes: Lesbian Lives in the 1970’s

Planning Meeting

Goals:

  • Introduce and educate a broader audience about a crucial aspect of post-war American history.
  • Commemorate and illuminate the contributions of lesbians in the 1970’s whose work was instrumental in the development of a modern feminist and LGBT identity.
  • Nurture current historical research on women and Lesbianism during this particular era.
  • Engage current multidisciplinary scholars of the 1970’s, lesbianism, and feminism.
  • Create an original anthology of older work and new scholarly and creative work on lesbian lives in the 1970’s and now.

Please join the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in planning the Fall 2010 2-day Festival and the implementation of the Spring 2010 series of events.

There is much to be done!
Please RSVP your attendance: 70sLesbians@gmail.com

Facilitator: Sarah Chinn, Executive Director, CLAGS

Graduate Center
Room 9206
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM

Light Refreshments will be Served

back to top


Wednesday, October 14
Teaching, not Bowing: Queer Pedagogy in an Age of Assimilation

LGBTQ Studies Pedagogy Workshop

This workshop will explore the responsibilities of the queer studies teacher in hyperassimilationst gay and straight culture. How might queer classrooms be intentionally framed as separatist in this context, and what does separatist queer pedagogy look like? The workshop will be discussion based, so please come ready to participate.

Matthew Brim, Assistant Professor, English, College of Staten Island, CUNY

Graduate Center
Room C 201
7-9 PM

Cosponsored by the Center for Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS), New York University

back to top


Friday, October 16
MY DIVA Reading Series

English Department

Michael Montlack, editor of the essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), will be discussing the book and its focus on the special bond between gay men and their divas. There will be readings by Michael (on Stevie Nicks), Wayne Koestenbaum (on Anna Moffo), Mark Doty (on Grace Paley), Jason Schneiderman (on Liza Minnelli), Christopher Murray (on Margaret Dumont) and Richard Tayson (on Helen Reddy).

Q/A and Reception to follow.

Graduate Center
Room 4409
4-6 PM

Cosponsored by the Phd Program in English.

back to top


Tuesday, October 20
CLAGS BACK-TO-SCHOOL-MIXER

The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies invites you to a back-to-school mixer. Come share a glass of wine with fellow students, meet our staff, pick up information on our fellowships, awards, prizes, and events. The mixer will be followed by the LGBTQ Film Screening: Our Family.

Light Refreshments Served

Graduate Center
Room 7115
(CLAGS Office)
5:00 - 6:30 PM

back to top


Tuesday, October 20
Our Family

LGBTQ Studies Film Series

2007, 56 min., India
Tamil with English Subtitles

K. P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro, Directors

Set in Tamilnadu, India, Our Family weaves together excerpts from Nirvanam, a solo theatrical performance by Pritham K. Chakravarthy and the lives of three generations of transgendered females. Aasha, Seetha and Dhana, a family bound together by ties of adoption, belong to the community of Aravanis (also known as hijras in some parts of India). The performance by Chakravarthy and the daily lives of the three family members bear witness to the tumultuous journey towards a reinvented selfhood, a journey fraught with violence, exploitation, affection and courage. This award winning film allows the viewer to reinterpret Nirvanam, a Sanskrit term with religious connotations, as an act of liberation and transformation-from male to female. For more information about the film visit: http://ourfamily2007.wordpress.com

K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro, professors at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, will be available for Q&A after the screening.

Cosponsored by the Center for Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS), New York University

Graduate Center
Rooms 9204-9205
7-9 PM

back to top


Thursday, October 22
No!

LGBTQ Film Series
USA, 2006, 94 min.

Through intimate testimonies from Black women victims/survivors, commentaries from acclaimed African-American scholars and community leaders, archival footage, spirited music, dance, and performance poetry this award winning documentary unveils the reality of rape, other forms of sexual assault, the use of rape as a weapon on homophobia, and the healing in African-American communities. For more information on the film please visit: http://www.NOtheRapeDocumentary.org

The filmmaker will be available for Q&A after the screening.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Director

Graduate Center
Rooms C201-202
7-9 PM

back to top


Thursday, October 29
TENDENCIES: Poetics and Practice

Rachel Zolf, Trish Salah and Robert Glück

This series of talks by major poets, titled after the works of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, will explore the intersection of contemporary poetic practice, queer theory and pedagogy. Too often today, statements on poetics and their manifesto-like style have been moralistic or prescriptive discourses. By contrast, this series will attempt a Kinsey-like survey of actual poetic practice--what writers actually do, in the writers' own words--in the process queering the manifesto, inventing new terms for poetics discourse, and emphasizing queer writing and poetics.

Graduate Center
Skylight Room
6:30 PM

back to top


Monday, November 2
Race, Gender and Sexualities: Perspectives from Latin America

CLAGS-IRN Seminars in the City
-Axes of Desire: Gender, Sexuality, & Human Rights

The varying histories and amalgamation of diverse racial and ethnic groups in Latin America provides a vast terrain for scholarship and research in sexuality. While it is impossible to draw a single picture of Latin American sexuality that encompasses such a broad multinational area, we can draw from a few representations to discuss underlying themes and issues. We will explore Latin American sexualities through the lens of sexuality, gender, race and class from colonization to the current era. This seminar is intended to utilize sexuality as a way to expand our understanding of Latin America as well as draw from Latin America a greater understanding of sexuality as a central component of citizenship.

Presenters:
Raziel Valino, PhD candidate, Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
Anahi Russo Garrido, PhD candidate, Women & Gender Studies, Rutgers University

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
208 West 13th Street
Room 101
New York. NY 10011

Please stop by the CLAGS office to pick up a free Seminars Packet. Call prior to arrival at 212-817-1955.
The attendance of past seminars is not required.

back to top


Friday, November 6
FEMINIST PEDAGOGY CONFERENCE

8:30AM - 6:30PM
CUNY Graduate Center

Opening Remarks:
VICTORIA PITTS-TAYLOR
Sociology, Queens College and the Graduate Center
9:15 AM Skylight Room, 9th Floor

Keynote Address:
MICHELLE FINE
Distinguished Professor, Psychology, The Graduate Center
4:00 PM, Segal Theatre
Slanted practices of inquiry and pedagogy

Breakout Sessions: 10:00 AM- 4:00 PM 9th Floor

The Feminist Pedagogy Conference is a venue for conversation concerning the present state of feminist pedagogy both within and beyond the academy. Building on previous work, this is a forum to share pedagogical methods and ideas for teaching in women’s and gender studies and/or feminist approaches to learning and classroom strategies. Through the conference we aim to create a space were people can discuss the politics, problems, and transformative potential of feminist pedagogical practices in classrooms and community settings.

For Registration and Conference information, go to: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/womenstudies/wgp/archive.html
(currently being updated) or email Pamela Burger and Jennifer Sugg at feministpedagogy@gmail.com

Co-Sponsored by the Doctoral Student’s Council, The Women’s Studies Certificate Program, The Feminist Press, Center for Humanities, CUNY Anthropology PhD Program, CLAGS

back to top


Thursday, November 12
Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences

18th Annual David R. Kessler Lecture

Sarah S. Schulman, playwright and novelist, will deliver the eighteenth annual David R. Kessler Lecture in LGBTQ Studies. The Kessler Lecture and Award is intended to honor a scholar, artist or activist who has, over a number of years, produced a substantive body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of GLBTQ Studies.

Sarah Schulman is a native New Yorker. Her novels, nonfiction books, journalism and plays reflect people whose points of view and experiences are rarely represented in the mainstream arts. They include the novels Rat Bohemia, and Girls, Visions and Everything, the play Carson McCullers, and the nonfiction books Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America, as well as the forthcoming Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences and The Gentrification of the Mind.

An active Participant Citizen, Ms. Schulman has been involved in foundational movements for social change including Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, MIX: NY Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival (co-founder), Lesbian Avengers (co-founder), Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, ACT UP Oral History project, www.actuporalhistory.org (cofounder.) Her awards include a Guggenheim (playwrighting), Fullbright (Judaic Studies), Revson Fellow for the Future of New York City, two American Library Association Book Awards (Fiction and Nonfiction), Stonewall Award for Contributions Improving the Lives of Lesbians and Gays in the United States and a finalist for the Prix de Rome. She is Professor of English at The City University of New York, College of Staten Island and a Fellow at The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.

Graduate Center
Proshansky Auditorium
6:30 - 8:30 PM

back to top


Friday, November 13
33rd Annual Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival

CLAGS is proud to co-sponsor the screening of two films Edie and Thea: A Very Long Engagement and Fig Trees at the 33rd Annual Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival. The screenings will be held at the American Museum of Natural History.

Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement
A tender double portrait of two elderly women whose shared life is both ordinary — filled with trips, work and milestones like getting engaged and buying their first home — and extraordinary. Extraordinary because Edie and Thea met in the closeted early sixties, and their lives unfolded against a backdrop of radical cultural change. The film draws on a wealth of photographs from infancy to adulthood to create a mosaic of the two women’s lives, while Edie and Thea reminisce, painting a kaleidoscopic picture of pre-Stonewall gay life: the bars and the parties, as well as estranged families and the constant fear of exposure.

5pm
New York Premiere
Susan Muska and Gréta Olafsdottir · 2009 · 61 min · U.S.
Meet filmmakers and Edie Windsor in person

FIG TREES
FIG TREES is a documentary opera about AIDS activists Tim McCaskell of Toronto and Zackie Achmat of Capetown as they fight for access to treatment drugs. Documentary interviews, speeches, press conferences and demonstrations are sampled, taken apart, and set to music, replayed this time as operatic scenes. A surreal fictional narrative is inter cut with the stories of their struggles against government and the pharmaceutical industry. In this fictional world, Gertrude Stein decides to write a tragic opera about Tim and Zackie and their saint-like heroism. She kidnaps them, transports them to Niagara Falls, and forces them to sing a series of complicated avant-garde vocal compositions. However, when Zackie ends his treatment strike and starts taking his pills, Gertrude realizes that there will be no more tragedy, and thus, no more opera

7pm
John Greyson · 2009 · 104 min · Canada, South Africa

American Museum of Natural History
Central Park West at 79th Street
New York, NY 10024
5 PM; 7 PM

For all Mead programs enter at 77th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue

To Order Tickets:
By Phone: 212-769-5200
Online: www.amnh.org/mead
On-site: During Museum hours at the Advance Group Sales desk in the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda (Central Park West at 79th Street entrance), and at the Rose Center for Earth and Space (81st Street entrance).

Mention CLAGS to receive Member price of $10!
To view the festival’s full schedule please visit www.amnh.org/mead.

back to top


Monday, November 16
An Evening with Sarah Schulman

Moderator: Linda Villarosa

This year CLAGS offers you the unique opportunity to engage Sarah Schulman in an intimate follow-up to her 2009 Kessler Lecture “Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences.” Linda Villarosa will add her star power to the event as conversational host.

Come join these two luminaries of journalism and literature for an inspiring evening of conversation on Sarah’s lifework and her critical contributions to queer ideas. Linda Villarosa, award winning journalist, editor and author has served as executive editor of Essence Magazine and as a contributing reporter for The New York Times. Most recently, she published the novel Passing for Black which was nominated for a 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction.

Space is limited so please RSVP to clagsdevelopment@gc.cuny.edu
Tickets are $15, all proceeds go to benefit CLAGS.
Light refreshments will be served.

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby Street
New York, NY
7:00 PM

back to top


Tuesday, November 17
TENDENCIES: Poetics and Practice

AMY KING, WAYNE KOESTENBAUM, R. ERICA DOYLE

This series of talks by major poets, titled after the works of Eve Sogofsky Sedgewick, will explore the intersection of contemporary poetic practice, queer theory and pedagogy. Too often today, statements on poetics and their manifesto-like style have been moralistic or prescriptive discourses. By contrast, this series will attempt a Kinsey-like survey of actual poetic practice--what writers actually do, in the writers' own words--in the process queering the manifesto, inventing new terms for poetics discourse, and emphasizing queer writing and poetics.

Graduate Center
Skylight Room (9100)
6:30 PM

back to top


All events on this page are open to the public. With the exception of major conferences as noted, all CLAGS events are free of charge. Pre-registration is not required unless otherwise stated in the event description.

All events at The Graduate Center are co-sponsored by Continuing Education & Public Programs, The Graduate Center, CUNY.   

All events in the Graduate Center are wheelchair accessible. Please contact the security office at the Graduate Center at 212-817-7777 for further details.

Please call the CLAGS office at (212) 817-1955 for additional information or arrangements.

CLAGS Event Archives

DonateNow

back to top


 

  The Graduate Center . City University of New York . Room 7.115 . 365 Fifth Avenue . New York, NY 10016 . 212.817.1955 . clags@gc.cuny.edu