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CALENDAR Spring 2009 | |||||||||||||||||||
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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.
Wednesday, February 4
Seminars in the City From the seedy Blue Angel Cabaret to the CWTV’s Gossip Girl, in the past decade burlesque has infiltrated the mainstream yet manages to remain a transgressive art form. While it flirts with popularity burlesque at its best does not compromise its subversive origins, erotic themes, and defiant ideals. It naturally lends itself to promoting queer philosophy and values without necessarily calling attention to its inherent queerness. Contemporary burlesque, often known as neo burlesque, borrows from various genres including dance, drag, performance art, theatre, and, of course, traditional burlesque. It is a hybrid art form that mixes traditions, flaunts rules and standardizations in order to remain provocatively entertaining. The seminars will invite some of the leading neo burlesque performers in New York to perform as well as provide the theoretical and historical context for their work. The seminar participants will have the opportunity to read about, observe, and engage with this unique form of performance art that advances the artistic expression by constantly challenging the political and cultural authorities. Seminar Facilitator: Jasmina Sinanovic
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
Additional Tease n' Tell Seminars
Please request the seminar reading material by sending an email to clagsevents@gc.cuny.edu The readings will be emailed as PDF files. The attendance of past seminars is not required.
Friday, February 6 LGBTQ Studies Colloquium Series This presentation explores the significance of unhappiness, and in particular unhappy endings, within queer cultural politics. Is happiness a valid criterion for determining we are headed in the right direction? Toward happy goals/objects? Are certain lives inevitably unhappy because they fail to follow the right direction? Ahmed argues that we need to re-read the negativity of unhappy queer as a starting point for social critique. Contrasting Well of Loneliness with more recent texts, including Rubyfruit Jungle, Annie on My Mind and Babyji, Ahmed uses unhappy queer narratives to explore how unhappiness does not originate with the fact of 'being' queer, but is an effect of how 'being queer' is read as causing familial and social unhappiness. Sara Ahmed, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Visiting Chair in Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers UniversityGraduate Center
Tuesday, February 10 LGBTQ Studies Panel SAWCC (South Asian Women's Creative Collective) and CLAGS are proud to present a panel on queer South Asian art. Panelists will elaborate on their practice and various narrative strategies. Whether on the dance floor or gallery walls, practitioners dismantle and re-envision imagined borders between myth and reality. Conversely, artists also turn to personal anecdotes and project beyond their immediate relevance – be it through performance or film.
Panelists:
Moderator: Graduate Center
Wednesday, February 18 LGBTQ Studies Colloquium Series This presentation investigates an apartheid era political anomaly when the ruling National Party (NP), supported by the gay magazine Exit, fielded a “pro-gay rights” candidate in the Hillbrow constituency during the 1987 whites only election in South Africa. The Hillbrow/Exit gay rights campaign, and the subsequent defeat of the incumbent Progressive Federal Party (PFP) candidate Al Widman, articulated discourses about the reform of apartheid in white self-interest and conflated white minority and gay minority rights, thereby contributing to the NP’s justification for apartheid. The Exit/Hillbrow provoked protest by LGBTQ activist groups and problematised the singular assumptions that are often made about race and sexuality in apartheid South Africa and reveal political, social and economic crisis can provoke reconfigurations of identities in order to try and buttress the status quo. Dr Daniel Conway, Lecturer in Politics, Graduate Center
Tuesday, February 24 CLAGS/Frameline Film Screening Citizen Nawi tells the story of Ezra Nawi, the driving force behind the protection of Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills who regularly face attacks from their Jewish settler neighbors. Nawi, a plumber by trade, ignores the neighbors’ ostracism and police/military harassment as he fights a personal battle for the rights of Fuad Mussa, his lover, a Palestinian from Ramallah and an illegal resident chased by Israeli law enforcement officials. The settlers consider Nawi an enemy worse than the Arabs and his life is under constant threat. He also finds himself engaged in stormy quarrels with ultra-orthodox Jews in Jerusalem's Gay Pride Parade. Yet through it all he retains a blazing wit and sharp human observation that allows him, and us, to see as never before what it means to be trapped by one's circumstances while still committed to resistance. Nissim Mossek, Director
Graduate Center
Monday, March 2
Seminars in the City 2nd Seminar From the seedy Blue Angel Cabaret to the CWTV’s Gossip Girl, in the past decade burlesque has infiltrated the mainstream yet manages to remain a transgressive art form. While it flirts with popularity burlesque at its best does not compromise its subversive origins, erotic themes, and defiant ideals. It naturally lends itself to promoting queer philosophy and values without necessarily calling attention to its inherent queerness. Contemporary burlesque, often known as neo burlesque, borrows from various genres including dance, drag, performance art, theatre, and, of course, traditional burlesque. It is a hybrid art form that mixes traditions, flaunts rules and standardizations in order to remain provocatively entertaining. The seminars will invite some of the leading neo burlesque performers in New York to perform as well as provide the theoretical and historical context for their work. The seminar participants will have the opportunity to read about, observe, and engage with this unique form of performance art that advances the artistic expression by constantly challenging the political and cultural authorities. Seminar Facilitator: Jasmina Sinanovic
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
Additional Tease n' Tell Seminars
Please request the seminar reading material by sending an email to clagsevents@gc.cuny.edu The readings will be emailed as PDF files. The attendance of past seminars is not required.
LGBTQ Studies Performance Series This one-man show is based on the oral histories collected in Johnson's book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South: An Oral History (University of Carolina Press). The oral histories are from black gay men who were born, raised, and continue to live in the South and range in age from 19 to 93. The show tells of Chaz, a transgendered person who lives as a man on Sunday so he can sing in the church choir, but lives as a woman during the rest of the week; then there is Larry J., whose early years of sexual experimentation is both humorous and disturbing; Freddie's story of being raised by parents who did not want him is heartbreaking, but also delivered with an ironic twist; Countess Vivian, the oldest narrator, recounts his life during the 1920s and the 1930s on the streets of New Orleans; and, Stephen, one of the youngest men, shares the moving story about being pressured to conform to a traditional notion of masculinity and enter a heterosexual relationship that produces a son. Johnson embodies these and others' stories in the show. Cosponsored with the Gender and Sexuality Studies Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University and English Department, Fordham University. E. Patrick Johnson, Chair Department of Performance Studies, Northwestern University School of Communication.
Graduate Center
CLAGS LGBTQ Studies Panel What does it mean to be Queer and writing fiction in the United States in the 21st century? What is the status of Queer Literature today? And how does the Queer writer relate both to the past and the future of this genre? Three of the leading contemporary writers will reflect upon this and other questions regarding the role of the Queer fiction writer and the function of the Queer literary imagination in our current epoch. Attention will be given to the issue as it pertains to creativity and form, to economics and the material basis of publishing, as well as to the interface between writers and readers. Particular focus will be given to the Queer novelist and how she relates to the current socio-political status of the LGBT community in this country, as well as the ways in which the Queer writer might best traverse and overcome both market forces and the forces of history.
Moderator: Sarah Chinn,
Graduate Center
CLAGS Colloquium Series in LGBTQ Studies Marriage advertisements are central features of news and communication in India, represented both through print as well as the internet. These advertisements, termed ‘matrimonials,’ address an imagined community of ‘Indians’ and boldly encode hierarchies of caste, class, skin colour, citizenship and mobility. In this talk Chandra examines the history of such matrimonials in the Indian diaspora, from 1830-2007. Does the chronology of the matrimonial in the Indian diaspora disrupt hegemonic narratives of origin? How might we learn about the movement of capital, property and sexual power through the tightly phrased matrimonial advertisement? What can we glean about the compulsory alignment of heterosexuality, caste, and memory in the Indian diaspora? Does an interdisciplinary and anti-heteronormative theorization of an Indian imperial formation enable us to look beyond disciplinary bound models of modern imperialism? Shefali Chandra, Gender & Women’s Studies Program, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Graduate Center
Monday, April 6
Seminars in the City 3rd Seminar From the seedy Blue Angel Cabaret to the CWTV’s Gossip Girl, in the past decade burlesque has infiltrated the mainstream yet manages to remain a transgressive art form. While it flirts with popularity burlesque at its best does not compromise its subversive origins, erotic themes, and defiant ideals. It naturally lends itself to promoting queer philosophy and values without necessarily calling attention to its inherent queerness. Contemporary burlesque, often known as neo burlesque, borrows from various genres including dance, drag, performance art, theatre, and, of course, traditional burlesque. It is a hybrid art form that mixes traditions, flaunts rules and standardizations in order to remain provocatively entertaining. The seminars will invite some of the leading neo burlesque performers in New York to perform as well as provide the theoretical and historical context for their work. The seminar participants will have the opportunity to read about, observe, and engage with this unique form of performance art that advances the artistic expression by constantly challenging the political and cultural authorities. Seminar Facilitator: Jasmina Sinanovic
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
Additional Tease n' Tell Seminars
Please request the seminar reading material by sending an email to clagsevents@gc.cuny.edu The readings will be emailed as PDF files. The attendance of past seminars is not required.
CLAGS Colloquium Series in LGBTQ Studies The vibrant gay scene included a thriving gay press with nearly thirty journal and newspaper titles, three separate homosexual rights organizations, and an estimated 130 gay and lesbian watering holes turning Berlin into the undisputed capital of gay liberation by 1933. Drawn from research for Beachy’s forthcoming Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (Knopf, 2011), this presentation explores the social and cultural conditions that fostered a teeming population of young male prostitutes – estimated in the tens of thousands by the early 1930s – as well as the German and foreign men who patronized them during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). The research makes use of the works of authors like Christopher Isherhood, early twentieth century sex tourists as well as the unpublished sociological study of Richard Linsert, a colleague of sexologist and gay rights activist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Completed in 1927, Linsert’s remarkable survey was only recently recovered in Berlin and provides detailed interviews of exactly 100 Berlin rent boys, documenting the practices of their “trade,” social backgrounds, and sexual preferences and identities. Robert Beachy, Associate Professor of History Goucher College
Graduate Center
LGBTQ Studies Colloquium Series In this documentary, the filmmaker follows Master Luu Ngoc Duc, one of the most prominent spirit mediums in Hanoi, and his vibrant community through their rituals and everyday life. The film explores how effeminate and gay men in homophobic Vietnam have traditionally found community and expression in the country’s popular Mother Goddess Religion, Dao Mau. Nguyen Trinh Thi,director
Graduate Center
International Resource Network (IRN) Lecture Series Making use of wide-ranging scholarship on globalization this presentation illuminates the defining debates in transnational queer studies by addressing questions such as: What is the place of queer sexuality in the intensification of flows of people and capital across national borders? What the implications of global flows for queer theories -- for example, how do the politics and theories of first-world settler societies like the United States relate to queer analysis in the rest of the world? Given the importance of cross-cultural diversity to arguments about sexual variation, should queer theories emphasize international linkages or radical sexual difference? A crucial and timely analysis of transnational queer studies that provides vital insights into the international work for LGBTQ human rights and the implications of globalizing gay culture.
Graduate Center
Monday, May 4
Seminars in the City Final Seminar: The Drag Queen and The Professor Presenters: Joe Jeffreys & Rose Wood Burlesque gender-bender Rose Wood and drag historian Joe E. Jeffreys discuss the interplay of drag and burlesque in this multimedia conversation and Q&A featuring a special live performance by Rose Wood. Rose Wood is grateful to do what she does and not be arrested. A headliner at The Box since it opened, Rose is best known for transgressive over the top performances , including an infamous bottle act, that aggressively explore boundaries of gender and taste. Rose was awarded “Most Exotic Move” at the 2006 Exotic World International Burlesque Competition and “Best Burlesque Surprise” in 2008 by the New York Press. "Tranny Burlesque queen Rose Wood shocks and amazes even the most jaded Hell's Kitchen boys."—Next Magazine. Seminar Facilitator: Jasmina Sinanovic
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
The attendance of past seminars is not required. There is no reading material for this seminar.
OutHistory Presentation & Panel Series Two multimedia exhibits followed by a panel discussion by 2008-09 OutHistory Fellowship Winners, Joey Plaster and Tristan Cabello. Plaster focuses on the Polk Gulch neighborhood in San Francisco, and Cabello uses Bronzeville, Chicago as the subject of his award winning exhibit.
Graduate Center
CLAGS LGBTQ Performance and Panel An evening of live performances and discussion exploring the intersections of queerness, music and pop and punk cultures. Join innovative performers from the current music scene and leading academics in performance studies to trace a lineage of queer underground music culture and address questions such as, “How do performers define their work as opposed to theorists and critics? Is there a uniquely queer musical and performance sensibility? Is the road to mainstream success paved with compromises? How is such music and performance to be historicized?” From Freddie Mercury and Grace Jones to Sylvester and Annie Lennox to Antony and Beth Ditto, take a closer look at queer music culture and the driving obsessions of those who help create it.
Panelists: Graduate Center
Graduate Center
Seminars in the City
Many imagine the city to be the locus of non-normative sexual practices and identities, be it a site of refuge or risk, community or alienation, pleasure or danger. In other words, artists, policy makers, scholars, and activists alike have painted visions of the city as a playground for outlaws, as a homeland for outcasts, as a center of pathology, and as the promise of new possibilities. Sex and the City will feature a series of seminars focusing on the history and contemporary experiences of sexual and gender minorities in particular lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the U.S. city from the late 19th century to the present.
Seminar Facilitator:
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
Seminars in the City is supported by
"Stonewall Was a Riot!" celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots at the scene of the crime, kicks off Pride week 2009 and launches OutHistory.org's "Since Stonewall Local Histories Contest." Performers include Staceyann Chinn, Dred, Anthony Escobar, Rosamond King, Lisa Kron, and others. MC JZ Bitch and DJs Sara G., Associate Music Editor, BUST Magazine and DADDY.
Doors open at 7:30pm,
The Stonewall Inn,
"Stonewall Was a Riot!" is a fundraiser for
OutHistory.org.
Monday, 7-9 p.m.
A Lecture with Marcia Gallo
Wildly popular fictional as well as real-life gay women made Greenwich Village the place to see-and-be-seen for lesbians in the mid- to late 1950s. But in addition to the nightclubs, restaurants, bookstores and theaters that welcomed them, the Village also provided a home base for now-legendary activists with the first lesbian rights group in the U.S., the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB). Presented by The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation 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.
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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 |
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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.