Announcement: Dr. Jane Ward, "Not Gay: The Homosexual Ingredient in the Making of Straight, White Men"
We are pleased to announce a lecture by Dr. Jane Ward, "Not Gay: The Homosexual Ingredient in the Making of Straight, White Men," to be given on Thursday, February 25th at 1:30 PM in CLA 1.302B. We've included a description of Dr. Ward's talk below; we hope to see you there.
Although the U.S. media has recently been abuzz with commentary about heteroflexibility, most accounts have focused on “girls who kiss girls” for the pleasure of male spectators, or men of color “on the down low” who are presumed to be gay and in the closet. But where do white men—the dominant culture’s most normalized and idealized figures—fit in to these narratives? In this talk, Ward traces narratives about straight white men’s homosexual encounters across three sites— the United States military, online personal ads, and popular culture—illustrating the unique ways that whiteness and masculinity converge to circumvent the pathologizing gaze of popular science, the gaze applied to men of color. Taking sex between straight white men as its point of departure, Ward’s project offers a new way to think about heterosexuality—not as the opposite or absence of homosexuality, but as its own unique mode of engaging homosexual sex, a mode characterized by pretense, disidentification and racialized heteronormative investments.
Announcement: Dr. Lisa Duggan, "Normativity and Its Discontents"
We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Lisa Duggan, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, is giving a talk on Feburary 25th at 6:00 PM in CLA 0.128 called "Normativity and Its Discontents." The description of Dr. Duggan's talk is below; we hope to see you there.
What or who is normal? Norm, normal and normative are terms of both social aspiration and political revulsion, referring alternatively to laws or rules, averages or means, ideals or ethical judgements. They are deeply embedded in the histories and cultures of capitalism and empire, race, gender and sexuality. They are central terms in psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychology, and well as in biomedicine, the philosophy of ethics, sociology and economics. They are also vernacular terms of popular approval and rejection. In this talk, we will consider the history and politics of normativity in two contexts: (1) The geopolitics of mental diagnosis deployed during the "war on terror," as represented in the Showtime television series Homeland, and (2) The widely popular fiction of libertarian capitalist hack Ayn Rand. These can show us how American Studies, disability studies and gender/sexuality studies, in particular, put these binaries to work in a global context. The goal is to understand the role of "normal" life in the contradictory moral discourse of neoliberal imperialism.
Announcement: Lecture by Dr. Katherine Capshaw
On Thursday, February 25th, the Department of American Studes, the Institute for Historical Studies, the Center for Women's and Gender Studies and the John L Warfield Center for African and African American Studies present a lecture from Dr. Katherine Capshaw, associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut, in GWB 2.206. Dr. Capshaw's presentation, entitled "Framing the Possibilities of Black Childhood in Photographic Books and Comics" will "consider the potential of visual representation to promote social justice through resistant, playful, unsettled images of black childhood. In photographic picture books of the 1960s and early 1970s authored by women, we find substantial child involvement in images that represent lived experience. Joy becomes a politcal statement in many photographs of the era, an expression of psychological freedom that can lead to political action. The second half of the presentation will engage contemporary graphic novels and comics by African American authors and illustrators; these artists often employ comics' metatextuality in order to interrogate social opresion and to counter the pejorative images that have framed black youth." We hope to see you there.
Announcement: BlaxploItalian
On Wednesday, February 17th, the French and Italian Department, in conjunction with the Center for European Studies, the Department of American Studies, the Department of History and the Department of Radio, Television and Film, will present an evening with Italian born and Brooklyn based director Fred "Kudjo" Kuworno. In addition to a Q&A with the documentarian, the event will feature screenings of his films BlaxploItalian, a "call to action for increased diversity in international cinema" that follows the careers of several Black actors working in Italian cinema and Inside Buffalo, about a unit of African American Buffalo Soldiers who fought in Italy during World War II. We hope to see you there.