CLAGS

I don't relish the idea of traveling to NYC (it seems so far away), but I might have to make an exception and try to make it to one of these!

10/1

Thursday, 7-9 PM

Room 9207

Graduate Center

Rare Form: Crafting Queerness in Contemporary Literature

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

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.

10/5

6-8 PM

The LGBT Center

208 West 13^th Street

New York, NY 10011

CLAGS-IRN Seminars in the City

Axes of Desire:  Gender, Sexuality, & Human Rights

For the 2009/2010 academic year, the Seminars in the City will be sponsored by the International Resource network, focusing on the theme of sexuality and human rights around the world. The series reflects CLAGS and IRN’s shared commitment to providing a public forum for intellectual discussion and debate within and beyond the academy by connecting academics, activists, and the larger community around the world to share information and resources in sexuality studies. Since the IRN is organized by geopolitical regions, each seminar will focus on questions of sexual human rights in specific regions around the world. For more information visit: http://bit.ly/ja1eJ

Neither Heaven Nor Hell: The Realities of Sexual Minority Organizing in the Caribbean

Presenter: Angelique V. Nixon, Assistant Professor in Residence, Women's Studies, University of Connecticut

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.

Reading Material: Free course packets for the Seminars are now available at the CLAGS office. Please call: 212-817-1955 to make sure the office is open for the packets to be picked up. Due to budgetary reasons we do not mail the packets. For further inquiries please check our website www.clags.org or email clagsevents@gc.cuny.edu

Registration or attendance of past seminars in this series is not required.

10/09

Friday, 7-9 PM

Skylight Room

Graduate Center

CLAGS LGBTQ Studies Panel:

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

Moderator: Sarah Chinn, Executive Director, CLAGS

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.”

10/14

Wednesday 7-9 PM

Room C 201

Graduate Center

LGBTQ Studies Pedagogy Workshop

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

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

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.

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

10/16

4-6 PM

English Department

Room 4409

MY DIVA Reading Series

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.

Cosponsored by the Phd Program in English

10/20

5:00-6:30 PM

CLAGS Office

Room 7115

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

10/20

Tuesday, 7-9 PM

Room 9204-9205

Graduate Center

LGBTQ Studies Film Series

Our Family

Directed by K. P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro

2007, 56 min., India
Tamil with English Subtitles

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

10/22

Thursday, 7-9 PM

Room C 201-202

Graduate Center

LGBTQ Film Series

NO!

Director, Aishah Shahidah Simmons

2006, 94 min. USA

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.

10/29

Thursday, 6:30 PM

Skylight Room

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 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.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, the PhD Program in English and the Poetics Group

The Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY at 34^th Street.  All events in the Graduate Center are wheelchair accessible.  Please contact the security office at the Graduate Center (212-817-7777) for further details. 

CLAGS is committed to accessibility for all participants at our events, so we have a SCENT-FREE policy.  ASL interpretation can be provided for any CLAGS event if requested 10 or more working days prior to the event. 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 clagsevents@gc.cuny.edu.  For more information, visit our website, www.clags.org. 

All CLAGS events, which are free and open to the public, are co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Studies Concentration in Lesbian and Gay/Queer Studies. 

Nearest subways: B, D, F, V, N, Q, W to 34^th Street; 6 to 33^rd Street