Sexuality Studies Association – Association d'études de la sexualité

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Keynote and Plenary Panel for 2022 Conference

Grappling with Care: Femme Emotional Labour, Somatic Politics, and the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus

Keynote address by Dr. Ann Cvetkovich

Friday May 20, 2022 6:00pm – 7:30pm EST

Free and open to the public, register here: https://sfu.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5IkduyorjkqH9U9a0YT0ZItu00gZaeNYa_5

Event will be professionally live captioned

This talk will explore the proliferation of discourses of care – including self-care, collective care, and radical care – as well as critiques of those discourses, both of which have gained additional momentum and urgency in activist and academic contexts during this time of pandemic. Taking up Eli Clare’s notion of “grappling with cure,” I “grapple with care,” including its use in addressing the mental health crisis in academia and its use by activists, especially queer feminists of colour working for racial, gender, sexual, and disability justice.  Drawing on the work of adrienne maree brown, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, I explore organizing and facilitation as forms of femme emotional labour or care, the somatic politics of reclaiming the body from collective histories of trauma, and creative approaches to practices of care.

Ann Cvetkovich is Director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University.  She was previously Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and founding Director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012).  For additional info, see www.anncvetkovich.com.

 

Plenary Panel: ruins, queer and otherwise…

A panel convened by Dr. Ricky Varghese featuring Canisia Lubrin, Fan Wu, Concetta Principe, sam sax, Trish Salah.

Saturday May 21, 2022 2:00pm – 4:00pm EST

Free and open to the public, register here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/291340044917

Event will be professionally live captioned

Organized by Dr. Ricky Varghese, recipient of the 2020 Academic Leadership in Sexuality Studies Award.

The philosopher Walter Benjamin famously suggested that “allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things.” What kind of ruin is the thing or figure that is queer? Is queerness synonymous to the ruin? What might it mean to queer the ruin or think of it as foundationally queer at its core? If as Benjamin suggested, in the ruin, there are allegories for thinking itself, can queerness be a thought experiment requiring us to think differently, or otherwise, about difference and otherness? As the ellipsis in the title suggests – the ellipsis, itself a way to signify a sort of ruin in and of a text – this panel of poets attempts to initiate a conversation regarding what it is that leaves us in ruins, how we may find forms of redemption amidst these ruins, and what may be precisely queer and otherwise about this redemption.

 

 

 

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This entry was posted on Friday March 25th, 2022 by .