Cyber Queer: Uploaded Gender Identities and the Queer Gaze.

On Friday, 10 April 2009, 5.30pm.

@19 University Place, Room 222, New York City

Free and open to the public

How faithful, seductive and elusive are the practices of online photographic self-portraiture and in what ways do the cameras speak for us? What ‘outs’ does cybernetic self-construction offer to the restrictions of gender norms governed by cultural discourse and the nation state? And how do new media and technologies of seeing and visual transmission negotiate, problematize and subvert the liminal zones between ‘–social’ and ‘–sexual’, untouchable and accessible, hegemonic and subaltern, desire and truth? Tracking three contemporary, cross-cultural modes of gendered media performance – online queer identities in and out of the United Arab Emirates, music videos from Céline Dion and Will Young, and the ‘dismembered’ naked blason of the gay male chatroom – our panel wishes to raise and debate these issues and more.

‘Corps morcelé in Chat-room’ – Ljubisa Matic, PhD Candidate, Department of Drama, Stanford University

‘A Will-ful and Grace-less Gaze’ – Richard Evans, MA, John W. Draper Program of Interdisciplinary Studies, NYU

‘Uploading Transnational Queer Subjectivities in The United Arab Emirates’ – Noor Al-Qasimi, PhD, Research fellow at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, NYU.

Moderator: Joseph Perna, PhD candidate, Department of Italian Studies, NYU

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University

Light refreshments will be provided. Please bring (any) ID to enter building. For more information log on to: http://manenough.wordpress.com/

Failure to Perform: Male Body Performativity and Hegemonic Masculinity (A Panel).

On Friday, 13 March 2009, 5.30pm.

@19 University Place, Room 222, New York City

 

Central to R.W. Connell’s now classic formulations of hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities are “body-reflexive practices”: male bodies as exemplary sites of social agency through which norms of social conduct, as well as configurations of rebellion against the pressures of normativity, are constructed, performed and contested. Focusing on three contemporary, cross-cultural configurations of the male body – penile erection dysfunction in a case study of Mexican men, classically trained Korean ballet dancers, and Richard Pryor’s performativity and its liberatory laughter – our panel seeks to raise and answer questions surrounding the role of the male body vis-à-vis issues of race, subordination and liberation, habitus, hegemony and social change, and the freedom-conferring potentials of comedy.

‘Ballet, Male Dancers and Their Embodied Masculinities: The Case of Professional Classic Ballet Dancers in Korea’ – Haryun Peun, PhD candidate, Department of Sociology, SUNY at Stony Brook

‘Richard Pryor’s Expansive Masculinity’ – H. Alexander Welcome, PhD candidate, Department of Sociology, CUNY, The Graduate Center

Moderator: Kristina Varade, PhD candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, CUNY, The Graduate Center

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University

Light refreshments will be provided. Please bring (any) ID to enter building. For more information log on to: http://manenough.wordpress.com/

Visual Pleasures and Bodily Cinema: Queer Spectatorship and Fem-Dom Internet Porn.

On Wednesday, 4 March 2009, 6:30-8:30 pm,

@ The Library, 2^nd Floor, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, 24 West 12^th Street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues), New York City

Free and open to the public

Porn is proliferating, and S/M is mutating, but is theory keeping pace? This talk by Professor Christopher Vitale will focus on Fem-Dom internet porn (niche market pornography in which women dominate, abuse, humiliate, and/or penetrate men), as a way of seeking to update feminist spectatorship theories as defined by Laura Mulvey in her groundbreaking 1975 paper ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Integrating Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze’s readings of sadism/masochism, we will examine not only the genre conventions of Fem-Dom porn, but also the liminal ‘before/after’ negotiation scenes filmed by Kink.com as part of its effort to become a ‘community’ porn production facility.

By describing the potentials/limitations for queer spectatorship opened by these new forms of internet video, and the slippage of gender and sexual points of reference that allow for a ‘gaze’ beyond that of ‘erection of the eye’, this event will pose questions of more fluid fantasmatic positions, organs, and identifications in a fundamentally polymorphous economy of erotic looking, and what it might mean to view masculinity beyond the domain of mainstream notions of sexual ‘orientation’.

Christopher Vitale is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He has just recently completed a book manuscript on the philosophy of networks called The Networked Mind: A New Image of Thought for a Hyperconnected Age, and is currently working on an introductory text updating semiotic theory for the age of the internet called Media/Semiotics: A Guide to Making Meaning of Signs in Contemporary Culture.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University

Hosted by Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò

Light refreshments will be provided.

Man Enough: An Interdisciplinary New York University Graduate Student Colloquium on Masculinity, presents:

Institution, Work and the Masculine Self.

On Thursday, 19 February 2009, 5-7 pm,

@ Great Room, 1^st Floor, 19 University Place, New York City

Free and open to the public

What role do work and institution play in the gendered construction of masculine self-consciousness and what are the effects of hegemonic masculinities as constructed through work? How have the changing concepts of “man’s work” or the “all-male sphere”, over the last century or so, operated upon male self awareness, representation and action, and what relationships may be perceived between the construction of masculinity through institution and work, and military interventionism? Centered around a discussion of these and related topics our panel features:

‘The Literary Study of Victorian Masculinities’ – Benedick Turner, PhD, Department of English, NYU

‘Keeping Workers Out of the Spineless Class: Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor, and Masculinity in the Making of Labor’s Foreign Policy, 1895-1918’ – Justin Jackson, PhD candidate, Department of History, Columbia University

Film screening: ‘Debating Masculinity’: A short film of interviews with five leading voices in masculinity studies – Introduced by Josep M. Armengol, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor, Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, SUNY at Stony Brook

Moderator: Josep M. Armengol

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University

Light refreshments will be provided. Please bring (any) ID to enter building. For more information log on to: http://manenough.wordpress.com/

Man Enough: An Interdisciplinary New York University Graduate Student Colloquium on Masculinity, presents our Spring schedule:

1: Thursday, 19 February 2009, 5-7pm. 19 University Place, Great Room. Panel:

Institution.

‘The Literary Study of Victorian Masculinities’ – Benedick Turner, PhD, Department of English, NYU

‘Keeping Workers Out of the Spineless Class: Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor, and Masculinity in the Making of Labor’s Foreign Policy, 1895-1918’ – Justin Jackson, PhD candidate, Department of History, Columbia University

Film screening: ‘Debating Masculinity’: A short film of interviews with five leading voices in masculinity studies – Introduced by Josep M. Armengol, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor, Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies Postdoctoral, SUNY at Stony Brook

Moderator: Josep M. Armengol

2: Wednesday, 4 March 2009, 6:30-8:30 pm. Casa Italiana, Library. 24 West 12^th Street, New York. Roundtable:

Visual Pleasures and Bodily Cinema: Queer Spectatorship and Fem-Dom Internet Porn.

Lead by: Chris Vitale, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pratt Institute

3: Friday, 13 March 2009, 5:30-7pm. 19 University Place, Room 222. Panel:

Performativity II.

‘Applying STS Insights to Masculinity Studies: The Case of Erectile Dysfunction in Mexico’ – Emily Wentzell, PhD candidate, Anthropology, University of Michigan, and Visiting Assistant in Research in the Yale University department of Anthropology

‘Ballet, Male Dancers and Their Embodied Masculinities: The Case of Professional Classic Ballet Dancers in Korea’ – Haryun Peun, PhD candidate, Department of Sociology, SUNY at Stony Brook

‘Richard Pryor’s Expansive Masculinity’ – H. Alexander Welcome, PhD candidate, Department of Sociology, CUNY, The Graduate Center

Moderator: Kristina Varade, PhD candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, CUNY, The Graduate Center

4: Friday, 10 April 2009, 5:30-7 pm. 19 University Place, Room 222. Panel:

Cyberqueer.

‘Corps morcelé in Chat-room’ – Ljubisa Matic, PhD Candidate, Department of Drama, Stanford University

‘A Will-ful and Grace-less Gaze’ – Richard Evans, MA, John W. Draper Program of Interdisciplinary Studies, NYU

‘Uploading Transnational Gendered Subjectivities in The United Arab Emirates’ – Noor Al-Qasimi, PhD, Research fellow at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU and at the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

Moderator: Joseph Perna, PhD candidate, Department of Italian Studies, NYU

5: Thursday, 16 April 2009, 5-7 pm. 19 University Place, Great Room. Lecture:

Outsourcing Masculinity: The Destruction of Young Males of Color.

Rob Maitra, PhD candidate, Cultural Studies, Teachers College, Columbia University, and Director of Educational Advancement at The Boys’ Club of New York, Director of Buzzer Thirty

Colloquium Organizers:

Daniel Lukes, PhD candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, NYU

Gaoheng Zhang, PhD candidate, Department of Italian Studies, NYU

Co-sponsored by NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality

For a full calendar of events log on to:http://manenough.wordpress.com/

NB: The above schedule is subject to change: please refer to the website for updates, and please note different event locations.

Facebook group: http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=22818377126

Contact:

dnl215@nyu.edu, gz261@nyu.edu

Colloquium statement:

Spanning the humanities and social sciences and with contributions from across the spectrum of historical time periods and cultures, this year-long colloquium seeks to probe and investigate components of masculinity through the lens of contemporary academia, to formulate and hopefully answer questions of what it might mean to be male and negotiate masculinity in our world today.

Marlon Riggs, White Seduction,

and the Queer Black Look

.

On Friday, 5 December 2008, 4-6 pm

@ The Library, 2^nd Floor, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, 24 West 12^th Street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues), New York City

Free and open to the public

David A. Gerstner discusses the cultural and political anxieties that unfolded following the PBS presentation of Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied (1989). Riggs’ provocative exploration of inter-racial homosexuality and AIDS infuriated a good number of moral custodians—black and white. The Christian Broadcast Network, for example, referred to Tongues Untied as ‘This Summer’s Version of the Mapplethorpe Controversy’ while some black scholars accused Riggs of failing to live up to the film’s “revolutionary” call for black men to love black men, especially since his lover was white. What did the Christian ideologues see in Riggs’ work that so disturbed their white and heterosexual sensibilities? Why did many African Americans take offense at what they viewed as Riggs’ “seduction” by and “admiration” for white culture? In what way did Riggs’ (and Mapplethorpe’s) visualization of the queer look raise the ante on the homosexual look, pleasure, and, ultimately, death?

Gerstner is author of Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema (Duke, University Press, 2006) and the editor of The Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture (2006). He is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the City University of New York where he serves on the Graduate Center Doctoral Faculty and in the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island.

Preceded by a work in progress:

‘Border Crossing and Queer Screen Masculinity: The Case of Ferzan Özpetek’s Il bagno turco – Hamam (1996)’ – Gaoheng Zhang.  

Gaoheng Zhang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Italian Studies at NYU and his dissertation addresses the dynamics of border crossing and masculinity in the films of Italian director Gianni Amelio.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University

Hosted by Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò

Light refreshments will be provided. For more information log on to: http://manenough.wordpress.com/

Teaching Male-Positive Masculinities: Exploring the Theory and Practice of Enabling Men in Literature

A pedagogy workshop by

Professor Dennis S. Gouws.

On Friday, 21 November 2008, 4-6 pm

@ The Library, 2^nd Floor, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, 24 West 12^th Street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues), New York City

Free and open to the public

Current research concerning the education of boys and men suggests that masculinities are often misrepresented in American culture, leaving many boys and men feeling alienated and excluded from their learning and living communities. A new acute attentiveness to discourses about boys, men, and masculinities and how they are inscribed without question in our culture is timely and auspicious. Teaching a male-positive literature class can intervene in and contribute positively to the education of boys and men by enabling them to become embodied literate learners and leaders, to become men in literature.

In the spirit of a male-positive acute attentiveness to these discourses and positive intervention into their praxis, this workshop will address the following interrelated questions:

• Are American boys and men poorly served by education?
• What opportunities for undertaking a male-positive approach to education and literacy are evident in current scholarship?
• What male-positive strategies might better enable men in literature and literacy?

After an introductory lecture on the current state of boys and men in American education, participants will be invited to discuss ways we might develop a consistently male-positive pedagogy for teaching literature and then to give a male-positive reading of a short literary work.

Dennis S. Gouws is Professor of English at Springfield College and Lecturer in English at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. His research interests include male-positive pedagogy and the manhood question in nineteenth-century British literature. He is currently writing a book on the manhood question in George Eliot’s fiction.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University

Hosted by Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò

Light refreshments will be provided.

Man Enough: An Interdisciplinary New York University Graduate Student Colloquium on Masculinity, presents:

New Masculinities: Pathology and its Alternatives.

On Friday, 14 November 2008, 4-6 pm

@ The Library, 2^nd Floor, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, 24 West 12^th Street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues), New York City

Free and open to the public

How do we talk about men and boys today, and how much of this discourse is negotiated through the languages of pathology and normativity? To what extent is masculinity a category constructed by means of a struggle with norms and pathologized cultural models, with manhood envisaged as necessarily subject to “change”? How is maleness being re-defined by the politics of gender equality, in the US and Europe? Centered around a discussion of these and related topics our panel features:

.

‘Normal Man vs Pervert: Constructions of Masculinity in the Narratives of Sex Offenders’ – Diana Rickard, PhD candidate, Department of Sociology, CUNY

‘Resistance and Accommodation to Norms of Masculinity: A Multi-method Longitudinal Study of Urban Boys’ Friendships’ – Carlos Santos, PhD candidate, Department of Applied Psychology, NYU

‘Politicizing the New Man: State Masculinity Politics in Sweden’ – Niclas Järvklo, PhD candidate, Department of Literature and History of Ideas, Stockholm University and Visiting scholar, SUNY at Stony Brook (in absentia)

Moderator: Katharina Piechocki, PhD candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, NYU

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University

Light refreshments will be provided. For more information log on to: http://manenough.wordpress.com/

Man Enough: An Interdisciplinary New York University Graduate Student Colloquium on Masculinity, presents:

Muscle and Emotion: Performing Masculinity Then and Now.

On Friday, 31 October 2008, 4-6 pm

@ The Library, 2^nd Floor, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, 24 West 12^th Street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues), New York City

Free and open to the public

What does it mean to “perform” masculinity? To what extent is maleness a mode of behavior constructed through regulation and repression, privileging the “muscular” over the “emotional”? What is the current condition of the homosocial/homosexual distinction? Centered around the theme of masculinity as performance, from the middle ages to the modern military, our panel will seek to probe these issues and more, and it features:

‘Egregiously Homosocial: Later Medieval Manuscript Illuminations of Biblical Sodomites’ – Joseph S. Ackley, PhD candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU

‘Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Emotion in American Literature’ – Josep M. Armengol, Postdoctoral, Sociology, SUNY at Stony Brook

‘Transcending Masculinity: (Re)reading Rocky … Thirty Years Later’ – Heather Collette-VanDeraa, MA candidate, UCLA’s Cinema & Media Studies MA Program

‘Calling Jodies: The Homosocial Construction of Masculinity in the Military’ – Holly Halmo, MA candidate, Draper Program, NYU and MSLIS, Long Island University

Moderator: Jonathan Mullins, PhD candidate, Department of Italian Studies, NYU

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University

Light refreshments will be provided. For more information log on to: http://manenough.wordpress.com/