Humanities Institute

LECTURE:   "Becoming Feral: Sex, Death and Falconry"

Thursday, October 20, 2016 at 4pm, 1008 Humanities

Falconry, with its hoods, jesses, leather straps and chaps, its gauntlets, leashes, swivels and boxes is suggestive of a whole sexual subculture that stands outside of contemporary understandings of desire. By tracking 20 ^th century notions of wildness through these narratives of the training of raptors, we can engage the meaning of wildness in the context of the postcolonial critiques of civilization and in the face of eco-critical calls for different relations to non-human animals.

SEMINAR:    "Wild Things – Queer and Feminist Theory at the End of the World"

Friday, October 21, 2016 at 10am-12pm, 1008 Humanities

Strange weather, zombie apocalypse, never ending war, ruthless capitalism, organ harvesting, drones, and the list of threats to human existence goes on. While a general air of intensifying crisis hangs heavy around us, there are also signs of new life, new modes of protest, different imaginaries of collectivity and distinctly post-human forms of belonging, being and becoming. In this seminar, we will range across theories and narratives of the end of the world, past and present, to look for feminist and queer insights into endings, beginnings and the wild in between.

Jack Halberstam is Visiting Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. His articles have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and collections. Halberstam is the author of five books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Female Masculinity, In A Queer Time and Place, The Queer Art of Failure) and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. He has co-edited a number of anthologies including Posthuman Bodies with Ira Livingston and a special issue of Social Text with Jose Munoz and David Eng titled “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?”

Untimely Bodies: Race, Temporality, Queerness -- A Symposium

Thursday, Nov 10, 2016 at 2:00-6:00 pm

This symposium will reflect on the interactions between bodies and time. Bodies in time. Bodies out of and stretched across time. Recent work in Queer Studies has interrogated corporeal orientations and assemblages, the circulation of desire and the possibilities of the kinetic un/timeliness of the body. Likewise, Native Studies, Black Studies and Critical Race Studies, have provided new ways to imagine material and conceptual bodies, their long histories, short lives and enduring disruptiveness. This event brings together scholars invested in the untimely and the out of place, insisting on intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, the passing of time, its uneven contours and asynchronicity.

Participants include:

Tavia Nyong'o, New York University

Martin Manalansan IV, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

Joshua Whitehead, Poet

Roundtable discussion featuring SBU faculty: Tracey Walters, Africana Studies, Nerissa S. Balce, Asian and Asian American Studies; Tiffany Joseph, Sociology; and Kadji Amin, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Martin F. Manalansan IV is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies and Head of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  Professor Manalansan is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora and is editor/co-editor of four anthologies.

Tavia Nyong’o is a cultural critic and an Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. His book,  The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory, won the Errol Hill Award for best book in African American theatre and performance studies. Nyong’o has published in venues such as  Radical History Review,  Criticism,  GLQ,  TDR,  Women & Performance,  WSQ, and The Nation.

Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit member of the Peguis First Nation on Treaty 1 territory. He is currently studying at the University of Calgary (Treaty 7) with a focus on Indigenous Literatures and Cultures, Queer Theory, Critical Race, and Creative Writing. His creative and critical work has appeared in Prairie Fire, filling station, EVENT Magazine, Red Rising Magazine, Stolen Generations: Survivors of the Indian Adoption Projects and 60s Scoop and is forthcoming in Narratives of Transracial Adoption, Masquerade, Mumming, and Multiculturalism.