LGBT Studies Events

SPRING 2024 EVENTS:

TRANS STUDIES NOW! "WE'RE HERE, WE'RE QUEER, TRANS, AND FEMINIST IN THE ACADEMY"
Thursday, April 11, at 5:00pm
A.D. White House

Trans Studies Now! is a year-long speaker series organized by the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and the LGBT Studies Program at Cornell, with co-sponsorship from the Department of Literatures in English and the Society for the Humanities. Featuring cutting-edge scholars from a range of disciplines, the series offers a forum for discussing this field; audience members are invited to read selected articles before the event.

Guests are invited to read selected articles before the event.

Marquis Bey's '19 work focuses on thinking blackness not as racial identification but as “paraontological,” and utilizes this understanding to recalibrate how we might move through questions of nonnormative subjectivity—via race, gender, and personhood. Through black feminist theory, trans and nonbinary studies, and abolitionist theory, Bey articulates  a project of black trans feminism that is not beholden to a veneration of particular subjects but rather an assertion of the dismantling of the normative constraints that define the world—white supremacy, cisnormativity, and heteropatriarchy as well as the categories of race and gender themselves. 

Bey is the author, most recently, of Black Trans Feminism and Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (both published with Duke University Press, 2022) and is currently at work on a three-volume collection of critical essays on “jailbreaking” gender, race, and class. 

Amy Brainer studies queer and trans family issues in Taiwan and in transnational contexts. Her first book, Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan (Rutgers, 2019), received the 2019 Ruth Benedict Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology. Her current research follows queer and trans individuals and couples as they navigate marriage-based immigration to the United States. At UM-Dearborn, Dr. Brainer is Coordinator of the LGBTQ Studies Certificate and teaches a number of courses in the program, including Sexualities, Genders, and Bodies (WGST/HUM/SOC 366), LGBTQ Religious Experience (WGST/RELS/SOC 388), Family, Sexuality, and Human Rights (WGST/ANTH/SOC 451), and Hope and Joy in Queer and Trans Lives (FNDS 1602).

Emma Heaney is a scholar of comparative literature, feminist studies, and trans studies. Her first book, The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Northwestern UP 2017) traces the medicalization of trans femininity and the uptake of the resulting diagnostic in works of literature and theory. Her edited collection, Feminism Against Cisness [Duke UP 2023], gathers essays by trans studies scholars that demonstrate the potential of feminist critique freed of the ideology that assigned sex determines sexed experience. Her current research derives a theory of the transformation of queer and trans identities from works of literature spanning the long twentieth century. Emma was previously an Assistant Professor of English at William Patterson University and has held fellowships at MacDowell and the Marble House Project.

Events will be held at the A.D. White House; they are free and open to the public. For more information, contact FGSS Director Jane Juffer at jaj93@cornell.edu.

FALL 2023 EVENTS:

TRANS STUDIES NOW! "POLICY AND TRANS POETICS"
Thursday, November 9, at 5:00pm
A.D. White House

Trans Studies Now! is a year-long speaker series organized by the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and the LGBT Studies Program at Cornell, with co-sponsorship from the Department of Literatures in English and the Society for the Humanities.  Featuring cutting-edge scholars from a range of disciplines, the series offers a forum for discussing this field; audience members are invited to read selected articles before the event. Here is the link to the November 9 reading

Events will be held at the A.D. White House; they are free and open to the public. For more information, contact FGSS Director Jane Juffer at jaj93@cornell.edu.

Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski (Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow at Case Western Reserve University) M.W. Bychowski is an Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow teaching courses on transgender and intersex history, disability culture, racism, and medieval literature. A few of her recent and upcoming articles include, "Unconfessing Transgender: Dysphoric Youths and the Medicalization of Madness in John Gower’s “Tale of Iphis and Ianthe” (Accessus 2016), "The Necropolitics of Narcissus: Confessions of Transgender Suicide in the Middle Ages" (the Medieval Feminist Forum 2017), “The Island of Hermaphrodites: Disorienting the Place of Intersex in Pilgrimage Narratives” (Postmedieval 2018), alongside contributions to The Medieval Disability Ashgate Research Companion, Chaucerian Skin Matters, and the Companion to Medieval Sexuality. In addition to her other writing, she engages actively in the Digital Humanities, maintaining a website on transgender and disability culture, www.ThingsTransform.com, through which she offers, "Transform Talks," workshops and training for businesses, schools, and faith communities on issue of gender and disability. Such work has brought her to work with the White House twice in 2016 as part of the "LGBTQ Champions of Change" and "the Forum on LGBT and Disability Issues."

Heath Fogg Davis (Professor of Political Science, Director of Intellectual Heritage at Temple Univ.) Heath Fogg Davis (PhD in Politics, Princeton University, B.A. Harvard University) is the Director of Temple’s Intellectual Heritage Program. His book, Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter? (New York University Press) offers practical strategies to help organizations of all kinds design and implement policies that are both trans-inclusive and institutionally smart. Newsweek named Beyond Trans a must-read book. His commentary on transgender and gender non-conforming political and legal issues has appeared in CNN.com, Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Christian Science Monitor, Women's Health Magazine and on MSNBC, National Public Radio, C-SPAN Book TV, and other podcasts

Perry Zurn (Society Fellow 23-24, Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University) Perry Zurn is Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies, the Honors Program, and the Antiracist Research and Policy Center. Zurn will be a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University ('23-'24) and a visiting scholar at The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania ('23-'25). He researches primarily in political philosophy, critical theory, and transgender studies, and collaborates in psychology and network neuroscience. He is the author of Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (2021) and the co-author of Curious Minds: The Power of Connection (MIT Press, 2022). He is also the co-editor of Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition (2016), Carceral Notebooks 12 (2017), Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge (2020), and Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, 1970-1980 (2021). He is currently at work on a new monograph, How We Make Each Other: Trans Poetics at the Edge of the University (under contract, Duke University Press) and co-editing Trans Philosophy: Meaning and Mattering (forthcoming).

TRANS STUDIES NOW! "THE WORK OF TRANS AFFECT"
Tuesday, October 3, 2023 at 5:00pm

A.D. White House

Trans Studies Now! is a year-long speaker series organized by the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and the LGBT Studies Program at Cornell, with co-sponsorship from the Department of Literatures in English and the Society for the Humanities. Featuring cutting-edge scholars from a range of disciplines, the series offers a forum for discussing this field; audience members are invited to read selected articles before the event. Here is the link for the October 3 event readings.

Events will be held at the A.D. White House; they are free and open to the public. For more information, contact FGSS Director Jane Juffer at jaj93@cornell.edu.

Chan Tov McNamarah - Cornell Law School (they/them) is a visiting assistant professor at Cornell Law School, where they teach a seminar on Gender and Sexual Minorities and the Law. Their research focuses on anti-discrimination law and constitutional law, with an emphasis on the Reconstruction amendments and constitutional guarantees of equality. Their current writing scrutinizes the logic, structure, and validity of legal arguments used to oppose the equal citizenship of sexual and gender minorities (persons who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary, etc.). That work has been published or is forthcoming in the Columbia Law ReviewCalifornia Law ReviewCornell Law Review (twice), as well as the online components of UCLA Law Review and Virginia Law Review.

Hil Malatino is Joyce L. and Douglas S. Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute and Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Philosophy at Penn State University. He is the author of Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (Minnesota 2022), Trans Care (Minnesota 2020), and Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (Nebraska 2019). He is co-editor of the t4t issue of TSQ alongside Cam Awkward-Rich and the "Care Ethics Otherwise" issue of Essays in Philosophy alongside Sarah Clark-Miller and Amy McKiernan. His essays have appeared in Hypatia, TSQ, Signs, and many other journals and edited volumes.  

SPRING 2023 EVENTS:

PUTTING YOURSELF OUT THERE: SELF-NARRATION IN JOB MATERIALS
Monday, February 13, 2023 at 12:00pm
190 Rockefeller Hall

Hillary Miller teaches twentieth and twenty-first century drama in the English Department at Queens College (CUNY) and serves as Assistant Director of the English MA program. Her first book, Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York (Northwestern University Press, 2016), won the John W. Frick Book Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society and the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the American Society for Theatre Research. Her second book, Playwrights on Television: Conversations with Dramatists (Routledge, 2020), addresses the labor of the contemporary playwright through interviews with eighteen dramatic writers about their cross-platform writing careers. She has published on numerous topics related to theatre post-World War II in the United States, including: activist theatre traditions; queer precarity; performance and urban space; racial, ethnic, and geographic inequalities in the arts; and the politics of producing. 

Her essays and reviews have appeared in Lateral, PAJ, Performance Research, The Radical History Review, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Survey. She currently serves as Vice President of Awards for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). She received her Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance from the Graduate Center (City University of New York), an M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and a B.A. in Theatre and Women’s Studies from Dartmouth College. She has taught at Baruch College (CUNY), California State University-Northridge, and Stanford University.

FALL 2022 EVENTS:

RADICAL DESIRE: MAKING ON OUR BACKS MAGAZINE
Now - September 30, 2022
Hirshland Exhibition Gallery, Carl A. Kroch Library

On Our Backs magazine launched in San Francisco in 1984 promising, per the tagline on the cover, “entertainment for the adventurous lesbian.” The photographic images on the cover and throughout were central to its mandate to deliver sexual content for lesbians. The photography also created the greatest difficulties for the magazine’s circulation at a moment when many feminist leaders decried pornographic photographs and film as a form of violence against women. This exhibition presents original photographs created for On Our Backs during its first decade. Made by staffers and freelancers, professionals and amateurs, members of the magazine’s inner circle and its far-flung readership, they convey the fantasies, imagination, humor, rigor, radicalism, political engagement, and ethos of community-building and inclusion that defined On Our Backs and made it a touchstone in the queer press. Additional photographs and documents elucidate the political and erotic contexts into which the magazine emerged, the women behind it, and their business practices and strategies. All materials are drawn from Cornell Library’s Human Sexuality Collection.

Exhibition curators: Kate Addleman-Frankel, Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography, Johnson Museum of Art, and Brenda Marston, Curator of the Human Sexuality Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

TRANS HISTORICAL: GENDER PLURALITY BEFORE THE MODERN
Thursday, September 15 
4:00pm
107 Olin Library

In a Chats in the Stacks talk about the book she co-edited, Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern, Masha Raskolnikov presents proof against those who claim that transgender people, experiences, and identities could not have existed prior to the twentieth century.

The collection of essays explores the abundance and diversity of gender experiences that flourished in the medieval and early modern worlds—from colonial North America to Renaissance Poland; from Byzantine and Ottoman Greece and Turkey to Korea. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, this multi-disciplinary volume offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early-modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal.

This book talk is sponsored by Olin Library. Light refreshments will be served.

Raskolnikov is an associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell, and she is also its director of undergraduate studies. She is the author of Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory. 

Once Upon a Time in A Place Called NOW: An Interactive Storytelling Workshop for Artists, Activists, and Educators

Thursday, October 20, 2022
5:00-6:30 pm
Film Forum, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts

Co-sponsors: The College of Arts and SciencesPMAAmerican StudiesLGBT StudiesFeminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies

Rhodessa Jones, The Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of ’56 Visiting Professor

Also featuring Workshop Facilitators Angela Wilson and Felicia Scaggs, core members of the Medea Project

Rhodessa Jones is Co-Artistic Director of San Francisco’s Cultural Odyssey and Director of the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women. An actress, teacher, singer, and writer, Jones’ solo work includes the Bessie Award-winning Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women, which has toured globally. She has received numerous accolades and awards, including a United States Artists Fellowship, an honorary doctorate from California College of the Arts, a Bay Area Theatre Legacy Award, and a Montgomery Fellowship at Dartmouth College.  In addition to her Rhodes Fellowship at Cornell, Jones is currently a 2022 Pew Center for Arts and Heritage Fellow.

Organizer: Sara Warner

PMAPS Colloquium: Aunty Aesthetics, or More Ways to be an Aunty, a talk by Dr. Kareem Khubchandani
Friday, October 21, 2022
3:00pm
Schwartz Center for Performing and Media Arts, Film Forum

Aunties are known to be terrifying figures, domineering and difficult, overbearing to younger generations. They are especially known for managing and curtailing desire, whether shaming you for that extra piece of cake you are eyeing, or blabbing to your parents about your nighttime escapes. As such, they have become the butt of the joke, particularly in meme culture that critiques older generation's outmoded style and politics. This talk revisits the hegemonic figure of the South Asian aunty in performance, TV, literature, and visual culture to detail what paying attention to her aesthetics can teach us about the queer and trans futures she makes possible rather than forecloses.

Kareem Khubchandani is Associate Professor in theater, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2020), co-editor of Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021), and guest editor of the "Critical Aunty Studies" special issue of Text and Performance Quarterly.

OUR BODIES, Their Laws: Impacts of Dobbs V. Jackson on LGBTQ+ Communities
October 25, 2022
132 Goldwin Smith Hall
4:30pm-6:00pm

What does the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe vs Wade have to do with LGBTQ+ people? A lot, it turns out. LGBTQ+ people are directly affected by the Dobbs v. Jackson decision compromising access to abortions because queer and trans people also need access to reproductive health care.  The right to privacy, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, is the foundation for abortion rights (Roe and Casey), and it is the bedrock for both same-sex sexual intimacy (Lawrence v. Texas) and same-sex marriage (Windsor v. United States and Obergefell v. Hodges).  The Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v Jackson that the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process protection of liberty does not include a federal right to abortion.  This verdict rescinds a right to privacy that has safeguarded citizens’ autonomous decisions with respect to their most intimate and personal life choices for nearly fifty years. What other rights are vulnerable in the wake of this ruling? How does this ruling intersect with the rise in anti-trans legislation across the country? This interactive discussion with presenters and audience focuses on the potential impacts of this legislation and Dobbs v Jackson for LGBTQ+ people and communities, including the issues of gay marriage, queer kinships, and transgender healthcare and rights.  

Discussion leaders include Sara Warner, associate professor of Performing and Media Arts and director of LGBT Studies; Katherine Sender, professor of communications and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Cortney Johnson, associate dean of students and director of the LGBT Resource Center.

EVENT RECORDING

QUEER STUDIES AND QUEER POLITICS: REFLECTIONS AND RESEARCH FROM THE MIDDLE EAST
October 25, 2022
G08 Uris Hall
12:00pm-1:30pm

This interdisciplinary panel will bring together three groundbreaking scholars working on Queer studies in Southwest Asia (Middle East)

Abdulhamit Arvas, Assistant Professor, English,  University of Pennsylvania

Arvas’s book in-progress, Abducted Boys: The Homoerotics of Race and Empire in Early Modernity, explores racial and imperial entanglements of homoeroticism and violence in English and Ottoman contexts with a focus on abductions and conversions in the early modern Mediterranean. He will discuss the significance of queer early modern Ottomans in exploring the history of sexuality in a transcultural context.

Maya Mikdashi,  Associate Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies,  Rutgers University

Mikdashi’s book, Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism and the State in Lebanon (SUP, 2022), theorizes the relationships between sexual difference and political difference, the religious and the secular, and law, bureaucracy, and biopower. She will focus on the regulation of queer and straight sexualities in the transnational Middle East through moral panics, law, bureaucracy, and violence, focusing on Lebanon. 

Evren Savcı, Assistant Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University

Savcı’s book, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (DUP, 2021), analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey’s AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. She will speak to the ways in which the history of sexuality and modernity has influenced queer studies’ work on the Middle East. 

The discussion will be moderated by Lucinda Ramberg (to be confirmed), Anthropology, Cornell University.

Register for the session here.

Interviewing and Negotiation for Academic Positions
Monday, October 31, 2022
12:00pm-1:30pm
Biotechnology Building, 102 Mann Library

An important part of the academic job search is interviewing and then negotiating the offer. Come learn about the art of interviewing for faculty positions from your laptop or mobile device. The format will be interactive presentation followed by question and answer period.

Presenters: Yael Levitte, Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity, and Christine Holmes, Director of Postdoctoral Studies

Registration will open late 2022.

Co-sponsored by the Office of Postdoctoral Studies and the Future Faculty and Academic Careers program, as part of the Graduate School's Academic Job Search Series.

Accommodations:We strive to make our events accessible to all Cornell community members. Individuals who have accessibility accommodations to request should contact futurefaculty@cornell.edu. We ask that requests be made at least one week in advance to help ensure they can be met.

CLUB Q CANDLELIGHT VIGIL
Thursday, December 1, at 5:00pm
Arts Quad, Central Campus

A candlelight vigil to honor and remember the victims of the Colorado Springs nightclub tragedy and to call for an end to violence against the LGBTQ+ community. 

Sponsored by Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies; LGBT Studies; Women's Resource Center; and the LGBT Resource Center

SPRING 2022 EVENTS:

REFUGE, ASYLUM, DETENTION: A FEMINIST AND QUEER LENS
EVENT RECORDING
February 3, 2022

84 million people and counting have been forcibly displaced by war and violence worldwide. The majority are stranded with insecure legal status in refugee camps and urban peripheries in the global South. Those who seek refuge in the U.S., Europe, or Australia face ongoing violence and rights violations, including incarceration in camps and detention centers. Others are granted temporary protection that turns refuge into decades-long protracted insecurity.

In this discussion, we use feminist and queer lenses to analyze these movements and containments. We explore how gender and sexuality shape refuge, asylum, and detention; how feminist and queer standpoints illuminate the structures that produce and sustain global apartheid; and how refugees and their allies resist these forces.

This event is co-sponsored by the Cornell Migrations Initiative.

RADICAL DESIRE: MAKING ON OUR BACKS MAGAZINE
February 14-September 30, 2022
Hirshland Exhibition Gallery, Carl A. Kroch Library

On Our Backs magazine launched in San Francisco in 1984 promising, per the tagline on the cover, “entertainment for the adventurous lesbian.” The photographic images on the cover and throughout were central to its mandate to deliver sexual content for lesbians. The photography also created the greatest difficulties for the magazine’s circulation at a moment when many feminist leaders decried pornographic photographs and film as a form of violence against women. This exhibition presents original photographs created for On Our Backs during its first decade. Made by staffers and freelancers, professionals and amateurs, members of the magazine’s inner circle and its far-flung readership, they convey the fantasies, imagination, humor, rigor, radicalism, political engagement, and ethos of community-building and inclusion that defined On Our Backs and made it a touchstone in the queer press. Additional photographs and documents elucidate the political and erotic contexts into which the magazine emerged, the women behind it, and their business practices and strategies. All materials are drawn from Cornell Library’s Human Sexuality Collection.

Exhibition curators: Kate Addleman-Frankel, Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography, Johnson Museum of Art, and Brenda Marston, Curator of the Human Sexuality Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Online exhibition coming in March!

ABOUT MAKING GAY HISTORY: A LECTURE BY ERIC MARCUS
March 2, 2022
9:40am-10:55AM, EST

The lecture will be given in the Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies course in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University. Eric will addresses the absence of substantive, in-depth LGBTQ-inclusive American history from the public discourse and the classroom by providing a window into that history through the stories of the people who helped a despised minority take its rightful place in society as full and equal citizens. 
In so doing, we aim to encourage connection, pride, and solidarity within the LGBTQ community and to provide an entry point for both allies and the general public to its largely hidden history.

Eric Marcus is executive director of Making Gay History and founder and host of the Making Gay History podcast. He is the author of a dozen books, including two editions of Making Gay History (the original 1992 edition is entitled Making History), Why Suicide?, and Breaking the Surface, the #1 New York Times bestselling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis. Eric is also the co-producer of Those Who Were There, a podcast drawn from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. And he is the founder and chair of the Stonewall 50 Consortium. Learn more about Eric in this NBC News profile.

CHATS IN THE STACKS: THE QUEERNESS OF HOME WITH STEPHEN VIDER
More information will be forthcoming. 

THREADS: SUSTAINING INDIA'S TEXTILE TRADITION
April 13, 2022 at 4:45pm
Willard Straight Theatre, Central Campus

w/post-screening discussion with Denise Green (Director, Cornell Fashion & Textile Collection) and filmmaker Katherine Sender (Dept of Communication/FGSS)

Directed by Katherine Sender and Shuchi Kothari

Threads: Sustaining India’s Textile Tradition is a documentary film that follows the stories of fashion designers and fabric artisans as they transform traditional textile practices for contemporary fashion markets. After decades of decline in demand for legacy fabrics, these stories demonstrate that committed, collaborative relationships between designers and artisans can innovate traditional practices. We meet Chanderi Master Weaver Bhagwandas who describes how Sanjay Garg (Raw Mango) refined motifs and color in Chanderi weaving. We explore Rahul Mishra’s collaboration with bandhani Master Craftsman Jabbarbhai to innovate tie-dyeing processes in merino wool. We watch Aneeth Arora (Péro) as she works with artisans and craftspeople to modernize traditional silhouettes. And we discover how Rahul and Shikha Mangal (Vrisa) marry handmade with machine-made processes to sustain artisans and appeal to contemporary consumers. The film features interviews with designers in Delhi and Jaipur; hand weavers in Chanderi, 350 miles south of New Delhi; bandhani tie-dyers in Bhuj, in India’s north west; and block printers near Jaipur in Rajasthan. The clothes they produce appeal to an increasingly affluent Indian middle class and global diaspora by using textiles that reference traditional techniques in a contemporary way. Threads argues that sustainability involves more than environmental stewardship and improved economic circumstances for workers: Designers and artisans collaborate in ongoing creative relationships to reinvigorate both traditional textile techniques and the communities who produce them.

In English, Gujarati, Kutchhi, and Hindi.
58 minutes

LIVING QUEER HISTORY: REMEMBRANCE AND BELONGING IN A SOUTHERN CITY, A LECTURE BY SAMANTAH ROSENTHAL
April 21, 2022 at 5:00pm
Goldwin Smith Hall, Kaufman Auditorium (G64)

Queer history is a living practice. Talk to any group of LGBTQ people today, and they will not agree on what story should be told. Many people desire to celebrate the past by erecting plaques and painting rainbow crosswalks, but queer and trans people in the twenty-first century need more than just symbols—they need access to power, justice for marginalized people, spaces of belonging. Approaching the past through a lens of queer and trans survival and world-building transforms history itself into a tool for imagining and realizing a better future.

In her book Living Queer History, Samantha Rosenthal tells the story of an LGBTQ community in Roanoke, Virginia, a small city on the edge of Appalachia. Interweaving historical analysis, theory, and memoir, Rosenthal tells the story of their own journey—coming out and transitioning as a transgender woman—in the midst of working on a community-based history project that documented a multigenerational southern LGBTQ community. Based on over forty interviews with LGBTQ elders, Living Queer History explores how queer people today think about the past and how history lives on in the present.

GRADUATE STUDENT CONVERSATION WITH SAMANTHA ROSENTHAL ABOUT LGBTQ+ PUBLIC HISTORY
April 22, 2022 at 10am
190 Rockefeller Hall

If you’re interested to learn more about Rosenthal’s work, you can access an e-version of their new book through the Cornell library: https://newcatalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/15166925

RSVP to svider@cornell.edu

GAYLE S. RUBIN LECTURE
Associate Professor, Anthropology and Women's Studies 
More information will be forthcoming. 

Gayle Rubin received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1994 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 2003. She is the author of a series of groundbreaking articles on the politics of sex and gender (collected in Deviations, 2012) and an anthropological study of gay leathermen in San Francisco (entitled Valley of the Kings, forthcoming).   Her teaching includes classes on “Sex Panics,” “Sex and the City,” and graduate seminars such as “Sexological Theories: From Krafft-Ebbing to Foucault” and “The Feminist Sex Wars.”

Top