WGSS Speaker Series 2019/20

WGSS Speaker Series 2019/20

Transnationalizing Queer Studies
WGSS Lecture Series, 2019/20
Sponsored by: WGSS; The Edward J. & Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; LGBTS

The WGSS lecture series for 2019/20 asks: What is at stake when we seek to transnationalize queer studies, a field with a strong US/Western European genealogy that has by now traveled far and wide? Bringing together interdisciplinary scholars who focus on a variety of regions (China, India, Brazil, Israel/Palestine), this lecture series will help chart exciting and promising new approaches to queer that decenter the US, yet do not simply replace it with other locations. Instead, this body of work problematizes center/periphery models that often rest on the universal/particular binary. Moving also beyond the binaries of traditional/modern, East/West, authentic/colonized, a transnational approach to queer studies demands that we shift our attention from questions of whether queer is “authentic” and therefore applicable to the “non-West” to analyzing the conditions of possibility for queer to have imagined itself as “indigenous” to US/Europe.

September 26th, 4:00pm 
Durba Mitra, Harvard University

February 13th, 4:00pm
Greg Mitchell, Princeton University 

February 27th, 4:00pm
Gil Hochberg, Columbia University

March 26th, 4:00pm
Rachel Lee, UCLA

April 9th, 4:00pm
Petrus Liu, Boston University

All events will be held in WLH Room 309.

Sponsored by: The Edward J. & Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; LGBTS; WGSS