WGSS Spring 2015 Colloquium | April 13, 2015

Event time: 
Monday, April 13, 2015 - 5:30pm
Location: 
WLH Rm 309 See map
Event description: 

The Industry of Change: Skin Technologies & Melanin-Based Transformation in the Wake of Black Power

With the rise of Black Power, blackness i.e. dark pigmented skin, became beautiful and iconic. Entrepreneurship, “passing” experiments, and Michael Jackson exemplified this emergent epidermal spirit, one mediated by medical and melanin-based sciences. These cases of aesthetic alteration posit alternate outcomes for enacting human difference, offering toolkits for “trans-color” futures.

Cecilia Cardenas-Navia  

Universalism and the Difference it Makes:
Le Corbusier’s Modulor and Latifa Echakhch’s Movement and Complication

In her 2009 installation, Moroccan-French Latifa Echakhch renders Le Corbusier’s antrhopometric scale within the gallery space, revising and undercutting the Modulor’s claims to a functional universal ideal. Deploying modernism’s stripped vocabulary, Echkahch exposes the wasy that Le Corbusier’s Modulor restricts bodies that do not match its “ideal type.”

Claire Schwartz African American Studies
Hours of operation: 

5:30-7 pm