LA Queer Studies Conference

Conference Program

This year's LA Queer Studies Conference is the successor to the QGrad conferences held annually at UCLA beginning in 1999. Although we no longer limit the conference to graduate students, we always encourage substantial graduate student participation, since one of the goals of the current format is to foster the exchange of ideas between graduate student and faculty scholars.

Organized by the UCLA Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies and supported the David Bohnett Foundation, the Gill Foundation, and the UCLA Division of Humanities, Graduate Division, Center for the Study of Women, Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, and the departments of Anthropolopgy, Art History, Asian American Studies, Comparative Literature, English, Film, TV, and Digital Media, French and Francophone Studies, Germanic Languages, Musicology, Sociology, and Women's Studies.

The Art of Melancholy
A selection of films by Leslie Thornton

Download flyer

Leslie Thornton

Leslie Thornton works at the forefront of media aesthetics in cinema, video and digital media. In pieces such as Adynata (1983), Peggy and Fred in Hell (1985-) and Jennifer Where Are You (1981), she explores trauma, language and the unspeakable, and sexual and other differences, frequently foregrounding the aural component of her films. Thornton has also done sustained work on Isabelle Eberhardt in The Great Invisible (1997, 1998, 2002).  For this presentation, she will discuss the quality of melancholy in her work, thinking about how the medical and social world have co-opted this delicate state of mind into the realm of Depression, which it's really not.

Co-sponsored by Cinema and Media Studies

A Conference and Reception in Honor of

Karen Brodkin
Professor, Anthropology, UCLA

Karen Brodkin is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. She is the author of several books, among them Sisters And Wives: The Past And Future Of Sexual Equality (Westport, 1979), Caring By The Hour: Women, Work And Organizing At Duke Medical Center (University of Illinois, 1988), How Jews Became White Folks And What That Says About Race In America (Rutgers, 1998), and Making Democracy Matter: Identity and Activism in Los Angeles (Rutgers, 2007). More generally, her research interests include social movements, gender, work and kinship, political economy, theory, migration, race and contemporary North American cultures.

Organized by the Department of Anthropology

FACULTY CURATOR SERIES

Prognosis Time
Pathologies of Terror

Jasbir Puar
Associate Professor,
Women's & Gender Studies, Rutgers University
website

Jasbir Puar is a core faculty member in the department of Women's & Gender Studies, and a graduate faculty member in the department of Geography at Rutgers.

Professor Puar's research interests include gender, sexuality, globalization; postcolonial and diaspora studies; queer theory; South Asian cultural studies; and tourism studies.

Professor Puar is currently working on a book manuscript on queer biopolitics, race and sexuality, and discourses of counter/terrorism.

State of the Union
Marriage in the Shadow of Electoral Politics

Download program

Marriage politics animate some of the most heated political controversies of our time, including debates surrounding same-sex marriage, political sex scandals, immigration policy reform, the prohibition of polygamy, and welfare policy.

UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women will host a conference titled “State of the Union: Marriage in the Shadow of Electoral Politics” to engage these issues in relation to the historic 2008 election.  The conference will highlight neglected connections to the historical regulation of sex, sexuality, and intimacy in the United States, offering fresh and provocative perspectives.

Co-sponsored by Department of Anthropology, Department of Political Science, Department of Sociology, Department of Women’s Studies, Williams Institute, and UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families

Ellen Bravo is a long-time activist for working women. She began working for 9to5, National Association of Working Women in 1982, when she helped found the Milwaukee chapter and served until 2004 as its national director. She has also served on several state and federal commissions, including the bi-partisan Commission on Leave appointed by Congress to study the impact of the Family and Medical Leave Act. She co-chaired the Economic Sufficiency Task Force of the Wisconsin Women = Prosperity project led by Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton and serves as treasurer for the campaign of Congresswoman Gwendolynne Moore. Professor Bravo currently teaches in the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Taking on the Big Boys: Or Why Feminism Is Good for Families, Business, and the Nation (CUNY, 2007), The Job/Family Challenge: A 9to5 Guide (Wiley, 1995), and the co-author (with Ellen Cassedy) of The 9to5 Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment (9to5, 1999 ).

Part of the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment's Annual Colloqium Series

Ladyboys and Good Sons Contemporary Mediums and Gender Identity in Northern Thai Trance Dance

Lanna (Northern Thai) culture is largely Animist in origin. Belief systems and rituals that go back many centuries and refer to humans’ relationship with and dependence on spirits of the dead are found in various forms throughout the region. Chief among these is the Chiang Mai region, including the cities and surrounding areas of Chiang Mai, Lamphun, and Lampang. Each year in the late Spring and early Summer months leading up to the Buddhist Lent, dozens of trance dance ceremonies take place that pay homage to royal, working class, and hero spirits within family, clan, and social lineages.

Like the majority of Thai culture, Lanna mediumship was traditionally a matriarchal practice, dominated by familial and clan females. However, with social strictures loosening in the middle to late 20th-century Thailand, fewer females have chosen to fulfill their traditional roles or, consequently, become mediums as well, opting instead for more modern vocational roles. Additionally, homosexuality, especially among men, has become generally accepted in mainstream Thai society, opening up their involvement in mediumship. Krathoey, or "ladyboys" as they are generally referred to in English, are gay males of all ages who typically engage in cross-dressing and transvestism.

The Lanna medium population that participates in annual trance dance ceremonies now contains a high percentage of elderly females and young males, the latter of which are primarily gay. While being gay is never a simple and easy social issue, despite greater social acceptance, mediums also have a tenuous relationship within their roles with the mainstream Thai population, many of whom consider mediumship as at best, mysterious and odd, and at worst, a deviant and false religion. Being a male and/or gay medium thus represents a nexus of competing social tensions that are simultaneously resolving themselves via the very nature of their masculine and feminine status.

This paper and audio-visual presentation begins an examination of this nexus and many of the socio-cultural-historical factors that contribute to it through the social-interactive lens of Lanna trance dance rituals, which are generally loud, day-long spectacles that take place in homes and small gathering areas. The presentation content is largely based on fieldwork and interviews conducted by the author in Summer 2008 in Northern Thailand.

Michael Sakamoto is currently an MFA student in dance/choreography in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures.  He has been performing worldwide since 1992, and has lectured or done guest performances at the California Institute of the Arts, Chiang Mai University (Thailand),  the Los Angeles City Cultural Affairs Department, Arizona State University, UC Irvine, and UC Riverside, among others.

Organized by UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures

FACULTY CURATOR SERIES

The Queer Space of China

David Eng
Professor, English,
University of Pennsylvania
website

This presentation explores the emergence of gay and lesbian identity in contemporary China in relation to liberal distinctions between public space and private desires.  Following anthropologist Lisa Rofel's recent scholarship on expressive desire, I investigate the ways in which Chinese gays and lesbians are positioned as individuals who are uniquely capable of embracing their private desires and thus are at the vanguard of a new modernity in China. 

David L. Eng is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also a core faculty in the Program in Asian American Studies. He is the author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke UP, forthcoming) and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke UP). He is co-editor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of Mourning (U of California P), with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Temple UP), and with Judith Halberstam and Jose Muñoz of a special issue of the journal Social Text, "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?".

Mad for Foucault
Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory

Lynne Huffer
Professor & Chair,
Women's Studies
Emory University
website

Lynne Huffer is Professor and Chair of Women's Studies at Emory University. She received her Ph.D. in French literature from the University of Michigan in 1989, and taught at Yale University and Rice University before coming to Emory in 2005. Her fields of study include feminist theory; queer theory; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender studies; modern French and francophone literature; literary theory; and ethics.

She is the author of Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia and the Question of Difference (Stanford UP, 1998), Another Colette: The Question of Gendered Writing (University of Michigan Press, 1992), and numerous articles on feminist theory, queer theory, and French literature. She is also the editor of a special issue of Yale French Studies: Another Look, Another Woman: Retranslations of French Feminisms (1995). Her current book project explores the problem of ethics in feminist and queer theories, with a particular focus on the work of Michel Foucault.

Co-sponsored by the Department of French & Francophone Studies

Actions of Transfer
Women's Performance in the Americas

Conference Information and Program

This four-day event, co-sponsored by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, will include performances and invited speakers along with round table discussions and workshops. It brings together women performers/activists from throughout the Americas and scholars who think about performance as a mode of embodied transmission and social intervention. The event will explore issues of indigeneity, gender and sexuality, transnational/global encounters, labor, domestic violence and access to material resources. Actions of Transfer is being held as a sister event with the inauguration of Centro Hemisférico/FOMMA, a joint research/cultural center and performance space in Chiapas, Mexico, which will take place in San Cristóbal de las Casas on August 28-29, 2008.

Hosted by the Center for Performance Studies.

FACULTY CURATOR SERIES

Oedipus Raced, or the Child Queered by Color
‘Gay’ Child and ‘Black’ Child in Liberal Race Films

Kathryn Stockton
Professor, English,
University of Utah
website

Drawn from her forthcoming book, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, this talk theorizes how the category of the child is queer, in broad and narrow senses, both racially and sexually, even up through the 1990s. Specifically, the lecture offers a crossing: the point at which the ghostliness of the “gay” child lends certain meanings to the child queered by color (who, in some cases, might also be gay). Two important films on American race, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967) and Six Degrees of Separation (1993), show how race relations are haunted by the issues—really, the specters—of “gay” children, spawning new slants on psychoanalysis, architectural theory, so-called liberal parenting, and concepts of childhood.

Kathryn Bond Stockton is Professor of English and Director of Gender Studies at the University of Utah. Her most recent book, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” was a national finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and last year she received the Crompton-Noll Prize, awarded by the Modern Language Association, for the best essay in gay and lesbian studies. She has also authored God between Their Lips: Desire between Women in Irigaray, Bronte, and Eliot (Stanford University Press), and her new book on the queer child is forthcoming from Duke University Press, Series Q.

Meet the Authors

ANNUAL ROE V. WADE LECTURE

Ties that Double-Bind Us: Feminism and the Fertility Industry

Amy Agigian
Associate Professor, Sociology, Suffolk University
website

Feminists face a series of double-binds in our efforts to apprehend and intervene in the ever-expanding fertility industry. Lesbians and women of color face particular challenges. This talk maps some of these double binds and explores the potential of a human rights framework to lead us toward reproductive justice.  

Amy Agigian, Ph.D., is founder and director of the Center for Women's Health and Human Rights at Suffolk University in Boston, where she is Associate Professor of Sociology. She also directs the new Master of Arts in Women's Health program, the first graduate program in the country to focus on women's health from a multi-disciplinary, non-clinical, social-science perspective. Trained in medical sociology and the sociology of women, gender, and sexuality, she received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1998. She is a long-time feminist activist and the mother of a young son. Her book Baby Steps: How Lesbian Alternative Insemination is Changing the World (Wesleyan University Press) came out in paperback in 2005.

Thinking Gender 2009
19th Annual Graduate Student Research Conference

Thinking Gender is a public conference highlighting graduate student research on women, sexuality and gender across all disciplines and historical periods.

We invite submissions for individual papers or preconstituted panels.  We especially welcome feminist research on women of color, the premodern, queerness, and the sciences.

Emerging Epistemologies Workshop

Cathy J. Cohen
Professor, Political Science, University of Chicago
website

Cathy J. Cohen, is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Cohen is the author of the book The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago, 1999) and the co-editor with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU, 1997). Her work has been published in numerous journals and edited volumes including the American Political Science Review, GLQ, NOMOS, and Social Text. Cohen is also editor with Frederick Harris of a new book series from Oxford Press entitled "Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities." Her general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.

SENIOR FACULTY FEMINIST SEMINAR SERIES

Emily Abel is a Professor of Health Services and Women's Studies at UCLA. She teaches courses in aging, the history of public health, and women and health care. Professor Abel received her B. A. from Swarthmore College, her M.A. in history from Columbia University, her Ph.D. in history from the University of London, and her M.P.H. from the UCLA School of Public Health. Her most recent book is Who Cares for the Elderly? Public Policy and the Experiences of Adult Daughters (Temple, 1991). She is currently writing a history of women's care for the sick and disabled family members in the United States from 1850-1940.

Saskia Subramanian, PhD, is a Sociologist at the UCLA Center for Culture and Health (Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences) and a faculty affiliate in the UCLA Women's Studies Program. She completed her A.B. and M.A. in Sociology at Bryn Mawr College and received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Most recently, she has been funded by the Susan G. Komen Foundation as Principal Investigator on two grants in which she has conducted qualitative research on breast cancer survivors with post-treatment symptoms. She has recently teamed with the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine to investigate the efficacy of complimentary and alternative approaches to these conditions.

A CMRS Ahmanson Conference

Medieval Sexuality 2009

View program

Considering that the history of sexuality as a more or less coherent intellectual project is only a few decades old, what we have learned about medieval sexuality so far is remarkable.  Precisely because the investigations have only just begun, however, whole areas have yet to be explored.  To further this exploration, this conference will bring together scholars from various disciplines and nationalities to take stock of what is being done now and to investigate new areas in the history of medieval sexuality.  Attention will be focused on two primary issues: First—What is this thing we call “medieval sexuality”?  Does it have any medieval coherence, or, despite what scholars claim to have learned from Foucault, is it just modern sexuality in medieval drag?  Second—What can be learned by studying points of exchange, the movement of sexual knowledges or representations across various boundaries?  How does sexuality figure in the relationship of medieval text and image?  What are the tensions and exchanges between sacred and secular sexualities? And how has the 19th-century science of sexuality defined our ways of understanding medieval sexuality?

This conference, organized by Professors Zrinka Stahuljak (French & Francophone Studies, UCLA) and James Schultz (Germanic Languages, UCLA) is supported by a grant from the Ahmanson Foundation, with additional funding from the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS), the UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research, the Humanities Division of the UCLA College of Letters and Science, the Center for the Study of Women, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Studies Program, and the Departments of Comparative Literature, English, French & Francophone Studies, Germanic Languages, and History

Miriam Silverberg Memorial

Please join us for a memorial celebration of the life of Miriam Silverberg, scholar, colleague, and friend.

This event will honor Miriam's life and accomplishments.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History and Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies

Celebrate the start of a new academic year!

Refreshments provided.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Women's Studies