07 Mar Critical Sexualities Graduate Student Symposia
Wednesday, March 7 / 4:00-8:00 PM
Wednesday, March 14 / 4:00-8:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
The goal of this symposium is to create a wider venue for discussion about sexuality research. Organized by the New Sexualities Research Focus Group, these symposia highlight the work of graduate students in Dr. Mireille Miller-Young’s “Global Sex Work and Economies of Desire” seminar. Drawing from critical sexualities studies frameworks, UCSB graduate students will present their work on issues as diverse as sex work, sexual technologies, sex panics, and sexual performance. Collectively, these papers examine the most cutting contemporary issues around gender and sexuality and, by offering new theoretical frameworks, serve as critical disruptions to established ways of knowing. Following each meeting of this two part symposia we will feature the work a keynote speaker whose work demonstrates exciting new approaches in the field of Critical Sexualities.
Symposia Schedules
Wednesday, March 7
4:00-5:15 PM Panel 1
5:30-6:45 PM Panel 2
7:00-8:00 PM Keynote
Keynote: “Flying Under the Radar: Transgender Politics and Surveillance at the Airport”
Toby Beauchamp, UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Communication, UC San Diego
His talk looks closely at the images and rhetoric circulating about the installation of new X ray scanners in U.S. airports, which enable security personnel to see beneath travelers’ clothing. Transgender advocacy organizations have argued that scans of transgender bodies may be read as threateningly ambiguous, and may incorrectly target them as terrorist suspects. Positioning questions of surveillance as central to transgender politics, this talk contends that attention to gender-nonconformity offers a productive reading of the airport scene that turns scrutiny away from individually troubling bodies and onto the fractured practices and assumptions of the state itself.
Wednesday, March 14
4:00-5:15 PM Panel 1
5:30-6:45 PM Panel 2
7:00-8:00 PM Keynote
Keynote: “Latchkey Aesthetics and New Sound Karaoke”
Karen Tongson, Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California, and the author of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press, 2011). Tongson is also the series editor for Postmillennial Pop (NYU Press), and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Popular Music Studies.
Unsupervised, left alone and either fearful or bored, America’s suburban spawn have been called latchkey kids since at least World War II (when the label was purportedly invented to describe kids transiently orphaned by work as well as war). In this talk, Tongson will elaborate upon how “latchkey aesthetics” repurposes found pop cultural materials (often from the 1970s-1990s). In performance pieces that feature the latchkey look, popular materials become easily accessible and “re-heatable” through postmillennial digital technologies—a practice that befits individual performers and small collaborations operating on shoestring budgets, and limited schedules for making art (not unlike the absent parents who helped cultivate the aesthetic to begin with).
Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Hull Chair in Feminist Studies, and the Departments of Asian American Studies, Film and Media Studies, English, and Feminist Studies.