Robyn Wiegman, Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University, is confirmed as a keynote for the Sexuality Summer School 2013. Robyn will be speaking to the theme of this year’s summer school in her lecture: ‘Wishful Thinking’. Robyn will also hold a workshop with summer school students based on her latest book Object Lessons. Published in 2012 by Duke University Press, Object Lessons offers the ‘first sustained inquiry into the political desire that galvanizes identity fields.’ Wiegman’s analysis of Queer Studies in Object Lessons demonstrates how the commitment to antinormativity normalizes the field. Wiegman’s recent work on queer theory also includes “Eve’s Triangles: Queer Studies Beside Itself”, in Reading Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: Gender, Sexuality, Embodiment, edited by Michael O’Rourke (2012) and “When the Lesbian Postmodern Meets the Lesbian Premodern”, in The Lesbian Premodern, edited by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer, and Diane Watt (2011). She is also widely known for her studied reflections on academic feminism.
Joining Robyn as a keynote for the Sexuality Summer School 2013, Lois Weaver, Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice at Queen Mary, will reprise her performance lecture ‘What Tammy Found Out, a Front Line Report from the Back Porch, the Schoolyard and the Dinner Table’. Tammy WhyNot is a performance persona who claims to be a trailer park survivor who gave up a career in country music to become a lesbian performance artist and a university researcher. Tammy is dedicated to the facilitation of public engagement in social and economic justice and experimental forms of democracy. She applies her considerable courage and uncomplicated curiosity to her research project, What Tammy Needs to Know …about education and class; high art and popular culture; performance and human rights; feminism and femininity; and sex and aging. What Tammy Found Out is a performance lecture that will present findings from 62 years of research.
Robyn Wiegman is Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University, and former director of Women’s Studies at both Duke and UC-Irvine. Her latest book, Object Lessons (2012), explores the political desire that organizes identity knowledge domains. She has also published American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995), and a series of edited collections, including The Futures of American Studies (2002), and Women’s Studies on Its Own (2002). She is currently working on two projects: Without Guarantee: Feminism’s Academic Itineraries, and Arguments Worth Having: Race, Theory, Culture.
Lois Weaver is Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice, Department of Drama, Queen Mary, University of London and an independent performance artist and activist. She was co founder of WOW Theatre in New York and has been a collaborator with the Split Britches Company since 1980. She was Director of PSi12: Performing Rights, an international conference and festival on performance and human rights in 2006 and is currently Artistic Director for Air Project, an initiative that nurtures and sustains Live Art practitioners in the UK. Her practice based research uses performance to initiate conversations on human rights in women’s prisons with the project Staging Human Rights; technology design with Democratising Technology; and the role of democracy in public engagement with The Long Table. Tammy WhyNot has accompanied Lois since 1978 as her alter-ego, performance partner and research associate.
Sexuality Summer School 