Sexuality Summer School 26 – 30 May 2014: Queer Anatomies
In 2014, under the theme Queer Anatomies, the SSS welcomed Jasbir Puar (Rutgers), Valerie Traub (Michigan), Richard Dyer (Kings) and Mary Bryson (British Columbia), joined by filmmaker Jim Hubbard (director of United in Anger: A History of ACT UP) and performance artists Chase Joynt (Chicago) and Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver (of Split Britches) for a series of lectures, performances and screenings hosted by the University of Manchester, Contact theatre and Cornerhouse cinema with further sponsorship from Stroke Association UK, Manchester Pride and Screen. The student body encompassed literature, sociology, history, nursing, media studies, drama, psychology, critical management studies and gender studies, and students came from 10 different universities in the UK as well as from Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and USA.
One of our central events this year was a performance of Peggy Shaw’s RUFF at Contact, co-sponsored by the Stroke Association’s Science Stroke Art project. This was Peggy’s second visit to Manchester during the Sexuality Summer School, along with her performance partner Lois Weaver. Here, you can see the duo in action in a video created by the Stroke Association that features students and staff from the Sexuality Summer School and helps to show what makes what we do very special:
Below you can see the Public Events from the Sexuality Summer School. If you are interested in finding out more about the Summer School, how it is structured and what it offers to its postgraduate participants, you can download the 2014 schedule and reading list on the right hand side of this page.
Public Events 2014
Monday 26 May – 12-2
A Body with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled
Public lecture with Professor Jasbir Puar (Rutgers)
Venue: Manchester Museum
Monday 26 May – 6-8
United in Anger: A History of ACT UP(2012)
Film Screening followed by Q&A with director Jim Hubbard, Professor Richard Dyer (Kings) and Dr. Monica Pearl(Manchester)
Venue: Cornerhouse. Tickets: http://www.cornerhouse.org/booking-information-prices
Sponsored by Screen.
Tuesday 27 May – 4-6
Anatomy, Cartography, and the Prehistory of Normality
Public lecture with Professor Valerie Traub(University of Michigan and Simon Visiting Professor, Manchester)
Venue: John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, University of Manchester
Sponsored by EAC, University of Manchester and SEXGEN. Followed by wine reception at Contact.
Tuesday 27 May – 7.30-9.30
Green Screening: A Conversational Workshop
Workshop with Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver
Venue: Contact. Tickets: http://contactmcr.com/whats-on/12873-split-britches-ruff/
Wednesday 28 May – 8-10
Split Britches: RUFF
Performance by Peggy Shaw directed by Lois Weaver
Venue: Contact. Tickets: http://contactmcr.com/whats-on/12873-split-britches-ruff/)
Sponsored by Science, Stroke, Art 2014.
Thursday 29 May – 5-7
Biopolitics Under the Skin: Relating Cancer Narratives – An Archive of the ‘Talking Dead’?
Public Lecture by Professor Mary Bryson (University of British Columbia) and Chase Joynt (Chicago)
Venue: John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, University of Manchester
Followed by wine reception at Kro.
The Sexuality Summer School is sponsored this year by the Faculty of Humanities; Cornerhouse; Contact; Manchester Pride; Screen; Science, Stroke, Art 2014; and SEXGEN. For more information about the Sexuality Summer School, including details of previous events, go to sexualitysummerschool.wordpress.com, email us and get on the mailing list at sexualitysummerschool@gmail.com, find Sexuality Summer School on Facebook or tweet us @SSS_Manchester.
Public Lecture Abstracts:
Jasbir Puar
A Body with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled
In this paper I historically situate the most current intersectional flavors of the day, “trans” and “disabled,” through their emergence as the latest newcomers to the intersectional fray. I look at how their parallel yet rarely intersecting epistemological constructs—both come into being, or becoming, in the early 90s in the academy as well as in broader political terms and movements—require exceptionalizing both the trans body and the disabled body in order to convert the debility of a non-normative body into a form of social and cultural capacity, whether located in state recognition, identity politic formations, market economies, the medical industrial complex, or subject positioning. I argue that the potential politics of trans disability are seemingly only perceived in terms of the intersectional “trans-disabled subject” or the “disabled trans subject.” Using assemblage theory to advance the relationships between trans and disability beyond an intersectional rubric of subject identification, I elaborate a politics of conviviality through engagements with the medicalization of the body that might de-exceptionalize the transgressive tendencies of trans and disabled in favor of a shared politics.
Valerie Traub
Anatomy, Cartography, and the Prehistory of Normality
During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European cartographers and anatomists developed novel strategies for representing the diversity of human bodies in their atlases of the world and its inhabitants. Tracking their implicit taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and class, Valerie Traub speculates on the effects of their strategies on the historical emergence of the concept of “the normal.”
Mary Bryson & Chase Joynt
BioPolitics Under the Skin: Embodiment, Choreographies of Cancer Knowledge and Medicine’s Moving Pictures
In this public lecture Dr. Mary K. Bryson from the University of British Columbia explores Nietzche’s claim that ‘knowledge has survival value rather than truth value.’ Dr. Bryson’s talk will situate her Cancer’s Margins (www.lgbtcancer.ca) project and its preliminary findings in an overview of agonistic feminist, postcolonial, and queer biopolitical scholarship concerning anatomy, pathographies, embodiment, chronicity and new analytic modes of technomaterialism that have foregrounded and articulated complex and discontinuous assemblages that twist, warp and reimagine modernity’s bedrock binaries, including ‘alive<>dead’, ‘real <>fiction’, ‘subject<>object’, ‘now<>then’ and so on. This lecture will engage with the opportunity, and perhaps, the obligation, to think critically about the move to delimit historically, and as a gesture to an entirely different futurity, the time when a biopolitics of embodied humanism was organized in a relation of explicit politicization.
Sexuality Summer School 