Fall 2024
Anjali Arondekar, Abundance: Sexuality’s History
Darshana Mini, Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India
Ivan Ramos with Hentyle Yapp, Unbelonging: Inauthentic Sounds in Mexican and Latinx Aesthetics
Fall 2023
micha cárdenas: “Trans Imaginaries”
Join artist, scholar, activist, and USC alumna micha cardenas as she launches her debut novel, Atoms Never Touch. Exploring time travel, cybernetics, and neurobiology through vectors of queer desire, revolution, and radical imaginaries, Atoms Never Touch taps into the power of speculative fiction to move us toward alternative futures. cardenas will deliver a reading from her novel, followed by a conversation with Tara McPherson. Together they will reflect on cardenas’ novel as well as on her polymathic praxis, a career that sees her moving fluidly between academic, artistic, and activist realms. Before the reading, cárdenas will conduct a practice-based performance workshop.
Spring 2023
Beans Velocci, “Impossible to Distinguish”: A Trans History of Zoology, Race, and Sexual Dimorphism
Emily Owens, “How She Begot the Violence”: Making Violence Ordinary in the Antebellum Atlantic
Ren-yo Hwang, Trans of Color Entrapments & Carceral Coalitions
Fall 2022
The Politics of Hormones
A symposium investigating narratives about the role of hormones in the embodiment of vertical logics of race, sex, gender, & sexuality.
Spring 2022
Melanie Yazzie, What Does Justice Look Like? Connecting Abolition to Indigenous Feminisms
María del Rosario Acosta López, Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson,
Work-in-Progress workshop: engaging the writing of Sylvia Wynter, philosopher of the Americas, on aesthetics
Bedour Alagraa, Shanté Paradigm Smalls, Kwame Edwin Otu, K’eguro Macharia, Carole Boyce Davies, Alissa Trotz
Thinking with Andaiye’s The Point is to Change the World: Feminism as Praxis
Fall 2021
Book Talk Series
stef shuster, Uncertain Expertise in Trans Medicine
Jillian Hernandez, Liberatory Adornment: Autonomy and Erotics in Black and Latina Self-Fashioning
Durba Mitra, Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Theory
Sasha Geffen, Radiant defections: Queer expressions and gendered deviations in vocal technology
