Videos

Us: Empire and the Threat of Black Femininity with Dr. Amber Musser

Unlike Get Out, whose plot twists provided some of the film’s shock, the trailers for Us foreground the film’s conceit: a family comes home from a day at the beach to find murderous doubles in their home. While the film complicates this reveal, the sense of dread that the film activates—comes not from suspense but from its mobilization of the uncanny. Even before the doppelgangers are introduced, the film—especially upon repeat viewing—percolates with the sense that something is amiss. Bringing the unruly sensations of the uncanny to bear on Jordan Peele’s Us allows us to see how horror makes especially evident the United States as Imperial formation and the numerous ways that Black femininity is presented as threat.

Dr. Amber Jamilla Musser is a professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She writes and researches at the intersections of race, sexuality, and aesthetics. In addition to writing art reviews for The Brooklyn Rail. She has published widely in queer studies, black feminism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024). Her collaborative projects include co-editing Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021) and co-hosting its accompanying podcast Feminist Keywords; special issues of Signs: A Journal of Feminist Theory on “Care and Its Complexities” and ASAP Journal on “Queer Form;” and the series Elements in Feminism and Critical Theory for Cambridge University Press.

Make Me Like It – Episode 3

In Make Me Like It, Dr. Collins explores diaspora food cultures beyond sentimentally and nostalgia, by taking an irreverent look at what happens when we actually dislike some of the food we grew up with. This week, Dr. Collins tries Rock Cakes, can she make herself like it?

Make Me Like It: Corned Beef

This week on Make Me Like It, Dr. Corrine Collins revisits the Corned Beef from her childhood. In Make Me Like It, Dr. Collins explores diaspora food cultures beyond sentimentally and nostalgia, by taking an irreverent look at what happens when we actually dislike some of the food we grew up with.

Make Me Like It : Queen of Puddings

Join Dr. Corrine Collins as she explores diaspora food cultures beyond sentimentally and nostalgia, by taking an irreverent look at what happens when we actually dislike some of the food we grew up with. In this episode, Dr. Collins looks at Queen of Puddings.

Anxious Masculinities: Lesbian Film and Lesbian Film Studies in 2024

Dr. Bradbury-Rance presents a public talk that probes the ways in which masculinity has shaped the terms of contemporary “lesbian” film and film studies. While mainstream film since the turn of the century has intensified its pursuit of femininity as the visible symbol of lesbian progress, gender nonconformity continues to function as a marker of inevitability and intrigue, contestation and disavowal. The reading and misreading of gendered codes of butch and trans masculinity has become a particularly fraught site of anxious correction. Situated against personal and intellectual trajectories of watching and writing about film, this talk explores masculinity through a double bind that underpins the seemingly endless anxieties over lesbian representability.

Dr. Clara Bradbury-Rance is a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, published by Edinburgh University Press and translated into Spanish by Osífragos (both 2019). Clara has published in the journals Camera Obscura, French Screen Studies, Feminist Media Studies, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, Feminist Pedagogy, Feminist Theory, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and Film Quarterly. She regularly writes film reviews for Sight and Sound magazine.

Celebrating Postmilennial Pop

Since 2013, The Postmillennial Pop series at NYU Press has served as an incubator for transdisciplinary scholarship that reimagines research on popular and public culture in the age of transnationalism, convergence, and globalization. Join presentations and a brief conversation between the series’ seven authors and editors: Ramzi Fawaz (University of Wisconsin), Liz Przybylski (UC Riverside), Taylor Black (Duke University), Bo Ruberg (UC Irvine), Iván A. Ramos (Brown University), Jennifer Stoever, (SUNY Binghamton), and Aaron Trammell (UC Irvine).

“Critical Conversations: On Cults” A Conversation between Guinevere Turner and Poulomi Saha

Critical Conversations: On Cults is a conversation between Dr. Poulomi Saha, an Associate Professor of English and co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, and Guinevere Turner, a writer, director and actor who has first hand experience of growing up in Cults. They have an encompassing conversation about our fascination with cults, the dynamics of cults from the inside, and the presence of cults  that permeate today.

“Nobody Owns the Park” A Conversation with Greta La Fleur & Sarah Kessler

“Nobody Owns the Park” is a conversation between Greta La Fleur – the Consortium’s Fall 2023 scholar in residence, and Sarah Kessler, an Assistant Professor of English. Dr. La Fleur is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Their work has focused on early North American literary and cultural studies, the history of science, the history of race, and the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer & trans studies. Their first book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, explores how eighteenth-century race sciences contributed to emerging sciences of sex in the colonial Atlantic World.

Dr. La Fleur is currently working on two projects. The first is a scholarly monograph tentatively entitled How Sex Became Good: The Feminist Movements and Facial Politics that Made Modern Sexuality tracks how cultural and legal responses to the problem of sexual violence shaped the politicization of sexuality in the modern world. The second is a co-authored book of essays on birding, authored by anthropologist Cal Brink.

Transforming Misogynoir: A Conversation with Professor Moya Bailey & A.E. Stevenson

“Transforming Misogynoir” was a pubic talk between Moya Bailey, Associate Professor of Communication at Northwestern and USC Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture and the Department of Gender & Sexuality Spring Public-Scholar-in-Residence, and A.E. Stevenson, Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Professor Bailey is the founder of the Digital Apothecary and co-founder of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective. Her work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice, and she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Board President of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based movement media organization that supports an ever-growing network of activists and organizers. She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021).

A Conversation with Karina Longworth

Consortium director Karen Tongson’s conversation with Karina Longworth, a writer, film historian and podcaster, who is also the creator, producer and host of You Must Remember This, a podcast on the secret and forgotten history of 20th Century Hollywood. Longworth is the author of four books, most recently Seduction: Sex, Lies and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood (Custom House, 2018).The two spoke about transposing archival and cultural studies research into audio series for general audiences, while exploring the links between archival labor, gender, and the different genres and formats through which research finds its expression. Sponsored by USC’s Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Public Culture with the Levan Institute for the Humanities.