Relocations 15th Anniversary – Talk and Reception
Join us for a book talk conversation about Karen Tongson’s landmark study, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, and how “lesser Los Angeles” and its queer scenes have transformed in the years since the book’s publication. The talk is followed by a reception in the garden next door at 909 W. Adams Blvd . More details coming soon. Hope to see you there!
Past Events:
Come join us for our Spring 2026 Reception, a garden party with taquero service and aguas frescas.
Wind is Our Teacher: Sea Grape Consciousness at the Edge of the World
Join us in welcoming our 2026 Public Scholar in Residence,
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in her Barbra Streisand Lecute: Wind is Our Teacher: Sea Grape Consciousness at the Edge of the World in Doheny Memorial Library (DML) 240. A reception will follow on the Pardee Lawn as an end-of-year celebration for the Consortium, the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies, our graduating seniors, and our guests from the Mellon Intersectional Studies Collectives across the U.S.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. She is/they are the author of several books, most recently Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde and the award-winning Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. She is/they are the co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Trust, an intergenerational experiential living library of Black LBGTQ brilliance.
Intergenerational Dialogues: “Showing Our Work”
International scholars, Sam Stiegler (University of Melbourne) and LJ Slovin (University of Victoria), co-authors of Embracing Queer and Trans Frameworks in Qualitative Educational Research: Showing Our Work (Routledge) will be in conversation with Kelso Becktol and Max Lubbers, Ph.D. graduate students who work in trans and queer studies in USC’s Department of American Studies and Ethnicity.
Come join a conversation on queer and trans education and research!
The Power of Black Popular Culture: A Conversation with Aloe Blacc
Join the USC Dornsife Black Studies Center for an engaging conversation exploring the global influence of Black popular culture.
Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter, and USC alumnus Aloe Blacc will be in conversation with Oneka LaBennett, Director of the Black Studies Center and Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Edwin Hill, Associate Professor of French & Italian and American Studies & Ethnicity at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Together, they will explore how Black culture shapes global popular culture by examining influences across music, media, language, art, scholarship, and social movements around the world. The conversation will highlight the creative, intellectual, and cultural forces that continue to shape contemporary culture and public discourse.
This event is free for USC students, alumni, and community members; space is limited, and an advanced RSVP is required. Email Neud’s Saint-Cyr at saintcyr@usc.edu with questions.
Book Chat: Mariam Rahmani on “Liquid”
Join us Novelist and translator, Mariam Rahmani discusses her debut novel, Liquid: A Love Story:
“The Marriage Plot meets The Idiot in this brilliant debut, which tells the story of a young Muslim scholar stuck in the mire of adjunct professorship in Los Angeles who decides to give up her career in academia and marry rich, committing herself to 100 dates in the course of a single summer.”
Rahmani holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University.
Intergenerational Dialogues: Dissatisfaction
Join us for the inaugural event in a new USC Consortium series of intergenerational conversations between authors and USC graduate students with shared areas of expertise.
Our first event on Monday, March 9 at 3:30pm (DML 121), features Joshua Gavier Guzmán (Associate Professor of Gender Studies, UCLA). Guzmán is the author of Dissatisfactions: Queer Chicano Style Politics (NYU Press, 2024), and editor-in-chief of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. He will be in conversation with Ethan Trejo, a Ph.D. candidate in English at USC whose dissertation examines the political dimensions of Latinx drag aesthetics and performances. Both specialize in queer, Latinx studies, specifically queer of color critique and performance studies.
Black Technoscience Symposium
This afternoon-long symposium brings together scholars to discuss how visual cultures of blackness constitute and are mediated by science, social science, and technology. Rather than read aesthetics as a reprieve from technoscience, we ask how these various domains enmesh at the site of Black flesh. The invited speakers reckon with how the aesthetic arrangement of Blackened corporeality across these domains has long been and remains a critical apparatus to cohere broader definitions of heaven/hell, nature/culture, hero/criminal, human/machine, and life/death.
Egendering Blackness
In this incisive new book, Patrice D. Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. Douglass contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence that privilege its occurrences as a question of ethics, sexual agency, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re)produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to be human.
Patrice D. Douglass is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. Her current book project, Race and Abortion Ethics: Antiblackness and the Opacity of Liberty, interrogates the (im)permissibility of abortion in US law and politics. Her research on Blackness, gender, afro-pessimism, reproductive justice, and Black philosophies appear in or forthcoming from Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies of Media and Culture, Political Theology, Journal of Legal Anthropology, Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, Souls, Journal of Visual Culture, Theory and Event, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture (ZAA), and The Black Scholar. She holds a PhD and MA in Culture and Theory from the University of California, Irvine, a MA in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Riverside, and a BA in Feminist Studies and Legal Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
This event is hosted by USC’s Center for Feminist Research, the Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture, and Black Visual Cultures Collective (BVCC), which is co-founded by Naima Adams (American Studies), Corrine Collins (English), and Mlondolozi Zondi (Comparative Literature).
Citizen Journalism in Los Angeles
Join us for a discussion on citizen journalism featuring Javier Cabral, the editor in chief of L.A. TACO! Javier will be joined by Karen Tongson to explore the role of citizen reporting, which is taught in Javier’s class at Annenberg and practiced at L.A. TACO. They will also discuss moving between food and culture coverage and political reporting, and ways those topics overlap.
The Night Shift
An evening of lightning talks, film screenings, and performances exploring the entanglements of queer desire, erotic labor, and radical care. Assembling artists, scholars, and organizers who work at the intersections of performance, visual culture, gender, sexuality, race, and labor, this event reimagines what it means to think, feel, and create together after dark. Our evening will include a mixture of presentations and performances that explore kink (bondage, shibari), sex work, labor, disability advocacy, sensuality, and cruising.
Podcasts and Audio Storytelling
Join USC alum Paola Mardo, from Proximity Media and Long Distance Radio, for a workshop and conversation with Consortium director Karen Tongson. They will explore the elements of good audio storytelling, provide an inside’s takes on the podcast industry, and discuss entry points for scholars and students interested in podcasting.
Join Elaine Hsieh Chou in conversation with Dr. Dorinne Kondo, celebrating her recently published short story collection Where Are You Really From (Penguin Random House, 2025).
Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American author and screenwriter from California. Her debut novel Disorientation (Penguin Press / Picador) was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book, NYPL Young Lions Finalist and Thurber Prize for American Humor Finalist. The novel was optioned by AppleTV+ with Elaine set to adapt.
RESCHEDULED to April 1st: Tarot for the Apocalypse: Collective Care in Times of Unwellness (i.e. All the Fucking Time)
What do we need in times of unwellness? What kinds of care can we imagine and build for ourselves if we engage our unwellness in new ways? Facilitated by Dr. Mimi Khúc, this interactive workshop will use the Asian American Tarot to explore mental health and the social, cultural, and structural forces that shape it, engaging critical arts approaches that provide new vocabularies for both what hurts and how we might care for what hurts, together.
RESCHEDULED to March 31st: Touring the Abyss with dear elia: Unwellness and Care in the University
Join Dr. Mimi Khúc as she shares her work on unwellness and the university from her new book, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss. Applying her framework of a “pedagogy of unwellness,” Dr. Khúc explores the contours of student and faculty unwellness and locates it within the racialized ableism of meritocracy that undergirds university life (and beyond).
Queering Science Communication with Dr. Alice Motion
To thrive as students, researchers and STEMM professionals, the LGBTQIA+ community needs greater representation in science and more inclusive environments in which to work. Similarly, efforts to communicate science need to be more representative and inclusive of queer people and embrace opportunities to challenge traditional formats for sharing science.
Live From The Lab: Sharing Science Through Music and Sound with Dr. Alice Motion
Sound and music are powerful forces for human connection, emotional exploration, communication and artistic expression. Over the past five years, our interdisciplinary team has investigated some of the ways in which sound and music can be used in public contexts to build connection with, and understanding of, science.