New Gender/Queer Archives

Pracownia Gender/Sexuality (American Studies Center – OSA UW) orazQueer UW ma przyjemność zaprosić na konferencję New Gender/Queer Archives, organizowaną w dniach 7-8 grudnia 2017 na Uniwersytecie Warszawskim.

Wykład otwierający konferencję pt. „Trans* – A Hidden Archive” wygłosi profesor Jack Halberstam.

Wstęp wolny.
Osoby zainteresowane udziałem w konferencji 8 grudnia prosimy o informację na adres pracownia.gender@gmail.com
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The workshop New Gender/Queer Archives focuses on previously unexplored archives read from gender and queer theory perspectives. The archives are perceived here traditionally as physical repositories of (discursive) matter, but also, more broadly, as disciplined conglomerates of texts – “a spatial and temporal rhetorical embodiment, crucible of cultural debate” (Morris). A new gender/queer archive may both point toward the archives in the making and existing archives that are now read queerly or, alternatively, to specifically feminist and/or LGBTQ archives that are explored and problematized from a new angle. What these readings have in common is questioning institutional normativities that shape sexual subjects. At stake is not only intellectual quest, but also affective relationships of identification and disidentification (Morris/Rawson) that emerge while approaching an archive. “New” points here then to the past to further complicate the narratives of progress and linearity; or rather, toward asynchronic pasts that emerge when the archives are bound to different localities. Literary and cultural studies scholars will take up these questions during a two day conference which marks the first anniversary of the establishment of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group at the American Studies Center.

Program:

December 7, 2017
University of Warsaw, Students’ Union building
Krakowskie Przedmieście 24, Room 200

6:00 PM – Opening and welcome
Grzegorz Kość (Director of the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw)
Karolina Krasuska (Head of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group)

6:00-8:00 PM – Keynote lecture
Jack Halberstam (University of Columbia), Trans* – A Hidden Archive

In this talk prof. Halberstam traces a few histories of trans masculine lives that appear and disappear across various archives. Some of these lives flicker in and out of visibility, some in and out of criminality and still more remain enigmatically illegible. This talk argues for new visual methodologies for navigating archives of the lost, the found and the hidden.

December 8, 2017
American Studies Center, University of Warsaw
Al. Niepodległości 22, Room 116

10:00-12:00
Elahe Haschemi Yekani (HU Berlin) / Beatrice Michaelis (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research), Queering the Archives of Race and Slavery
Karolina Krasuska (University of Warsaw), Post-Soviet Jewish American Literature Meets Queer Theory
Tomasz Basiuk (University of Warsaw), The Activist and the Crank: Bob Mellors, Charlotte Bach, and the Case of Queer Knowledge Production
Moderator: Anna Kurowicka

1:00-2:30
Agnieszka Mrozik (Polish Academy of Sciences), Locked in the Archive: Polish Communist Women and the “Scandal of Revolutionary Life”
Ludmiła Janion (University of Warsaw), Gay Print Media as an Archive of the Polish Postcommunist Transformation
Moderator: Agnieszka Kotwasińska

3:00-5:00
Marta Usiekniewicz (University of Warsaw), Food, Masculinity, and Homosociality in American Mid-Century Crime Fiction
Krystyna Mazur (University of Warsaw), Valencia: Archive or, the Chroniclers of the 1990s Queer San Francisco
Anna Malinowska (University of Silesia), The Gender of Robots: Queering Machinic “Sexuality”
Moderator: Jędrzej Burszta