Erotic Methods
This roundtable is interested in the ways that sex, intimacy, and erotics are not only objects of study but also methods and methodologies for feminist, queer, and transgender studies. Queer ethnography has offered an extended engagement with the value of intimacy and desire in the field, and Black feminist theory has developed erotics as a means of thinking the political, sacred, and sexual together. In critical race and colonialism studies, intimacy has been used to describe the proximities and frictions that result from geopolitical rearrangements of power and capital. In queer and trans studies, BDSM, dungeons, public sex, erotic vomiting, and other dissident acts are crucial venues for re-organizing hegemonic formations of gender, class, and race, dragging colonial histories to the present, and inventing sexual futures. These are but some of the ways that sex, intimacy, and erotics open up new ways of thinking across disciplines.
We invite panelists to consider how sex, erotics, and intimacy operate in their research, pedagogy, art-making, and activism.
Roundtable Participants:
Asli Zengin, Rutgers University
Aslı Zengin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Before joining Rutgers, she held postdoctoral and teaching positions at Brown, Harvard, and Brandeis Universities. Her first book, Intimacy of Power: Women Prostitutes, Sex Work and Violence in İstanbul, was published in Turkish. In this book, she examines the regulation of licensed and unlicensed sex work at the intersection of state power, law, medicine, and violence. Her second book, Violent Intimacies: Trans Lives, State Power, Kinship and Urban Geography is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Zengin has widely published in edited volumes and peer-review journals, including Cultural Anthropology, Allegra, Anthropologica, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and Transgender Studies Quarterly. Her research lies at the intersection of ethnography of gender non-conforming lives and deaths; Islamic and medico-legal regimes of sex, gender and sexuality; critical studies of violence and sovereignty; as well as transnational aspects of LGBTQ movements in the Middle East with a special focus on Turkey.
Jallicia Jolly, Amherst College
Dr. Jallicia Jolly is a post-doc and incoming Assistant Professor in American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College. Dr. Jolly researches and teaches on Black women's health, sexuality, and activism; reproductive justice and transnational feminist organizing; Black feminist health science and Black motherhood; and intersectionality and HIV/AIDS in the U.S. and Caribbean. Dr. Jolly's first book manuscript, Ill Erotics: Black Caribbean Women and Self-Making in the Time of HIV/AIDS, now under contract with the University of California Press, is an ethnography and oral history of young HIV-positive Black Jamaican women's reproductive justice organizing that chronicles how they build empowerment and self-care around disability, class oppression, severe impoverishment, and lack of access to health care. As a community-engaged researcher and an equitypractitioner, she dedicates her work to improving the well-being of marginalized communities while elevating the organizing and interests of women in the African diaspora using human rights and reproductive justice frameworks. Her scholarship and community-engaged work foregrounds the interrelationship between lived experience, pedagogy, and political engagement.
Dr. Jolly connects her research to tailored community interventions that advance equity, systemic change & community-building within and beyond U.S. borders. A public scholar committed to research-informed action, Dr. Jolly has written for various media outlets such as The Washington Post/The Lily, Ms. Magazine, Huffington Post, Rewire News, Nursing Clio, Black Youth Project, National Center for Institutional Diversity's Spark Magazine, and the University of Michigan's Rackham Graduate School Blog. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships such as The Fulbright Scholar Program, The Mellon Mays Foundation, the American Association of University Women, National Women's Studies Association, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, Yale University's Sarah Petit Doctoral Fellowship in Queer Studies, Brown University's Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, and the University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities.
Twitter: @jallicia
IG: @Iamjallicia
Jorge Sánchez Cruz, Harvard
Jorge Sánchez Cruz received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside in 2018. His field of research explores the relationship between aesthetics and politics in 20th and 21st Latin(o) American literature and culture, and its intersections with sexuality and queer studies, travesti and trans theories, and critical race theory. His current manuscript, Aesthetics of Dissent: AIDS and Sexual Politics in the Americas, proposes to see, feel, and engage with minoritarian subjects’ cultural productions fueled by the search of prolonging life. Focusing on the 1980s and 1990s, the project contextualizes the role of writers, artists, and activists’ roles in civil and human rights movements and shows how their aesthetics—chronicles, visual art, poetry, and manifestoes—expose acts of sexual violence and seropositive aberration. A second project in-the-making explores the intersection of queer theory and decolonial thought, with an emphasis in Oaxaca and Chile.He also writes about undocumented rights and on cultural practices by undocu-queer writers and artists.
Before arriving to Harvard, he was an ACLS postdoctoral researcher in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018-2019, he held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow position in Latin American Critical Theory and Latin American Sexuality Studies in the Program of Critical Theory at Northwestern University.
Rajiv Mohabir, Emerson College
Rajiv Mohabir ’s memoir ANTIMAN (Restless Books 2021, Longlisted for the PEN/America Open Book Award) received the 2019 Restless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize. He is also the author of three books of poetry including Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021, Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award), The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize; Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention 2018) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019) which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award and the 2020 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College, translations editor at Waxwing Journal.
Moderator: Kareem Khubchandani is the Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University. He recently published Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (U. Michigan Press), a performance ethnography of queer social spaces in Bangalore and Chicago. He has published in Scholar and Feminist Online; Transgender Studies Quarterly; Journal of Asian American Studies; The Velvet Light Trap; Theater Topics; Theatre Journal; The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies; Queer Dance (Oxford UP); and Queering Digital India(Edinburgh UP).
ABOUT FEMINISMS UNBOUND
This Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) initiative, Feminisms Unbound, is an annual event series featuring debates that focus on feminist concerns, theories, and practices in this contemporary moment. This series is intended to foster conversations and community among Boston-area feminist intellectuals and activists. The series, in its open configuration, endeavors to allow the greatest measure of engagement across multiple disciplinary trajectories, and a full array of feminist investments.
The event organizers, who are also visiting scholars with the GCWS this year, are Elora Chowdhury (Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston), Faith Smith (Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Brandeis University), and Kareem Khubchandani (Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in theDepartment of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University). have programmed the events in this series.