Short notice of some excellent theorybitching! London/Brighton, Tonight/14th November
London: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak - TONIGHT: Revisiting Postcolonialism.
5pm to 7pm, Goldsmiths Great Hall, Richard Hoggart Building. A ticketless event. All welcome.
How to get to Goldsmiths (New Cross, SE14)
Brighton: Sara Ahmed - Unhappy Queers
This seminar explores the significance of unhappiness, and in particular
unhappy endings, within queer cultural politics. It considers
firstly how we can understand happiness as a promise that directs us
towards some life choices and not others; happiness is imagined as
'following' the straight line. By refusing heterosexuality, certain lives
are seen as inevitably unhappy. Rather than responding to such
presumptions of inevitable unhappiness by depositing our hopes in the
figure of the happy queer, the paper argues that we need to re-read the
negativity of the unhappy queer as a starting point for social critique.
By contrasting Well of Loneliness with more recent texts, including the
novel Annie on My Mind (1982) and the film Lost and Delirious (2001), the
paper argues that unhappy queer archives help us to explore how
unhappiness does not originate with the fact of 'being' queer, but is an
effect of how 'being queer' is read as the origin of familial and social
unhappiness.
Wednesday evening, 14 November, at 5 pm in the EDB Lecture Theatre (room EDB 121), University of Sussex. All are welcome and a wine and cheese reception will follow the event.
************
I'm about 80% on for the Spivak, more so for the Ahmed
5pm to 7pm, Goldsmiths Great Hall, Richard Hoggart Building. A ticketless event. All welcome.
How to get to Goldsmiths (New Cross, SE14)
Brighton: Sara Ahmed - Unhappy Queers
This seminar explores the significance of unhappiness, and in particular
unhappy endings, within queer cultural politics. It considers
firstly how we can understand happiness as a promise that directs us
towards some life choices and not others; happiness is imagined as
'following' the straight line. By refusing heterosexuality, certain lives
are seen as inevitably unhappy. Rather than responding to such
presumptions of inevitable unhappiness by depositing our hopes in the
figure of the happy queer, the paper argues that we need to re-read the
negativity of the unhappy queer as a starting point for social critique.
By contrasting Well of Loneliness with more recent texts, including the
novel Annie on My Mind (1982) and the film Lost and Delirious (2001), the
paper argues that unhappy queer archives help us to explore how
unhappiness does not originate with the fact of 'being' queer, but is an
effect of how 'being queer' is read as the origin of familial and social
unhappiness.
Wednesday evening, 14 November, at 5 pm in the EDB Lecture Theatre (room EDB 121), University of Sussex. All are welcome and a wine and cheese reception will follow the event.
************
I'm about 80% on for the Spivak, more so for the Ahmed