Sexuality Summer School 26 – 30 May: Queer Anatomies

The Sexuality Summer School, organised annually since 2008 by the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture at the University of Manchester, brings international scholars and artists to Manchester for a series of public events that run alongside its programme of postgraduate workshops.

The SSS addresses current debates within queer and feminist sexuality studies, with a particular emphasis on the interdisciplinary study of culture. Past themes have included temporality, performance, affect, and homophobia; this year our focus will be on cultural theories and histories of anatomy.

Public Events 2014

Events at Contact and Cornerhouse can be bookedonline at the links provided; events at the University of Manchester / Manchester Museum are free with no booking required, but please arrive early to avoid disappointment.

Monday 26 May – 12-2
A Body with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled
Public lecture with Professor Jasbir Puar (Rutgers)
Venue: Manchester Museum

In this paper Puar historically situates the most current intersectional flavors of the day, “trans” and “disabled,” through their emergence as the latest newcomers to the intersectional fray.  She looks at how their parallel yet rarely intersecting epistemological constructs—both come into being, or becoming, in the early 90s in the academy as well as in broader political terms and movements—require exceptionalizing both the trans body and the disabled body in order to convert the debility of a non-normative body into a form of social and cultural capacity, whether located in state recognition, identity politic formations, market economies, the medical industrial complex, or subject positioning.  

Monday 26 May – 6-8
United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (2012)
Film Screening followed by Q&A with director Jim Hubbard, Professor Richard Dyer (Kings) and Dr. Monica Pearl(Manchester)
Venue: Cornerhouse. Tickets: http://www.cornerhouse.org/film/cinema-listings/united-in-anger-a-history-of-act-up
Sponsored by Screen.

United in Anger combines archival footage with insightful interviews from the ACT UP Oral History project to explore direct action advocacy group, ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), from a grassroots perspective.

Tuesday 27 May – 4-6
Anatomy, Cartography, and the Prehistory of Normality
Public lecture with Professor Valerie Traub(University of Michigan and Simon Visiting Professor, Manchester)
Venue: John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, University of Manchester
Sponsored by EAC, University of Manchester and SEXGEN. Followed by wine reception at Contact.

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European cartographers and anatomists developed novel strategies for representing the diversity of human bodies in their atlases of the world and its inhabitants. Tracking their implicit taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and class, Valerie Traub speculates on the effects of their strategies on the historical emergence of the concept of “the normal.”

Tuesday 27 May – 7.30-9.30
Green Screening: A Conversational Workshop
Workshop with Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver
Venue: Contact. Tickets: http://contactmcr.com/whats-on/12873-split-britches-ruff/

In this workshop in advance of her show Ruff Peggy Shaw will be in shifting dialogue with her long time collaborator and friend, Lois Weaver, on issues of self, memory and the power of the imagination in the wake of a life altering event.

Wednesday 28 May – 8-10
Split Britches: RUFF
Performance by Peggy Shaw directed by Lois Weaver
Venue: Contact. Tickets: http://contactmcr.com/whats-on/12873-split-britches-ruff/)
Sponsored by Science, Stroke, Art 2014.

RUFF is renowned performer’s Peggy Shaw’s tribute to those who have kept her company these 68 years, a lament for the absence of those who disappeared into the dark holes left behind by her stroke in 2011 and a celebration that her brain is able to fill the blank green screens with new insights.

 

RUFF will be followed by a post-show Q&A called ‘Ask the Doctor’, with local stroke clinician Dr Khalil Kawafi, when guests will have the opportunity to ask questions about stroke.

 

Thursday 29 May – 5-7
Biopolitics Under the Skin: Relating Cancer Narratives – An Archive of the ‘Talking Dead’?
Public Lecture by Professor Mary Bryson (University of British Columbia) and Chase Joynt (Chicago)
Venue: John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, University of Manchester
Followed by wine reception at Kro.

This talk situates the Cancer’s Margins project (www.lgbtcancer.ca) and its preliminary findings in an overview of agonistic feminist, postcolonial, and queer biopolitical scholarship.

 

The Sexuality Summer School is sponsored this year by the Faculty of Humanities; Cornerhouse; Contact; Manchester Pride; Screen; Science, Stroke, Art 2014; and SEXGEN. For more information about the Sexuality Summer School, including details of previous events, go to sexualitysummerschool.wordpress.com, email us and get on the mailing list at sexualitysummerschool@gmail.com, find Sexuality Summer School on Facebook or tweet us @SSS_Manchester.