After the Cohort
Image: Tehching Hsieh, Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984 (Rope Piece). © 1984 Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano.
In response to the antisocial thesis in queer theory, and as a proponent of queer of color critique, José Esteban Muñoz famously theorized queerness as forward-dawning and relational. Given our contemporary moment, however, there is a renewed interest in queerness as a negative, destructive, nonrelational force. Deeply indebted to the work of Muñoz, this symposium reunites and puts into public conversation a cohort of four of his students -- Sareh Afshar, Joshua Guzmán, Summer Kim Lee, and Daniel J Sander. The cohort will join together to think at a practical level about cohorts and students -- what students build or do not build, what they inherit or do not inherit -- in order to think at a theoretical level about what a queer and distinctly relational politics and aesthetics could be, even if it is borne out of negativity. Speakers will draw on their areas of study -- including Art History, Asian American Studies, Iranian Studies, and Latinx Studies -- to consider negation in critical theory, performance, and aesthetics. A reception will follow the symposium
Bios
Joshua Javier Guzmán is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA. He co-edited a special issue of Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory entitled “Lingering in Latinidad: Aesthetics, Theory and Performance in Latina/o Studies.” Joshua is currently working on a book-length project tentatively titled Suspended Satisfactions: Queer Latinidad and the Politics of Style, which examines stylized modes of Latino dissatisfaction with not only the US nation-state but also the activism emerging in response to systemic state violence during a very contentious post-1968 Los Angeles.
Summer Kim Lee is a Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, where she will transition into the position of Assistant Professor in the fall of 2020. She earned her MA and PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. She has research and teaching interests in Asian American literature, performance, and culture, critical race and ethnic studies, feminist theory, and queer theory. She has published and forthcoming work in Social Text, ASAP/Journal, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Post45, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books.
Daniel J Sander is Assistant Curator at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Recent projects include the exhibitions Haptic Tactics (2018), the Leslie-Lohman Queer Theater & Performance Residency for Emerging Artists (2018-2020), Alex Schmidt: Group Fail Pony Play (2018), Ben Ross Davis: Endosymbiosis (2019), Arch (2019), and a special issue of the journal Women & Performance entitled 'Queer Circuits in Archival Times' (2018), based on a conference of the same name he co-organized in 2016. He has taught courses at New York University and Yale University and been a guest lecturer, critic, and/or reviewer at the Rhode Island School of Design, the International Center of Photography, Hunter College, University of Mississippi, New York University, Pratt Institute, Maple Terrace, Parsons School of Design, Bard College, and the Wassaic Project. He is a 2019-2020 Curatorial Mentor for CUE Art Foundation's Open Call.
This event is sponsored by Tisch Creative Research.