GFWS and CFR Present: GFWS Annual Lecture ‘Queer Archives, Regional Archives’ by Dr. Gayatri Gopinath

The Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies and the Centre for Feminist Research present:
The Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies Annual Lecture
Queer Archives, Regional Archives: The Unruly Visions of Sheba Chhachhi and Akram Zaatari
by Dr. Gayatri Gopinath
Date: Thursday, Sept. 13
Time: 3 to 5 p.m.
Location: 626 Kaneff Tower, York University
Accessibility: Wheelchair-accessible space, gender-neutral and gender-segregated washrooms.
Light refreshments will be provided. The talk will be followed by a reception. Please advise of allergies/dietary needs with RSVP.
Link to Facebook event: facebook.com/events/328198364419455.
Free event. RSVP to juliapyr@yorku.ca.
In this talk, Dr. Gayatri Gopinath draws on her forthcoming book, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora, to identify a “queer regional imaginary” in the works of contemporary artists Akram Zaatari and Sheba Chhacchi. Dr. Gopinath foregrounds the category of the region – in both its sub-national and supra-national senses- in a queer diasporic frame in order to produce a new mapping of space and sexuality. This alternative mapping rejects dominant cartographies that either privilege the nation-state or that cast into shadow all those spaces, and gender and sexual formations, deemed without value within the map of global capital.
Dr. Gopinath discusses the Beirut-based queer artist Akram Zaatari’s excavation of subnational regional photographic archives, in conjunction with Delhi-based artist Sheba Chhacchi’s installation Winged Pilgrims (2007), which disrupts area studies framings of “Asia” by mapping supranational histories of encounter and exchange that entirely provincialize the global north. Both works represent a queer incursion into area studies, where a queer regional imaginary instantiates alternative cartographies and spatial logics that allow for other histories of global affiliation and affinity to emerge.
Bio: Gayatri Gopinath is associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies and diaspora studies, and is the author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke UP, 2005) and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke UP, 2018). She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality and queer diasporic cultural production in journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, Social Textand positions.
Co-sponsored by: the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Social Science, the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, the Sexuality Studies Program and the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR).