Queer Aqui
formerly Queer Theory: Here, Now, and Everywhere
Project Co-Directors: Jack Halberstam, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Daniel Da Silva
Project Coordinator: Levi C. R. Hord
Queer Aqui is a CSSD working group to discuss, debate and investigate the politics of sexuality and gender in a global frame. This group builds upon the vast network of queer scholars here in the New York area and reaches out to groups in Beirut, Buenos Aires, Rio De Janeiro, Quito and Istanbul in order to consider how best to resituate queer studies to respond to shifts in the meanings of family, sexual health, gendered embodiment, religion, sexual practices, gender variance, activism and sexual communities worldwide. This group’s main focus is in considering the place of sexuality and gender in both the spread of global capitalism and right-wing populism and in the activist responses to these new forms of authoritarianism.
Scholars in this group have worked on neoliberalism, LGBT law, trans* issues, transnational imaginaries, queer diaspora, negative affects, art and politics, the queer decolonial, temporality and spatiality, phenomenology and much more. This is a multidisciplinary group with many transnational contacts and contexts that is committed to asking questions about the future of queer politics, the future of queer culture and the potential of new forms of solidarity, protest and queer thought.
News
Columbia Law Professor Franke commented on new US legislation to combat anti-Asian hate crimes.
In “Empirical Ephemera,” Professor Agard-Jones used the concept-metaphor of sand to consider how coloniality is made material.
Congratulations to Spring 2021 Grant awardees Kevin Fellezs (Music), Natasha Lightfoot (History), and Camille Robcis (French, History).
This piece, by the Queer Aqui working fellow, reflects on life experiences during the pandemic lockdown.
The Queer Aqui working group fellow member spoke with Vivan Ziherl at the event hosted by SVA NYC.
Elizabeth Povinelli and the Karrabing Film Collective screened a visual essay for the conference
Jack Halberstam’s Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (2020) is published by Duke University Press.
Publications
"Facial Weaponization Suite: Fag Face Mask” by Zach Blas, 2012, photo by Christopher O’Leary.
Past Events
Queer Aqui: Together in Hard Times (Queer Aqui: Juntos em Tempos Difíceis) focuses upon questions about the reliance of new right-wing populist regimes on homophobic, transphobic and misogynist ideologies
This panel will engage five emerging LGBTQ filmmakers from the Arab world in a meaningful discussion on the role of Arab queer cinema in shaping and giving voice to the Arab LGBTQ community.
Celebrate the launch of CSSD's newest working group, Queer Theory: Here, Now, and Everywhere, with the Queer Disruptions conference on March 1-2, 2018.
Fellows
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
Vanessa Agard-Jones is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, where she maintains affiliations with the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, the Center for Science and Society, the Earth Institute, and the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. At its most expansive, Agard-Jones’ work asks how coloniality is made material: in social forms, in human and nonhuman bodies, and in the landscapes in which we live.
Fellow, Portuguese, Rutgers University
Daniel da Silva’s research specializes in gender, sexuality, race, performance and popular music in the Portuguese-speaking world. His forthcoming book, Trans Tessituras: Transatlantic and Transgender Luso-Afro-Brazilian Popular Music analyzes popular music iterations of transgender voices in Brazil, Portugal and Angola to show how they amplify and refigure the gendered conventions of Portuguese-language popular music genres by pulling at national and transatlantic histories of race, gender and sexuality.
Journalist, Activist, Professor, Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University
Lisa Duggan is a journalist, activist, and Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is author of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Sensationalism and American Modernity and Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy, co-author with Nan Hunter of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, and co-editor with Lauren Berlant of Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest.
Fellow, Spanish and Portuguese, New York University
Licia Fiol-Matta is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She received an AB from Princeton University and a PhD from Yale University, both in Comparative Literature. Prior to joining NYU she taught at Barnard College and the City University of New York.
Ph.D. Candidate, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Mia Florin-Sefton is a Ph.D. candidate and University Writing Instructor in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University, where she specializes in 20th and 21st century transatlantic anglophone literatures and culture; with a focus on how narratives of succession mediate and explicate the shifting relationship between biological and economic theories of heredity and inheritance. She is also currently at work on a project that looks at the history of sex glands and early history of hormone replacement therapy in the context of theories of racial degeneration and eugenics post-World War I.
Professor, Department of Law, Columbia Law School
Katherine Franke is the Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where she also directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and is the faculty director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project. She is a member of the Executive Committee for the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, a member of the Steering Committee for the Center for the Study of Social Difference, and an Affiliated Faculty member for the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation's leading scholars writing on law, religion and rights, drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory.
Fellow, Social Sciences and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute
Macarena Gómez-Barris is author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press 2010), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press 2017), and Beyond the Pink Tide: Artistic and Political Undercurrents in the Americas (UC Press 2018). Her new book project is At the Sea’s Edge: On Coloniality and the Oceanic.
Fellow, Gender and Sexuality, New York University
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 (forthcoming from Duke UP in November 2018).
Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam’s first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries and it stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. Her 1998 book, Female Masculinity (1998), made a ground breaking argument about non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders.
PhD Candidate, English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Levi C. R. Hord is a writer, scholar, and public speaker based in Lenapehoking (New York City). They are currently a Ph.D. student in the department of English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where they hold a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Associate Professor, Spanish & Latin American Cultures, Barnard College
Maja Horn specializes in contemporary Caribbean cultures with a focus on literature, visual and performance art, and political culture. She is the author of Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature (University Press of Florida in 2014) and is currently completing a second monograph on queer Dominican literature, visual and performance art. She has also published on Latin American and Caribbean arts for various Dominican and U.S. art magazines and is currently serves on the editorial committee for the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.
Professor, Department of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College
Janet R. Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor and Chair of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She served fifteen years as Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), and she has also served as Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development.
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Columbia University
Tey Meadow is assistant professor of sociology at Columbia. She is the author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century, and the coeditor of Other Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology. Her work has appeared in Gender & Society, Sexualities, Contemporary Ethnography, Race & Ethnic Studies, Politics & Society and a number of edited volumes.
Professor, Performance Studies, Yale University
Tavia Nyong'o is a professor of performance studies at Yale University, where he teaches in the American Studies, African American Studies, Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Theater Studies programs. His books include The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009) and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018).
Associate Professor, Department of History and French, Columbia University
Camille Robcis specializes in modern European intellectual history, with a focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. Her interests have circled around three issues: the historical construction of norms, the intellectual production of knowledge, and the articulation of universalism and difference in modern French history. Prior to coming to Columbia, she taught at Cornell for ten years.
PhD Candidate, Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University
Daniel S. Sáenz is a Colombian-Canadian Settler, writer, art historian, and occasional independent curator based in Lenapehoking (New York City) and Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal). He is currently a Ph.D. student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, where he holds a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Fellow, Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Kyla Schuller is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and author of The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
Nash Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Kendall Thomas is the Nash Professor of Law and co-founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture. His teaching and research interests include U.S. and comparative constitutional law, human rights, legal philosophy, feminist legal theory, Critical Race Theory and Law and Sexuality. A past Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School, and Visiting Professor in American Studies and Afro-American Studies at Princeton University, Thomas has taught or lectured in France, The Netherlands, England, The Czech Republic, Germany, Haiti and South Africa. His writings have appeared in several academic journals and volumes of collected essays.
Fellow, Art & Public Policy, New York University
Hentyle Yapp is an assistant professor at New York University in the Department of Art & Public Policy. He is affiliated faculty with the Department of Performance Studies, Disability Council, and Asian/Pacific/American Institute. His research engages China, performance, disability, and queer theory.