Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Winter Reading Group: "Public"

Queer + Public + Performance's Reading Group is meeting on Monday, March 1, 6 PM, in CMU 202, Seattle-UW campus. The readings selected for the Winter Reading group will draw on the recent experiences of our Tea Time at the Wing Luke Asian Museum as we focus on the concept of "public." Opening with the "public" entry from Keywords for American Cultural Studies , and including discussion of Lauren Berlant's "Sex in Public" and selections from Michael Warner's Publics and Counterpublics , the group hopes to consider the following questions:
  • How does queer (re)define the dichotomy of private and public? Can queerness ever actually be a private matter?
  • To what extent and with what investments is a queer public formed in and through queer performance and the performance of queerness?
  • How might we conceive of counterpublics and what is the political utility of a queer counterpublic? That is, if a counterpublic is defined through mobilizing around the shared experiences of oppression and the shared endgoals for navigating those oppressions, can queer groups, suspicious of any stable identity formation, arrange themselves as counterpublics and at what cost?
  • What material and immaterial media are necessary for the enactment of queer publics and are those media differently hospitable to queer aims and interests?
The readings are available here:
Keyword "Public"
Berlant & Warner, "Sex in Public"
Warner, Chapter Three, "Styles of Intellectual Publics"

Queer + Public + Performance is a working group that will engage the intersection of queer scholarship, performance, art, and technologies within the University of Washington and beyond. Q+P+P is sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities: http://depts.washington.edu/uwch/projects_0910_queer_public_performance.htm
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1 comment:

  1. EYCMarch 1, 2010 at 7:15 PM

    Blogging to you live from the QPP Winter Reading Group @ The Simpson Center at UW:

    --introductions, 7 participants
    --how do you do "queer" work in "public"?
    --connect this idea to the Wing Luke exhibit
    --is queer automatically public?
    --think through the linkages to the "public/private" way
    --identity politics, does "queer" get contained in the private?
    --spatialization metaphor problematic? versus the "public sphere"
    --what productive slippages come out of this difference between public sphere and public spaces
    --is Warner trying to argue against identity formation, even as he wants to hold on to "queer"
    --connections to Delaney _Times Square Red, Times Square Blue_
    --online public spaces, public spheres
    --what prompted QPP's move to talk about think about "publics" in this way?
    --is all academic scholarship "public" scholarship?
    --thinking about something like a museum and how it functions as a "medium" of representation; are they public spaces? are they texts?
    --what is "accessible"? what makes a text or writing accessible? why is it about access?
    --do texts call a public, hail a public?
    --the difference between the public address of the texts we study and the public address of the texts we write
    --what is a counterpublic?

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