Janet Jakobsen: Lush Lives in Hard Times
Department: Gender and Sexuality Studies
Date and Time: February 24, 2017 | 11:00 AM-1:00 PMEvent Location: HG 3341
Event Details
Janet Jakobsen
Lush Lives in Hard Times
A queer sense of lush life brings together the idea of a gay life and the melancholic realities of pursuing such a life in the midst of hard times – and these are hard times, indeed. The results of the 2016 elections in the United States have increased calls from both activists and scholars for an analysis of the “co-productions of gender, sexuality, race, class, citizenship, and embodiment.” “Lush Lives in Hard Times” adopts a theoretically promiscuous approach in order to develop an analysis that focuses on disjunction and multiplicity, as well as conjunction and inter-relation. In particular, beginning with a critique of the relation between religion and secularism in U.S. public life allows for a focus on multiple social worlds in a transnational frame and the ways in which those worlds are materialized through practice. Examples drawn from collaborative projects between community-based organizations, including Queers for Economic Justice, Sakhi for South Asian Women, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Barnard Center for Research on Women show how such an analysis can support queer world-making and unexpected alliances.