Conveners: Marcela Fuentes and Ramón Rivera-Servera
Centering performance as object of study, method of inquiry, and scholarly or creative outcome, this group will share works-in-progress in a workshop format that seeks to investigate the overlaps and departures between queer and transnational as categories of analysis and sites of praxis. We understand the "transnational" as a project of “centering difference,” and "queer" as a politics of “embodied alterities” equally invested in moving beyond assumed normativities of nation, gender, sexuality, race, and more. Beyond an intellectual project of mapping out "practices that travel" or that are networked through utilization of global channels, and a notion of transnational cultures as a “queering of the nation,” we propose to engage these two encompassing and theoretically expansive milieus, queer and transnational, as frameworks that can be productively juxtaposed in inquiring about identities that are shaped around social and cultural spaces that transcend pre-established borders.
Biographies
Marcela Fuentes is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the program “Cultures in Transnational Perspective” at UCLA where she teaches in the Theater department. She received her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University in May of 2008. She also works in theater, performance art, and independent radio as a director, producer, dramaturg, and performer.
Ramón Rivera-Servera's research and teaching focus on contemporary Latina/o American public cultures with special emphasis on the ways categories of race, gender and sexuality are negotiated in the process of migration. He is a Professor at Northwestern University in the Performance Studies department. His work documents Latina/o queer performance practices ranging from theatre and concert dance to social dance, fashion and speech. Rivera-Servera is currently co-editing an anthology on Black and Latina/o queer performance with E. Patrick Johnson (Professor and Chair of the Performance Studies department).
Participants
Alberto Abreu ArciaAndré Gardel
Cole Rizki
Diana Díaz Soto
Dolores Galindo
Elena Krell
Karina Hodoyan
Katherine Zien
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
Lucero Medina Hú
Marcela Fuentes
María Cristina Fusté
Melissa Gonzalez
Philip Zisman
Ramón H. Rivera-Servera
Regina Garcia
Sara Wolf
Tamilla Woodard
Yury Hernando Forero Casas