Center for the Humanities: 50th Anniversary (1969-2019)
Monday Night Lecture Series | Fall 2019

Desiring Otherwise: Queer Horizons of Activist and Academic Knowledge

Margot Weiss • Wesleyan University

September 30 @ 6 P.M.
Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork with queer left activists in New York City, Chicago, and Montreal, this lecture focuses on how activists theorize the concept queer. Rather than making queer left activism into an object of study, I aim to think alongside activists, juxtaposing the intellectual labor of intersectional queer economic justice movements—the work of ideation, imagining, and visualizing—with academic knowledge practices and desires. I explore queer as a site of pain and pleasure, oppressive constraint and utopic possibility. This dialectical queer emerges both through and beyond sexual and gender difference to index the desire for another world, linking political desires with sexual ones. In a time of pessimistic and pragmatic politics and economic precarity, queer is a knowledge practice that emerges from within the closure of the non-profit industrial complex and the university, yet gestures elsewhere and desires otherwise.

All lectures begin at 6 p.m. and are held in the Daniel Family Commons (located in the Usdan University Center) unless otherwise noted.

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View Fall 2019 Lecture List