MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | HYPERBOLE: SENSE, SENSATION, SPECTACLE

This Face is Not For Us: Thinking Escape in Queer Visual Narratives

FEBRUARY 18 @ 6 P.M.
Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

What drives the desire for popular stories of escape? Grounded in black study and radical black aesthetics, contemporary engagements with escape in the U.S. are often considered for their pedagogical, fugitive, and utopian functions. This talk shifts to focus on the sensuality of escape stories. Where queer modernity is shaped by both the histories of settler colonialism and slavery, the desire for stories of escape cannot be thought apart from pornotroping desires of whiteness. In this talk I explore queer narratives in portraiture and performance to ask what stories of escape tell us about improvisatory black queer fugitive movement as well as the white queer desire for black bodies in the academy and on the screen.