MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES
Monday, September 24
6 p.m.
Russell House
Click here to view the video of the lecture.
Margot Weiss
Assistant Professor of American Studies and Anthropology
This talk explores the temporality of desire—the relationships between erotics, cultural memory, and histories of national trauma. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork with BDSM practitioners in San Francisco and Berlin to focus on what practitioners call "cultural trauma play": play that re-performs real-world or historical trauma. I compare the eroticization of two emblematic national traumas—the Holocaust in Germany and chattel slavery in the United States- and contrast the political and national identifications at work in such play in order to explore what we might claim to know about the historicity of desire.