'A New Kind of Wildness' - the Rite of Spring and Other Queer Journeys into the Wild

Duration: 1 hour 16 mins

Description:	Professor Jack Halberstam, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Comparative Literature and Gender Studies, University of Southern California gives the Lent 2015 Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship Lecture, hosted by the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies.


Created:	2015-03-03 10:16
Collection:	University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies Centre for Gender Studies
Publisher:	University of Cambridge
Copyright:	Ms L. Dixon
Language:	eng (English)
Keywords:	Gender; Queer theory; Sexuality;


Abstract:	In a new book on "The Wild" I try to develop a new critical vocabulary to access different, transdisciplinary ways of thinking about race, sexuality, alternative political imaginaries and queer futurity. Building on the legacy of José Esteban Muñoz on the one hand and dialoguing with new and older work in queer studies, I try to repurpose the language of wildness in order to create a switchpoint between different discursive tracks which generally do not intersect. By using a discarded critical term like "the wild" or "wildness," I seek to activate an arena of thinking that has been cordoned off due its colonization and exhaustion within imperial languages of civilization. However, words like the "wild" are packed not only with imperial debris but also with new signs of life, new shoots of thought that peek up out of the rubble, like weeds, showing that the ground we thought was lost, offers odd and suggestive harvests. This talk takes Stravinsky/Nijinsky's Rite of Spring as the starting point for a leap into the wild.

Abstract:

In a new book on "The Wild" I try to develop a new critical vocabulary to access different, transdisciplinary ways of thinking about race, sexuality, alternative political imaginaries and queer futurity. Building on the legacy of José Esteban Muñoz on the one hand and dialoguing with new and older work in queer studies, I try to repurpose the language of wildness in order to create a switchpoint between different discursive tracks which generally do not intersect. By using a discarded critical term like "the wild" or "wildness," I seek to activate an arena of thinking that has been cordoned off due its colonization and exhaustion within imperial languages of civilization. However, words like the "wild" are packed not only with imperial debris but also with new signs of life, new shoots of thought that peek up out of the rubble, like weeds, showing that the ground we thought was lost, offers odd and suggestive harvests. This talk takes Stravinsky/Nijinsky's Rite of Spring as the starting point for a leap into the wild.

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