Kadji Amin, Indigestion: Transsexuality and the Queer Aversion to Identity
Date and time
Location
Ellen Wilkinson Building
C1.18, Ellen Wilkinson Building, SALC Graduate School
Oxford
Manchester
M13 9PL
United Kingdom
Kadji Amin will present the keynote lecture (via videolink) for the 2022 Sexuality Summer School: The Desire for Identity
About this event
This event has now sold out - please email sexualitysummerschool@gmail.com with the subject heading 'Kadji Amin' if you would like to be added to the waiting list for this event.
Please note, this will be an in-person event, with Kadji Amin joining us via videolink.
Kadji Amin
Kadji Amin is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. He earned a PhD from Duke University and has held fellowships from the Mellon foundation and the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University.
Kadji is the author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Duke University Press, 2017), which won an Honorable Mention for the Alan Bray Memorial Award for best book in LGBT studies. As a prisoner, prostitute, thief, author, and activist, Jean Genet (1910-1986) epitomizes the queer hope that social deviance and sexual transgression should birth radical art and politics. Disturbing Attachments troubles this expectation by focusing in on the unsavory attachments - including pederasty, racial fetishism, nostalgia for prison, and fantasies of terrorism - behind Genet's activism with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. Instead of just critiquing him, Disturbing Attachments uses Genet to interrogate the desires that orient the field of Queer Studies. It demonstrates how contemporary queer attachments to non-normativity, sexual transgression, and political radicalism bear the stamp of recent gay American history. Ultimately, the book challenges scholars to disturb the desires of Queer Studies so that the field can reorient itself to an expanded range of geographic, historical, and racial subjects. This requires, first and foremost, challenging the idealizations of queer theory.
The Sexuality Summer School
The Sexuality Summer School is a week-long event comprised of a series of workshops for 40 postgraduate students, alongside a public arts events programme open to all. For more detail on this years' programme, please visit: https://sexualitysummerschool.wordpress.com