March « 2017 « Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender

Ron Buckmire – “A Black, Gay National Science Foundation Program Officer? Or, How I Got Here From There” – October 4, 2012

A program officer in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Undergraduate Education will provide the details of his career trajectory. This involves being born in a small Caribbean island nation, going to school in a predominantly white and male engineering institution in upstate New York, being a faculty member at a small liberal arts college in California and working for the federal government. His entire career path was traversed while navigating the world as an openly gay, Black man who is also very interested and actively involved in multiple efforts that combine equity and excellence in various arenas, such as […]

Charles Batson – “The Passages of a Queer Québec ” – November 18, 2010

Through a focus on Larry Tremblay’s short story “Piercing,” Professor Charles Batson proposes a reading of the Québécois landscape as one marked by transgression, by crossings, by Queerness. In this Francophone province surrounded by hundreds of millions of Anglophones, constant transpositions seem to unsettle notions of fixed personal and cultural identities and point to Québec as a particularly Queer space. With an analysis of the 2009 award-winning film J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother) by the 19-year-old Xavier Dolan, we see liminality as central to an understanding of a Queer Québec.

Gretchen Schultz – “The Femmes damnées Go Global” – October 28, 2010

This talk will explore the relationship between 19th-century Sapphic literature from France and 20th-century US lesbian pulp fiction. Connections between these corpuses, one canonical and the other low-brow, reveal that representations of sexual minorities travelled transnationally and had an undeniable impact on disparate communities well before globalization and the information age. Reading pulp fiction through the lens of earlier male-authored Sapphic texts confirms their significance for distant and unintended readers: women in search of mirrors for emerging identities.

Frieda Ekotto – “The Erotic Tale of Karmen Gei: The Taboo of Female Homosexuality in Question” – September 23, 2010

In this presentation, Professor Frieda Ekotto is concerned with a new reading of sexuality, spirituality and race in the Senegalese film Karmen Gei. This reading explores the formation of sexuality and spirituality through an examination of a work which represents modern Senegalese culture and society. Professor Ekotto’s discussion aims to offer answers to the fundamental question posed by this erotic, subversive and transgressive film: Within modern Senegalese society and culture, is it possible to transcend the sexual taboo of female homosexuality?

Denis Provencher – “Queer-Arab-French: Sexuality, Islam and Citizenship in France” – September 13, 2010

How do Maghrebi-French men negotiate and understand same-sex desire within a French urban context? Does the ethnic North African, who pursues erotic same-sex relationships in France, identify himself as “gay” or “homosexual”? Can these men explain themselves to their families, to their diasporic North African communities, and relate to their Muslim faith? In this presentation, Professor Denis Provencher explores the process by which Maghrebi-French men have begun to construct alternative same-sex identities with the recovery of North African traditions.

Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender

Archive for March, 2017

Ron Buckmire – “A Black, Gay National Science Foundation Program Officer? Or, How I Got Here From There” – October 4, 2012

Charles Batson – “The Passages of a Queer Québec ” – November 18, 2010

Gretchen Schultz – “The Femmes damnées Go Global” – October 28, 2010

Frieda Ekotto – “The Erotic Tale of Karmen Gei: The Taboo of Female Homosexuality in Question” – September 23, 2010

Denis Provencher – “Queer-Arab-French: Sexuality, Islam and Citizenship in France” – September 13, 2010

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