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Saturday, April 16 • 3:45pm - 5:15pm
Roundtable: Queer DisEmbodiments: Voice, Sexuality, Synchronization
How bodies resound queerly, how queer voices leave bodies behind altogether by inhabiting other bodies and creating dazzling asymmetries between source, sound, and sex(uality)—from the ethereal as well as irritating murmurs of Kate Bush’s The Ninth Wave (Halberstam), to Sia’s ventriloquial automatons, including her dancing child avatar, Maggie Ziegler (Kessler); to the dispassionate, polyamorous disco rapture of Grace Jones’ voice (McMillan); to the breathy, helium seductions of nerdy, androgynous crooners like Green Gartside of Scritti Politti and Michelle Chamuel from NBC’s The Voice (Tongson); to the British dance band Years and Years’ uncanny channeling of Black women’s voices (Nyong’o), we’ll move in and out of bodies in an effort to understand the technologies of queer vocalization.

Moderators
avatar for Karen Tongson

Karen Tongson

Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California, and the author of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press, 2011). Her work has appeared in Public Culture, Social Text, American Quarterly, GLQ, and Novel: A... Read More →

Speakers
JH

Jack Halberstam

Jack Halberstam loves falsettos in men, women, and everyone else. Kate Bush is just the latest in a long line of falsetto-voiced singers (Sylvester, Prince, Maxwell, Antony Hegarty, Justin Timberlake, Thom Yorke) that Jack has obsessed over in the past few decades. What this means... Read More →
avatar for Sarah Kessler

Sarah Kessler

Sarah Kessler is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the UC Irvine, where she is completing a dissertation on ventriloquism in contemporary popular culture. Her writing on art, film, and media has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, In These Times, the Journal of Popular Music... Read More →
avatar for Uri McMillan

Uri McMillan

Uri McMillan is Assistant Professor of English, African American Studies, and Gender Studies at UCLA. He is the author of Embodied Avatars; Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (NYU, 2015), the first full length study of Black women's performance art. He has published... Read More →
TN

Tavia Nyong’o

Tavia Nyong’o is Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He writes on art, music, politics, culture, and theory. His first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minnesota, 2009), won the Errol Hill... Read More →


Saturday April 16, 2016 3:45pm - 5:15pm PDT
JBL Theater