Join us for our winter welcome event at Delta of Venus Cafe

January 11, 2013 from 4-6 pm

The QFT will be co-sponsoring a talk on February 9th with the LGBT Resource Center–

It is our great pleasure to host Dean Spade & Eric Stanley for a discussion on their recently released books: Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press) and Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law (South End Press). This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

Thursday, February 9 12pm-1:30pm Meeting Room A in the New Student Community Center

Hard copies of Captive Genders & Normal Life can be checked out from the LGBTRC library. We hope you join us for this exciting event.

Sponsored by the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center & the Queer, Feminist, and Transgender Research Cluster.
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Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Lawraises revelatory critiques of the current strategies pivoting solely on a legal rights framework, but also points to examples of an organized grassroots trans movement that is demanding the most essential of legal reforms in addition to making more comprehensive interventions into dangerous systems of repression—and the administrative violence that ultimately determines our life chances. Setting forth a politic that goes beyond the quest for mere legal inclusion, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require.

Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the enormity of the prison industrial complex. The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle.

An attorney, educator, and trans activist Dean Spade has taught classes on sexual orientation, gender identity, poverty and law at the City University of New York (CUNY), Seattle University, Columbia University, and Harvard University. In 2002 he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a collective that provides free legal services and works to build trans resistance rooted in racial and economic justice

Eric A. Stanley works at the intersections of radical trans/queer politics, theories of state violence, and visual culture. Eric is currently finishing a PhD in the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Along with Chris Vargas, Eric is a co-director of the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2011).

The Queer, Feminist, and Transgender Research Cluster held a discussion on 11/22/11 in response to the police violence against non-violent protesters on UC Davis campus, to address queer and feminist perspectives on the idea of removing police from campus, and to address the recent hate crimes on campus. About 30 undergraduate and graduate students took part, and the discussion focused primarily on the often confusing process of reporting and responding to both sexual assault and hate crimes on campus, as well as several less-publicized abuses by the UCD Police department.  The following is a summary that does not represent the views of everyone participating, but represents the primary concerns that came up. The full version of the notes are attached. Overall, most participants said that drastic change is needed in order to adequately address sexual assault and hate crimes on the UC Davis campus, and that the police force has not been effective in keeping queer and transgender folks, women, and people of color safe.  It seems that the current system exists more to protect that university’s reputation rather than to protect vulnerable groups.

1) The Campus Violence Prevention Program came up repeatedly as a possible but problematic alternative to the campus police force. The CVPP combines education with direct response to sexual assault, does not insist upon or require a victim to go to the police, and has some good resources for victims. However, it is also underfunded, only addresses sexual assault and not hate crimes, is a part of the campus police force with funding linked to the police, is not critical or willing to be involved in cases of police violence, treats sexual assault in a heteronormative way as male-on-female rape, and is not widely visible or known to be available by students on campus. The CVPP, in order to be effective, would need to address sexual assault, hate crimes, and police violence, and would need to hire students interns in order to be more visible and better coordinate with different centers on campus.

2) Several people expressed the need for flyers, art pieces, or other forms of widely available publicity explaining the multi-pronged and sometimes contradictory process for addressing sexual assault and hate crimes on campus. This would include information on what happens if a victim goes to the campus police, what happens if a victim goes to the city of Davis police, or to one of the resource centers on campus, and what each of these options offers and precludes. For example, going to the city of Davis police would preclude campus police involvement, but most people don’t know that.

3) Any campus initiatives on security should not reproduce the institutional mechanisms of the police force. They would need to involve both education and victim support and response without othering and criminalizing various groups on campus. They would also need to address the ways that different groups are affected disproportionately by violence on campus. Thus, a new kind of language for security, policing, and community response is needed. Whatever forms of response and education to sexual assault and hate crimes might replace the police—whether they are based in the resource centers, the CVPP, the 24-hour escort service, or a different group—need to be coordinated. Students encountered multiple, contradictory courses of official campus action in response to recent hate crimes. The Campus Council on Community Diversity has a conflict of interest in focusing on diversity statistics, rather than community safety, and is ineffective at coordination of campus response to hate crimes. Having the police report to the Chancellor also creates a conflict of interest, and any alternatives should be community-based.

4) Student Judicial Affairs most often uses the term “biased incident” to ignore hate crimes on campus and therefore limits effective response. However, a campus-based system like SJA might be an effective way to replace everyday security such as traffic or bike tickets.

5) Within the protest movement, minority voices are often ignored. During the rally some people walked away when speakers addressed the issues faced by women, queers, and people of color. People within the movement have also been pressured not to report cases of sexual assault. The protest movement should not be afraid of critique from within, and the workshops in the coming weeks may be a good place to respond to these fractures. Women, queers, transgender folks and people of color need to be involved in shaping this movement through workshops, discussion, and participation.

We’re very excited about our first event for this year, coffee with Professor José  Quiroga from Emory University. Rather than a formal presentation or reading group, we hope to spark a productive conversation with Professor Quiroga on queer studies and methodologies. In this light, we’re circulating a copy of the introduction to his book Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latin America (2001) and his remarks from a roundtable discussion on new directions in multiethnic, racial, and global queer studies, published in GLQ in 2003. Coffee and Conversation with Jose Quiroga November 18th, 2011 Sproul 912 10 AM

José Quiroga is a Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies. His research interests are contemporary Latin American and Latino literatures and cultures, gender and queer studies, contemporary Cuba and the Caribbean, and Latin American poetry.

His published books include Mapa Callejero (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2010), Law of Desire: A Queer Film Classic (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2009), Cuban Palimpsests (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and, in collaboration with Daniel Balderston, Sexualidades en Disputa (Buenos Aires: Ricardo Rojas, 2005). In addition he has also published Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York University Press, 2001) and Understanding Octavio Paz (University of South Carolina Press, 2000).

To obtain the recommended readings please contact efkuffner@ucdavis.edu

“Disciplining Sexuality, Unruly Performance” Conference

The QFT and Postcolonial research clusters and the LGBTRC present:
A conference featuring UC Davis graduate and undergraduate student research

Friday, May 27, 2011

King Lounge

10:30-Noon

Panel 1: Gendered Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism

Moderator: Dr. Emilio Bejél
Ryan Tripp
Slavery of the Sachemship:  Narragansett Duality in Peace and War, 1622-76
Emily Kuffner
Imagining America: Columbus’ First Letter to Spain and the Feminization of Landscape
Cecilio Cooper
“I Have Such Doubts”: Queer Suffering and the Neo- Slave Child”
Molly Ball
Early-ish Modern Negativity: Fantomina and Love in Excess as (Pre)Incarnations of the Antisocial Thesis

King Lounge

1:00-2:15

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Deborah Vargas, Assistant Professor, Chicano/Latino Studies, University of California, Irvine

“Borderland Ballads, Bullets, and Besos”

This presentation focuses on Chicana singer Chelo Silva, nicknamed “la reina Tejana del bolero (the TexMex queen of the bolero),” who performed during the 1940s to 1960s. Drawing from feminist queer studies, Vargas argues that Silva is a musically dissonant figure who provides alternative “border ballads” that have remained in the echoes of dominant heteromasculinist narratives of Chicano corrido music.

Deborah R. Vargas is an assistant professor in the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Vargas has published in a number of different journals and anthologies including Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Latina/o Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies and has conducted oral histories with several Chicana singers for the Smithsonian Institution Latino Music Oral History Project. Her monograph Dissonant Divas: Mejicanas, Music, Nation is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2012. She is the recipient of a number of fellowships including the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and most recently a University of California Center for New Racial Studies grant to support her current research addressing Mexicana/Tejana racialized sexuality in the social-musical space of the fandango in the Southwest during the 19th century.

Fielder Room

2:30-3:30

Workshop: Undisciplining Sex Education and Gender Performance

Cory Dostie
Performativity and Transgender Subjects
Rachel Messer
The Psychic Dick: Potent Possibilities
Carolina Ibarra-Mendoza
High School Latinas and Sex Education
Ashley Scarborough
Categories of Risk in Maternal and Child Health

King Lounge

2:30-3:30

Discussion: Teaching Gender and Sexuality Across the Disciplines

Dr. Deborah Vargas, Chicano/Latino Studies
Danielle McManus, English
Isabel Porras, Cultural Studies
Elizabeth Skwiot, Comparative Literature

King Lounge

3:45-4:45

Panel 2: Negotiating Hetero/Homonormativity Within State Apparatuses

Moderator: Dr. Kathleen Frederickson
Pearl Chaozon-Bauer
The Epithalamium: A Subversive Space for Rethinking Marriage
Jordan Pascoe
Marriage in Decolonial African Thought
Desiree Alaniz
Social Movements and the State: Gay and Lesbian Subjectivity in the Post-War United States

Laboratory A, Wright 101

5:30-6:30

Queer of Color Performance

Fayza Bundalli
Cecilio Stephanie Cooper
Redwolf Painter
Dr. Kortney Ryan Ziegler

THE SYMPOSIUM IS SPONSORED BY:
The UC Davis Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center, and the Post Colonial Research Cluster. The event is wheelchair accessible.

Led by Sharada Balachandran-Orihuela

When:   Monday, February 28, 2011

Time:    4:30 – 5:30

Where: Voorhies 126

We will be discussing Phillip Brian Harper’s article “The Evidence of Felt Intuition: Minority Experience, Everyday Life, and Critical Speculative Knowledge.”

(Article can be found in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6.4 (2000) 641-657)

For more information contact:  Matt Franks – mbfranks@ucdavis.edu or Carmen Fortes – cefortes@ucdavis.edu

Queer Exchanges, International Education, Transnational Identities

Presented by Abigail Boggs and Liz Montegary

Date: January 20, 2011
Time: 12:00 to 1:00 pm
Location: 126 Voorhies

This seminar will investigate contemporary practices of international educational exchange with the aim of interrogating the gender and sexual politics of the modern nation-state. Bringing together the fields of transnational feminist studies, queer cultural studies, and postcolonial studies, we seek to understand the role western educational institutions play in reproducing colonial narratives of rescue and supporting global identity politics (such as “global feminism” or “global gay movements”). We recognize the ways in which education has historically functioned as a key political technology for western liberal regimes, and we wish to understand how these disciplinary practices have continued and are reconfigured with the rise of neoliberalism and transnationalism. In what ways does international education perpetuate uneven exchanges of knowledge and capital and the circulation of western logics of development and democratization? How does the incorporation of “human rights” talk into the mission statements of educational institutions work to construct western-educated scholars and students as conduits for tolerance and progress? Does the humanitarian practice of educational exchange contribute to the depiction of “nonwestern” nation-states as sites of ethnic, religious, and hetero/sexist violence possibly in need of military intervention? In what ways does the production of cosmopolitan citizen-students not only support western projects of national security but also open space for waging critiques against the nation-state?

For more information, contact Matt Franks – mbfranks@ucdavis.edu or Carmen Fortes – cefortes@ucdavis.edu

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PANEL: “Categorical Difficulties: Trans Subjects and the Politics of Legibility”

This panel will trace the epistemic violence faced by gender non-conforming people, arising from the narrowly-defined gender categories available to officially identify and classify trans folks. In order to be legible within legal and social systems, gender non-conforming people are forced to narrate themselves through reductive, binary categories. This often comes at the expense of having the ability to define and imagine different ways of organizing gendered or non-gendered identities, histories, and bodies. As a result, for those who fall under the umbrella term transgender, the gaining of political recognition, civil rights, and access to community benefits often comes at the expense of their own ability to define themselves. This panel will investigate these contradictions and offer strategies for navigating the politics of transgender.

Brief Abstracts:

Tristan Josephson – “Immutability and the Fixing of Legibility in U.S. Asylum Cases”

This paper focuses on U.S circuit court cases that deal with trans asylum seekers.  I will begin with a brief discussion of how the legal procedure of applying for asylum functions as a process of subject production, and then I will examine how discourses of immutability structure the ways that trans asylum seekers can make themselves recognizable and legible in court cases. I’ll center my analysis of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Hernandez-Montiel v. INS (2000), a precedential case which enabled certain trans subjects to access asylum.

Jaime Becker – “Gender System Persistence: Processes and Mechanisms”

Gender systems insist on biological (females/males) and social binaries (women/men) despite the wide range of biological and social human beings that exist empirically. This produces inequality, to varying degrees, between women and men and renders invisible or highly problematic those people who cannot or do not choose to conform to the binary at all.  This research explores the nexus between interactional processes and macro-structural gender systems through an ethnographic study of gender non-conformists. If sex-categorization can’t be done, then what happens to gendered status distinctions, assumptions of self-other competence, and a myriad of gendered stereotypes? …

Carmen Fortes – “Creating A Space for Ourselves: Gender Identities at Play in the ‘Hole in the Wall Saloon’”

This paper is an ethnographic study of the lived experience of masculine-to-feminine (MTF) transgender persons at a Northern California city bar.  The study attempts to explore the meaning of place and participant demographics (age, race, and gender) in the presentation of gender identities.  In this paper I aim to (1) examine Durkheim’s characterization of social norms and their development; (2) provide detailed illustration of how place and other factors (history) allow or provide for gender fluidity in identity; and (3) challenge the binary notions of gender by illustrating their fluidity.

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TransAction Week is one of the LGBT Resource Center’s annual weeks and is designed to raise awareness on issues impacting transgender people and to celebrate the transgender community. Some events include a keynote speaker; Trans 101, an educational workshop; Trans-forming Body Image, a program exploring transgender body image; Gender-Palooza, a fun event exploring gender; and Trans Safe Zone, a two-hour training to increase awareness and sensitivity to transgender issues. This year, TransAction week will take place from Nov. 15th – Nov. 19th 2010.

For more information, please email Cory Dostie at cadostie@ucdavis.edu or see the LGBT Center’s website: http://lgbcenter.ucdavis.edu/events/trans-action-week

Monday, November 8: 1:00-2:30 the Sociology Department Boardroom, Room 1291 in the Social Sciences & Humanities Bldg.

Please join us for a luncheon and reading group with David Valentine, University of Minnesota Assistant Professor of Anthropology and award-winning author of Imaging Transgender.

Professor Valentine will share his current paper-in-progress, “Sue E. Generous: Toward a Theory of Non-Transexuality.” A draft of the paper is currently available for download from the Queer Research Cluster SmartSite. (For information contact Carmen Fortes or Matt Franks)

*Lunch will be provided*
Please RSVP by contacting Carmen Fortes

Date: November 8, 2010
Time: 4:30 pm
Location: 126 Voorhies

David Valentine, University of Minnesota Assistant Professor of Anthropology and award-winning author of Imaging Transgender will be visiting UC Davis.

The title of his talk is “How Not To Have An Identity.”

This talk is co-sponsored by The Cultural Studies Graduate Group, The Consortium for Women & Research (CWR), The Gender and Sexuality Commission (GASC), The Women’s Resources & Research Center (WRRC), and the Departments of Sociology, Comparative Literature, and English.