Lecture Series

In Spring 2013, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Program at the University of Maryland presented the eleventh annual lecture series in LGBT Studies:

DEBILITATING QUEERNESS

Queer theory in the twenty-first century has focused on a wide range of bodies and minds in a variety of states: failing, wounded, scarred, damaged, infected or infectious, diseased, mad, depressed, or traumatized. Only recently, however, has this focus engaged thickly with disability theory, making a crip turn to what Jasbir Puar describes as “questions of bodily capacity, debility, disability, precarity, and populations.” Debilitating Queerness both highlights and extends this turn. If debility signifies infirmity, feebleness, or frailty, what happens to queerness when it is openly theorized through debility and disability? What might it mean to debilitate queerness? How might such a debilitation be opposed to the compulsory able-bodiedness of mainstream LGBT politics? What other critical projects might it be linked to? Thanks to all who joined us for this illuminating series of conversations.

ROBERT McRUER
Queer Austerity and Excess: Cripping the Crisis; or, the Rise of Disability Capitalism
5:00 p.m. Thursday, February 7, 2013
Ulrich Recital Hall, Tawes Hall

Robert McRuer is professor and chair of English at the George Washington University. He is author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability and The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities. He co-edited Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies, a special double issue of GLQ, which won the 2003 Best Special Issue Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

ELI CLARE
Yearning Toward Carrie Buck: Involuntary Sterilization, Our Bodies, and the Law
5:15 p.m. Thursday, March 7, 2013
Ulrich Recital Hall, Tawes Hall

The infamous Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, which declared involuntary sterilization laws constitutional in 1927, was built upon the body of Carrie Buck, a poor white woman from Virginia. Eli Clare explores how disability, class, gender, sexuality, and whiteness often collide and ask questions about the relationship between bodies on one hand and law, history, and metaphor on the other.

White, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli Clare is a writer, speaker, activist, and teacher who lives in Vermont and addresses disability, gender, race, class, and sexuality in his work. He is author of two books, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation and The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion, a collection of poetry.

JASBIR PUAR
Bodies With New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled
5:00 p.m. Friday, April 5, 2013
Ulrich Recital Hall, Tawes Hall

Jasbir Puar is associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University. She is author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times and of articles in Gender, Place, and Culture; Social Text; Radical History Review; Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography; and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She has edited or co-edited special issues of GLQ, Social Text, and Society and Space.

Note: This was the keynote event for the DC Queer Studies Symposium, “Debilitating Queerness,” April 5, 2013, at the University of Maryland.

HEATHER LOVE
"I am Here, Where Are You?" Autism, Deviance, and the Observational Social Sciences
5:15 p.m. Thursday, April 25, 2013
Ulrich Recital Hall, Tawes Hall

Heather Love is R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, editor of a special issue of GLQ on the scholarship and legacy of Gayle Rubin ("Rethinking Sex"), and co-editor of a special issue of New Literary History ("Is There Life after Identity Politics?").

To obtain a souvenir copy of the poster, please visit the LGBT Studies Office in 2417 Marie Mount Hall.

We are grateful to the Office of Undergraduate Studies for its support of the series. Additional sponsors include the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies, the department of English, the Graduate School, the LGBT Equity Center, and the Office of Diversity & Inclusion.

Speaker Series Archive 2003-2013