Pleasure and Violence

This panel brings together scholars, activists, and artists whose work attends to pleasure (sexual and otherwise) as a way of creating new worlds in contexts of inequalities and violence.  Panelists work in different geographical and cultural contexts who center the powerful pleasures, joys, and world-making of populations at the intersection of sexual/gender dissidence and being marked by their race, class, or caste. 

Panelists:

• Brian Horton, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Brandeis

  Brian A. Horton's (Ph.D., Brown University 2019) research and teaching broadly focus on sexual, gender, and racial minority subjects (in India and the US) and the social worlds that they build at the interstices of recognition and discrimination. His first book project, Shimmers of the Fabulous: Intimate Touch and Public Sex in Queer and Trans Bombay, explores how queer and trans subjects fabulate—critically invent and draw into the present—worlds of possibility via their risky occupation of public space for the purposes of sex and intimacy. Drawing on years of fieldwork in Bombay, Shimmers explores how the movements, sartorial styles, gestures, intimacies, affects, and intensities forged in the darkness of Bombay offer an archive of LGBTQ+ life beyond preoccupations with the state, law, and its attendant structures of precarity and crisis. In thinking with his interlocutors desires to touch and be touched, he examines queer life not just thorough premature foreclosures or violence, but also through creative practices that seek to extend life and its immanent possibilities. Horton's writing has appeared Sexualities,South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and the edited volume Queer Nightlife (Michigan Press)

• Don Anahi, Film Director

  Experimental film director, sexual deseducator, videojournalist, militant for the recognition of sex work and sex worker. She intersects pleasure with denouncing and proposing for various causes, from her perspective as a transfeminist lesbian. She plays audiovisually with the properties of optical illusions, going through various formats such as video, intervened reality, 360º and cinema.

  Her short films have been exhibited in museums, cinemas, streets and other exhibition centers in the countries where my short films have been selected. As in Spain, the Patio Herreriano Museum of Contemporary Art; or in France, in the Museum of Modern Art les Abattoirs. As well as have been exhibited in universities and other kinds of prisons.

• Joan Morgan, Program Director, Center for Black Visual Culture at Institute of African American Affairs, NYU

  Dr. Morgan is an award-winning feminist author and a graduate of NYU’s American Studies Ph.D. program. A pioneering hip-hop journalist, Dr. Morgan coined the term “hip-hop feminism” in 1999, when her book was published, the groundbreaking When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost. Her book has been used in college coursework across the country. Regarded internationally as an expert on the topics of hip-hop, the Caribbean, and gender, Dr. Morgan has made numerous television, radio and film appearances — among them HBOMax, Netflix, Lifetime, MTV, BET, VH-1, CNN, WBAI’s The Spin and MSNBC. Dr. Morgan has been a Visiting Instructor at Duke University where she taught The History of Hip-Hop Journalism, a Visiting Research Scholar at Vanderbilt University and Visiting Lecturer at Stanford University’s Institute for the Diversity of the Arts where she was the recipient of the prestigious 2013 Dr. St. Clair Drake Teaching Award for her course The Pleasure Principle: A Post-Hip Hop Search for a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure. She is the first Visiting Scholar to ever receive the award. She is also a recipient of the 2015 Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship, the 2015 Penfield Fellowship, the 2016 American Fellowship Award and a 2020 finalist for the ACLU Emerging Scholars Fellowship.

• Juana María Rodriguez, Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

  Juana María Rodríguez is the author of two books, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003) and Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014) which won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize at the Modern Language Association and was a Lambda Literary Foundation Finalist for LGBT Studies. In 2019, she co-edited a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on "Trans Studies en las Americas." In addition to her publications in academic journals internationally, her work has been featured in Aperture; NPR’s Latino USA, NBC.com, Canadian News Network, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Cosmopolitan for Latinas. She is completing a book on visual culture and Latina sexual labor, under contract with Duke University Press.

• LaShandra Sullivan, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Reed College

  LaShandra Sullivan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Reed College. Her research focuses on Indigenous and Black social movements in Brazil. She studies relations to land and landscapes amidst historical reconfigurations of racialized labor, rural, and urban transformations. This work ranges from struggles for Indigenous land titling to contestations over implicit racial markings of space and dwellings. Her work centers attention on the ways that race, gender, and sexuality factor in ongoing historical production of racism and material inequalities in Brazil. She works with activists who contest historical and ongoing oppression through myriad forms of protest. She carries out this research in two different regions of Brazil. The first project collaborates with Indigenous Guarani land activists in Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul. Her newer project  focuses on the intersections of Black feminist and lesbian activism and black empowerment in the city of Rio de Janeiro. 

• Sayak Valencia, El Cologio de la Frontera Norto

  Sayak Valencia has a doctorate in Philosophy, Critical and Feminist Theory from the Complutense University of Madrid. She is a professor-researcher at El Colef, attached to the Department of Cultural Studies.

  Among Valencia’s many distinctions include: the Erasmus Mundus program (Visiting Scholars) for the European Master's Degree in Women's and Gender Studies GEMMA. 2019-2020; being a member of the editorial board / editorial board of the Academic Magazine "Art and identity politics"; and the European Mention in her doctorate.

  She participates in academic networks such as "Aesthetics, politics and violence in globalized modernity" and in the Scientific Committee "International Congress on Genres and subjectivities in contemporary artistic practices." She is currently collaborating in the project: "Critical Geopolitics, Sociology of Development and Border Studies in Latin America"