News
Congratulations to our 2020 – 2021 IRWGS Graduate Fellows Mia Cecily Florin-Sefton (Department of English & Comparative Literature) and Alex Pekov (Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature). Fellows are selected annually, based on the excellence of their scholarship and their commitment to women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.
Mia Cecily Florin-Sefton is a 4th year PhD candidate in the English and Comparative Literature Department whose academic research sits at the interdisciplinary intersection of feminist science studies, disability studies, critical race theory and biopolitics. To be more specific, she examines shifting and evolving theorizations of individual plasticity, developmental discourses and representations of aging alongside their relationship to the long history of eugenics and the science of variation and difference. Before coming to Columbia, she was a Thouron scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and has also previously worked as a curatorial assistant at the Barbican in London; where she helped to curate an exhibition on contemporary feminist and queer science fiction. Prior to that she worked as a magazine editor for the National Association of Writers in Education.
This year as a graduate fellow for IRWGS Mia is excited to explore new, virtual ways to cultivate solidarity and collaboration amongst the IRWGS graduate and undergraduate community; as well as advocating for the decolonizing of the curriculum, intellectual responsibility and feminist pedagogy. Alongside this mission statement she is also eager to create new opportunities for graduate workers to collaborate and share their works in progress.
Alex Pekov is a 5th year PhD candidate in Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature at Columbia. He holds a BA in Philosophy (Moscow State University Lomonosov) and an MA in Slavic and Jewish Studies (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg). His dissertation-in-the-making, “Toward a Transmediterranean Genealogy: Matrilineal Legacies in Sephardi Women Writers from the Former Yugoslavia and the Maghreb,” focuses on the autofictional family novels, crafted in French and Serbian by the women writers of Jewish Sephardi origin, born in the French-ruled Maghreb and ex-Yugoslavia, respectively. Applying a host of feminist and decolonizing reading and interpretive strategies, Alex studies these literary works as a linguistically diverse and translingual, geographically disconnected, largely untranslated into English, and hence virtually invisible archive of Sephardi women’s writing. Alex’s broader research interests include multilingualism and decolonization, genocide & gynocide, gender in writing, postmemory, queer diasporic lifeworlds, colonial and gay male physique photography.
In the 2020-2021 academic year, Alex will also be joining the CTL cohort of Lead Teaching Fellows in order to reflect on the many intersections of linguistics and feminist pedagogy—the topic that he started to investigate ever since he took the IRWGS Feminist Pedagogy class with Marianne Hirsch under the umbrella of the IRWGS Graduate Certificate. As an IRWGS Graduate Fellow, Alex hopes to serve as the Institute’s ambassador across Columbia’s departments, spreading the knowledge of the Institute’s expertise and asserting the value of immersing in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies not only for one’s research, but also for the authorship, ownership, and exploration of one’s self. With the academic quotidian forced to migrate largely online for the foreseeable future, Alex is committed to being an agent of maintaining and mobilizing our community’s intellectual exchange, co-presence, and togetherness in the virtual format—against and in spite of the disruptions and physical separations, caused by the current health crisis.
An Interview with Kalle Berggren on Masculinity and Intimate Partner Violence
By Tiana Reid, IRWGS Grad Fellow ’19 – ’20
On Wednesday February 19, 2020, Dr. Kalle Berggren of Stockholm University and Visiting Scholar at IRWGS gave a talk called “Theorizing masculinity and intimate partner violence: from radical feminism to queer temporality?” We followed up with Berggren to get a deeper sense of how discourses around violence against women fits into queer and feminist studies. Co-authored with Lucas Gottzén and Hanna Bornäs, Berggren’s “tour” theorizing masculinity and intimate partner violence is forthcoming and will be published by Routledge as “Theorizing masculinity and intimate partner violence” in Men, Masculinities and Intimate Partner Violence, edited by Lucas Gottzén, Margunn Björnholt and Floretta Boonzaier.
Tiana Reid: Your talk traced the theoretical landscape around intimate partner violence including radical feminist, criminological and intersectional approaches. Why was it important to give us a tour of the various arguments?
Kalle Berggren: When I began working on intimate partner violence (IPV) two years ago, I was struck by the interdisciplinarity of these issues. You have philosophers doing conceptual analysis concerning consent, ethnographers studying how people make sense of consent in their everyday lives, sociologists connecting IPV to social structures, criminologists studying violent crimes, psychologists identifying risk-factors, public health scholars researching prevention, and so on. Sometimes these bodies of work are in conversation with each other, sometimes not. In my talk, I wanted to give a tour of the major different ways in which masculinity and IPV have been theorized within feminist and gender scholarship.
One major difference concerns whether it is useful to look into men’s paths to becoming violent at all, and if so, how these paths should be conceptualized. Another difference concerns the status of gender as a category. Some scholars have focused primarily on men’s violence against women, whereas others have paid more attention to issues of gender and sexual diversity on the one hand, and race and class inequalities on the other. Coming from a background in a Gender Studies department with a strong tradition in feminist cultural studies, I have noticed that there is a gap between research on gender and violence and current debates in feminist theory and feminist cultural studies. I believe that violence research could benefit from more engagement with these debates, and turning to queer temporality is one way of doing that.
TR: Let’s start with the title of your talk,” Can you say a little bit more about the “queer temporality” in your title?
KB: Together with two colleagues, I’m currently conducting a study on young men who have committed physical or sexual violence against their intimate women partners in Sweden, One of the things we have found most intriguing in this project is issues about time. First of all, statistics indicate that young men commit the most violence in intimate relationships. Yet, in the Swedish context this violence seems to fall in-between discourses of ”youth violence” which is often about men’s violence against other men in public, and discourses about ”domestic violence” which tends to be about people who are 30+. In our data, which consists of both interviews with young men perpetrators and short narratives about violence that were submitted to a feminist anti-violence campaign, we also see temporality playing an important role. Several stories contain versions of ”I didn’t realize then…” or ”I didn’t think about it as violence then”. In making sense of such narratives, we are turning to the exciting work on queer temporality by Jack Halberstam and others, which has emphasized how social norms and temporality are embedded in each other. On the one hand, we think that the stories in our data resonate with broader discourses where Sweden is portrayed as a gender-equal country that still has problems with violence. In other words, violence is attributed to the past and seen as anachronistic. On the other hand, we are also interested in what we call becoming a perpetrator afterwards. In contrast to some work in criminology on how people desist from crime, we suggest that violence need not go together with a criminal identity. On the contrary, our analysis shows how some men realize only retrospectively that they have committed intimate partner violence. This shows how we do not simply live linear lives, and these transformations of the past can, in some cases, also be seen as an interesting consequence of the success of feminist campaigns.
TR: I always like to know how scholars toggle between interests and so I was curious about your past research on hip hop. How do you see the connection between these two projects?
KB: In my PhD thesis and other publications, I have analyzed hip hop in a Swedish context. Focusing on rap lyrics, I was fascinated by the genre’s capacity to encompass a variety of discourses. There is sexism but also feminist resistance; anti-racist analysis as well as racialized discourses; ableist metaphors but also critical perspectives on disability; and more. Sometimes research on hip hop in Europe has been centered around the notion of resistance, but I have been more interested in highlighting complexity, inspired by U.S. work on intersectionality in hip hop. On one level, my research on hip hop and on IPV are quite different, one project being about popular music and the other about a pervasive social problem. What unites both projects, however, is my interest in developing critical work on masculinity that draws from contemporary feminist, queer, and intersectional perspectives, in order to get beyond some of the limitations of earlier masculinity research.
Reflections on Ithaca Sounding 2020
By Issac Jean-Francois CC ’20
I would like to open my response by sharing my immense thanks to Professor Ellie Hisama and Richard Valitutto for inviting me to participate in Ithaca Sounding 2020. Much of my current thinking on Julius Eastman would not be possible without the unending support, guidance, and mentorship of Professors Saidiya Hartman, Ellie Hisama, and Marc Hannaford—thank you.
Spanning four days between January 30th and February 2nd, Ithaca Sounding 2020 was a conference/festival that featured the work of five composers from Ithaca: David Borden, Sarah Hennies, Julius Eastman, Robert Palmer, and Ann Silsbee. It has left a lasting impression on my conceptualizations of music listening and scholarship. It was unlike any conference I had ever attended in that it featured a series of intense performances and conversations right up against each other. As we approached the end of the conference, however, I realized that the distinction between listening to a paper presentation and listening to a piano sonata began to blur. A critical sonic proximity between talk and performance allowed for questions and discussion to flow between the sound of the voice and instrumentation. How might the work of the composers featured in the festival command a listening that swings between paper and performance? Or, rather, how might the academic project and presentation become musical?
I hoped to explore this question through two particular discussions at the festival: Listening Locally and Decolonizing the Curriculum. The workshop on decoloniality was led by Sarah Haefeli of Ithaca College. The discussion argued for an insertion of underrepresented composers into the curriculum of Musicology and a shift in the instruction of music from time to place (e.g. move from an era of music making to the place that a particular kind of music would be listened to like, the Court). It was the first time that I critically considered the question of place in relation to sound. Yet, I am unsure if an insistence on a kind of rootedness is particularly decolonial. I would argue that specifying place would insist upon colonial logics of static place and location. The workshop was very helpful for my thinking about the colonial logics that make up the instruction of music history and theory. Which is to say, underrepresentation in academic faculty and compositional practice does not only set up a false notion that there are not people of color in the archive of making music but that somehow Classical and Minimalist music emerges disembodied and apolitically. A decolonial critique of music theory and praxis that rests not only in folding in the abject performers, academics, and composers alike but a critique that interrogates the very structures of the discipline. This particular workshop inspired me to invite Professor Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier of Columbia’s Department of Music and Carlota Aguilar-Gonzalez to IRWGS to discuss the intersection of gender and sexuality studies on race and decolonial musicology.
I was invited to present on a panel titled Listening Locally: Intersectionality and Contemporary Music along with Ellie Hisama, Frederick Cruz Nowell, and Matthew Mendez. My research on Julius Eastman has never led me to believe that his life and work implied an insistence on place. Sarah Hennies and Ann Silsbee were both musicians and composers whose work, either musical or poetic, indicated that they were inspired by and connected to Ithaca, New York. Yet, in parsing out whether Eastman cared much about place, I remembered I was dealing with a fractured archive where absence, through the energy of Eastman’s Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc (1981), “speaks boldly.” In reflecting on this powerful discussion, I have begun to think about the relationship between absence and place. Ellie Hisama noted that Eastman was born in New York City, though it is often told that he was born in Ithaca, New York. His mother, Frances, noted that her family’s move to Ithaca cycled around concerns about safety. Absence and place mingle with flight, here. I can only imagine what it would have been like for Eastman to move to Ithaca as a black gay man; from my short time in the area I felt out of place. The place that remained consistent for all of these composers and musicians was the space of sound. All of the featured composers from Ithaca had either known each other or performed each other’s work. As pianist, Adam Tendler discovered during one of our discussions, Eastman loved to perform Silsbee’s and Palmer’s work. Sarah Hennies performed the very difficult vibraphone section of Femenine (1974) on the evening of February 1st. What I heard was a sonic communality that traversed place, space, and normative notions of absence. Though Eastman, along with Palmer and Silsbee, are no longer with us they persist in an unrelenting sonic outpour latent in each archival encounter.
I would have to say the most impactful section of the festival was Ellie Hisama’s presentation: “A Practice of Refusal:” Hearing Queer Black Visuality in Julius Eastman’s Work. Hisama read important Eastman texts and materials against the grain by way of Tina Campt’s Listening to Images (2017). Hisama’s precise analysis of Eastman’s compositional relationship between the sonic and visual—an oft-overlooked space of inquiry in Eastman scholarship—offered an incredible alternative to normative listening practices. Thinking about the Campt’s framing of “phonic substance” of Eastman’s compositions, namely Macle (1971) and Colors (1973), Hisama argued for an interpretation of musical notation that “emanates from the image itself.” Color extends between the chromatics of flesh and timbral notation allowing us to hear singers and instrumentation sound “as if [they] are in flight” (Eastman).
I look forward to continuing my work on Julius Eastman and my participation in Ithaca Sounding 2020 was an incredible opportunity to pursue and develop my questions alongside a broader intellectual community.
by Ami Yoon, Student, English & Comparative Literature
As a part of the “Extinction Thresholds” lecture series, Professor Greta LaFleur (Associate Professor of American Studies, Yale University) spoke on environmental logic in theories of early sexuality in her talk, sharing work from her first book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). As a model of a dynamic reading practice, LaFleur’s methodology in approaching eighteenth-century narratives circulating throughout the British colonies for discussions of sexual behavior, via the optic of racial difference, struck me as a canny way of engaging with historical, scientific, and literary texts that are, most of the time, unforgivingly racist and sexist. There was a kind of critical intimacy in how LaFleur opened up the hostile space of eighteenth-century natural history texts to trace a multiplicity of sexual behaviors in a period that long predates conversations about sexual identities and politics through the lens of modern sexology or queer studies. Moreover, LaFleur’s work in denaturalizing terms such as race and sex as stable categories enacts a perennially relevant lesson for students of women and gender studies.
Beginning with a 1614 narrative, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, by an Englishman named William Davis, LaFleur guided us through how Davis’ casual but confident characterization of the “Turks” of Algiers as “villains” and “altogether sodomites” indicates an early modern rhetorical habit of assessing ethnic or cultural difference through sexual behaviors. Such judgments and ideas about sexuality, closely tied to race, thread throughout eighteenth-century natural histories—from Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae to the writings of Thomas Jefferson—and migrate into popular narratives. In her work, LaFleur studies examples from four kinds of popular narratives that index how discussions of racial behavior rendered visible varieties of sexual acts in this era before sexology: Barbary captivity narratives, execution narratives, cross-dressing narratives, and antivice narratives.
The suturing of racial politics to sexual politics also comes linked with eighteenth-century conceptions of the human body as porous to the environment. Environmental logics of humoralism or climate theory (in which climate is thought to affect personal disposition and physiology) influenced readings of the body, such that eighteenth-century science effectively bound sex to race. As race and sex are being brought together again in contemporary discriminatory discourse, LaFleur highlighted how there has been a consistent relationship between racial science and sexual behavior for a long, long time. LaFleur thus explores what sex was like in the world of British North American colonies, before the concept of sexuality came into existence in modernity; indeed, in his introduction to LaFleur’s talk, Professor Jack Halberstam affirmed the importance of LaFleur’s book in offering us a prehistory of sexuality.
LaFleur commenced her lecture with a warning that her work delves into what she called “ugly” texts, fraught with multiple orders of violence, and toward the end of the session broached afresh the difficulty of reading early Atlantic world texts for adequate representations of sexuality. The challenge concerning the question of representation in her archives, LaFleur remarked, is perhaps not unlike what Saidiya Hartman confronts in “Venus in Two Acts” or Marisa Fuentes in Dispossessed Lives. The critical framework that LaFleur embraces in studying early sexuality is to read for technologies of representation, as almost none of her subjects speak on their own behalf about their sexual behaviors. Her historiography is a careful one, mindful not to turn into any kind of queer hagiography, but alive to what she describes, in her book, as the risk of a “devastating erasure of the relentless specificity of the everyday realities of people very distant from us, people who were grappling, in their own time and in their own terms, with both the philosophical and ethical question of making sense of human difference” (15). The decentering of the subject required by such a critical practice, too, resonates with the interests of feminist and queer scholarship, and as material for students to study, LaFleur’s work seems particularly well suited for fostering a dynamic receptiveness to queer ideas and methods.
Congratulations to our 2019 – 2020 IRWGS Graduate Fellows Diana Newby (Department of English & Comparative Literature) and Tiana Reid (Department of English & Comparative Literature). Fellows are selected annually, based on the excellence of their scholarship and their commitment to women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.
Diana Newby is a 4th year PhD candidate in Columbia’s Department of English & Comparative Literature. Her research sits at the intersection of 19th century literature, science, and affect theory, with a particular focus on old and new materialisms in the Victorian novel. Her dissertation project, “Passive Passions,” examines Victorian writing—particularly women’s writing—that challenged Western Enlightenment dualisms of reason/emotion, body/mind, self/other, and human/environment. Diana’s tenure with IRWGS has helped her draw out important affinities that these 19th century reformulations of embodiment, identity and agency share with contemporary new materialisms and feminist and queer affect studies. Her goal is to bring together literary and theoretical archives that make possible a non-normative understanding of embodied subjectivity as passive and relational.
In her teaching, Diana is also committed to disrupting normative knowledge formations and centering issues related to feminisms, gender, sexuality, and the body. At Columbia, she has taught two sections of University Writing-Readings in Gender and Sexuality, and she has taught social justice-focused writing and literature classes at two women’s colleges (Mills and Barnard). She has taken the IRWGS Feminist Pedagogy class with Marianne Hirsch, completed a certificate in Innovative Teaching at Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning, and will soon fulfill the requirements for the IRWGS graduate certificate with a syllabus and bibliography on “Women Writing Bodies.” When she isn’t teaching, reading, or writing, Diana can be found running in Central Park, testing out new vegetarian recipes, or playing with her cat, The Bug.
As an IRWGS Graduate Fellow, Newby hopes to organize events that explore points of contact between queer and feminist theory and affect studies, building on existing Institute programming like the Bodily series. She is also interested in creating more opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations between graduate students, faculty and visiting scholars, as well as exploring engagements with artists, writers and activists from beyond the academy.
Tiana Reid is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Her dissertation uses what W. E. B. Du Bois called “world-work” as a jumping-off point to pay attention to gendered perspectives on accumulation, labor, reproduction, and imagination during the middle of the last century. In 2015, she was awarded a four-year doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her writing has appeared or will appear in publications including American Quarterly, Bitch, Canadian Art, Feminist Formations, Flash Art, The Nation, The New Inquiry, The Paris Review, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, VICE, and Vulture. Former editorial assistant at Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, she has been an editor of The New Inquiry and a member of the editorial collective for Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory since 2017. She has presented her work at conferences including the American Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, and the National Women’s Studies Association.
Reid holds a graduate certificate in Feminist Scholarship from Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality and taught the course she developed at IRWGS, “Hauntings: American Poetry in the 1980s,” in Spring 2019. Most recently, Reid has been working on a new biannual magazine of gay communism called Pinko which launches Fall 2019. As an IRWGS Graduate Fellow, Reid is looking forward to continuing a feminist and queer study that distrusts what “woman” means and signifies, which is of course to also understand that the word indexes different things in different places, in different languages, and at different times.