In the decades after its invention in 1839, photography was inextricably linked to the Middle East. Introduced as a crucial tool for Egyptologists and Orientalists who needed to document their archaeological findings, the photograph was easier and faster to produce in intense Middle Eastern light—making the region one of the original sites for the practice of...

The first event in the 2017-2018 Sexuality & Geopolitics Seminar Series will feature Ari Heinrich, Associate Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at UCSD. Their lecture, “Chinese Bodies as Biological Surplus: Plastinated Cadavers and Geopolitical Heirarchies of the Human" will question what a comparative examination of Chinese-language discourse on the plastinated human cadaver exhibits might...

 Li Zhiwang, “Female Nude.”    Abstract:  This chapter argues that the works of controversial Chinese contemporary experimental artists known as the “Cadaver Group”—some of whom were at the center of a recent controversy surrounding a retrospective of Chinese art at the Guggenheim—should not be dismissed so easily as “shock art.”  Instead the works could be understood as documenting a transition from an...

The second event in the 2017-2018 Sexuality & Geopolitics Seminar Series will feature Peter Sigal, Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. His lecture, "Thinking with Trash: Nahua Knowledge and Queer Being" discusses how the Nahuas of central Mexico help us to see how indigenous meaning-making relates to the intellectual enterprise that...

Figure 1 from Making Maya Men: Fantasy, Voyeurism, and Queer Abjection Abstract: Franciscan friar Diego de Landa, in the mid sixteenth century, and Hollywood film producer and director Mel Gibson, in the early twenty-first century, created Maya men as abject queer beings. In 1566 Landa wrote his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, an extensive ethnographic...