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...