CONVENERS
Jorge Díaz is a sexual dissidence activist, biologist, poet, and feminist, with a PhD in Biochemistry from the Universidad de Chile. He has been a member of the Colectivo Universitario de Disidencia Sexual (CUDS) since 2008. He has written and published articles on biopolitics, feminist theory and aesthetics, and has also participated in art and sexual politics-related conferences.
Jack Halberstam has been working at the intersections of art and performance for the last two decades. Jack’s research and scholarship explores popular culture, eccentric political expression, and gender and sexual variance. Jack is currently working on several projects including a book titled THE WILD on queer anarchy.
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is a writer, performer, and scholar interested in multiple topics related to sexualities and performance in the Americas. He is author of Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Caribbean and is currently working on drag, trans performance and activism. He blogs and performs as Lola von Miramar and has published several works of fiction.
Felipe Rivas San Martín works with an imaginary composed by the screens, interfaces and applications with which we interact daily, using these images to produce his artwork. He also works with QR codes, producing “QueeR Codes,” to investigate the circulation of technologies in Latin America, the imposition of the neoliberal economy and its cultural effects in Chile.
LOCATIONS
18/7 – 20/7: H310, Tecnoaulas FEN
22/7: F12 FAU
DESCRIPTION
In keeping with the central theme of this year’s Encuentro, we propose to hold a workshop on Eccentric Sexualities. Recognizing the limitations of 20th century models of sexuality that are built upon Euro-American concepts of orientation, identity, urbanity, and the erotic, we plan to explore other epistemological organizations of desire. We recognize that across the Americas, other formulations of desire and dissidence, reproduction and resistance, and inside and outside have always existed. This workshop will look at historical examples as well as contemporary sexual formations and will draw from rich performance archives to answer a series of questions about sexual eccentricity. We are also interested in in-depth investigations of the strategies that these dissident and feminist collectives have developed—and are currently developing—that engageing artistic and activist practices such as drag and trans performance; the politics of trans-fiction; cyber-activism and post-Internet; feminist audiovisuality and photography; and independent publishing and activist writing. We will explore these strategies as countercultural weapons that defy the aesthetic canons of the representation of sexuality and are associated with the ex-centric.
Workshop participants will be working in a number of different areas including:
- The Margins of Sexual Performance: The Place of the Body
- Feminist Porn and Post-Porn
- Abjection and Feminist Critique
- Virtual Space and Dissident Archives
- Transfiction, Trans/Drag, and Transdisciplinarity
- Histories of Race and Desire
- Aesthetic Proposals of Transfeminist and Sexual Dissidence Collectives
- Performance and Perversion
- Outsider Performances and Art
- The Odd, the Strange, the Weird, and the Wonderful
- New and Old Theories of the Body
- Transgenderism and the Eccentric