Here is one way to gain notice in the edgier circles of higher education. Judith Halberstam has a lecture entitled “Animating Revolt/Revolting Animation: Penguin Love, Doll Sex, and the Spectacle of the Queer Non-human.” She delivered the lecture at
—–UCLA (Oct 06)
—–University of Alberta (January 07)
—–University of Cincinnati (February 07)
—–University of Minnesota (April 07)
—–Emory (September 07)
University of Minnesota summarizes the content:
Halberstam examines the narrative and visual transbiological leaps that we have made in our understandings of terms like heterosexuality and homosexuality, male and female, and individual and community in an age of artificial insemination, transsexuality, and cloning. Halberstam proposes that popular culture has already imagined multiple alternatives to male and female, masculine and feminine, family and individuality, and that contemporary popular culture, specifically horror film and animation, can provide rich archives for an alternative politics of embodiment, reproduction, and non-reproduction.
The women’s studies program at UCLA announced the lecture series of which Halberstam’s talk was a part with:
Body studies has been dominated by Foucauldian approaches emphasizing the regulation of the body by the modern state,” notes Lee [a faculty member]. “We are thrilled to be hosting these nationally renown scholars and creative artists who stress the queer performances and sensual kinetics of embodiment as avenues to enliven the discussion of feminism’s relation to body theory.