Stanford Humanities Center
Read through a conversation between Joel Cabrita the South African artist and curator Gabi Ngcobo, Sabelo Mlangeni, and students from Professor Cabrita's class, held at Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center on November 15, 2023.
Jordache A. Ellapen reflects on his photographic project, Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy, which blends photographs from his family archive with contemporary portraits shot in a studio. The work examines the intersections of race, sexuality, and eroticism as they relate to the in/visibility of black and brown queer bodies and subjectivities in South Africa.
Keguro Macharia weaves together histories and theories of blackness and sexuality to generate a fundamentally new understanding of both the black diaspora and queer studies.
Mel Y. Chen considers "toxicity" and "animacy" in the racializing and queering of bodies and sociality. Through a look at national panic in the US surrounding lead in Chinese-manufactured toys, an auto-ethnographic exploration of body, sociality and immunity, and other varied discussions, Chen probes social and object relationships amid material and bodily assemblages.
What can the nineteenth-century American novelist Sarah Orne Jewett tell us about inhabiting a present in which historical time appears both deranged and inescapable?
The second album by "Perfume Genius" is an example of how radically traversing the homonormative and queer/wild political scene(s) both enlivens stale gay political tropologies and revises them to put experimental queer aesthetic tendencies in high relief.
In this essay, we suggest that this new conceptualization of Swamp Thing re-positions the creature as a thing; an obdurate entity that does not easily adhere to rigid classifications of ‘human’ or ‘plant,’ of ‘animate’ or ‘inanimate,’ of ‘original’ or ‘copy’ (even if characters within the comic text may argue otherwise).
Masten considers what queer philology can uncover in the Shakespearean text from the period before lexical standardization.
In Noah Baumbach’s 2015 national-millennial fable, Mistress America, “I’m just normal” bespeaks dissatisfaction. It’s an identity that Tracy claims in an effort to project her way out of it.
