2015 Gender Studies and the Humanities Lecture:
Elizabeth Freeman
English, University of California, Davis
The lecture analyzes how Tino Sehgal’s museum installation “Kiss” establishes the normative temporal scheme of contemporary heterosexual sex, and how a series of performances by Brennan Gerard & Ryan Kelly (who work as Gerard & Kelly) comment upon and transform that scheme. Especially at issue is the role that the rhythms established by synchrony, reciprocity, and endurance play in the discourse of “good” sex gay and straight, and the role of arrhythmia in fostering queer sexual possibilities.
Elizabeth Freeman is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Duke University Press, 2010) and the co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. In 2007 she edited a special issue of GLQ on “Queer Temporalities.” Her first book, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture was published by Duke University Press in 2002.
This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Research in the Humanities, the Department of Art History, the Center for Visual Cultures, the Department of Communication Arts, Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies Department, Digital Studies Program, the English Department, the Gender and Women’s Studies Department, and the Gender and Sexuality Caucus.