The Global
Gaze:
Human Rights &
the Gay International
As LGBT
identity has aligned with mechanisms of state power, we
have witnessed a proliferation of imperially-sanctioned missionary
projects that Joseph Massad in “Re-Orienting Desire” terms the Gay
International. The Gay International is a set of hegemonic
organizations, including the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA)
and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC),
which have co-opted US human rights discourse to appoint themselves
advocates for Middle Eastern “gays” and “lesbians.”
Imposing a
universalized sexual epistemology onto others, the Gay International
incites the antagonism of anti-Western nationalist groups. Through
this strategy of incitement to discourse the Gay International does not
foster sexual liberation, but rather provokes overt
legal prohibitions on same-sex practices and violent state backlash
against post-colonial queers. The Gay International’s desire to unveil
post-colonial peoples’ sexual practices reveal complicity in a
disciplining imperial gaze, while the ideological
underpinnings of this perspective remain conspicuously invisible.
7PM Thursday October 18th
Kimmel Room 912
60 Washington Square South
Gayopoly:
Gentrification & Neoliberal Spatial Politics
The urban
landscape is a locus of queer imagination and migration.
Speaking from the threshold and epicenter of gentrification that is New
York University, we will attempt to address the economy of desires and
practices violently reshaping New York City.
Neoliberalism
is a set of policies and programs in practice since the late 1970’s,
promoting the opening of markets, privatization of public services,
and commodification of biological life. Numerous agents
and institutions of gay gentrification, private businesses,
mass media, and the state, constitute the neoliberal ideology Lisa
Duggan terms homonormativity. While aggressively organizing towards
freedoms such as the right to marriage, homonormativity depoliticizes queer communities, delineating liberation in
terms of consumption and private domesticity.
We will chart
shifting boundaries between public and private and new forms of
exclusion and entitlement—the freedom to consume and possess—that
substantiates homonormativity and gentrification. Whether sanitized
Christopher St. piers, Williamsburg’s necropolis of hip, or Jackson
Heights’ Mecca of consumption, a quiet violence remaps the spaces and
lives of New York City queers of color.
7PM Thursday November 1st
Kimmel Room 602
60 Washington Square South |
