Book Presentation & Discussion, 13 Jan 2025, 19:00
This discussion will explore formal experimentation as an index for evolving expressions of male homosexuality from literary modernism to contemporary cinema. In so doing, it will expose a tradition of flamingly failed passing that is itself a surreptitious mode of passing: the flaunting of gay style as an intentionally unconvincing cover for gay content.
With Ian Fleishman, Nicolas Helm-Grovas, and Annie Ring
Micropolitics Revisited: The Trouble with the Scale of Interpersonal Life
Lecture, 20 Jan 2025, 19:30
This talk returns to the 1970s, when the science of interaction got a new, if contested, politics. Along with social movement activists, some scholars of interaction came to argue that ‘the interpersonal’ was an important micropolitical domain in which otherwise diffuse formations — authoritarianism, heteropatriarchy, anti-Black racism — manifested themselves in practice.
Institutional psychotherapy emerged in France during World War II as a resistance movement against the fascist extermination of patients with mental and physical disabilities. The movement was initiated at the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital and established a horizontal collective of patients and healthcare workers to dismantle confinement systems reminiscent of colonial and totalitarian practices. Embracing group therapies and patient-run cooperatives, these methods intertwined the ‘treatment of the institution’ and mental ‘disalienation’.