A Day With Ann Cvetkovich: Lecture and Masterclass

Date  | 31 May, 2013
Time | 10:30–12:00, Public Lecture: The Art of the Queer Counterarchive
14:00-16:30, Masterclass (max. 20 participants)
Venue | Public lecture Bungehuis 4.01 | Masterclass Bungehuis 0.15 (Spuistraat 210)
Credits | 1 EC

The public lecture will examine the contemporary state of LGBTQ archives and the creative use of them by artists to create counter-archives and interventions in public history.

The masterclass aims at critically engaging with Ann Cvetkovich’s work by focusing on two of her books: An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures and Depression: A Public Feeling. In both of them, Cvetkovich aims at opening alternative accounts on/of trauma and depression, respectively, which are dominated by medical and psychiatric discourse. Instead, she offers cultural, social, historical and sexual discussions of feeling bad by spanning across feminism, critical race theory, Marxism and queer theory. For instance, in her latest book, Depression: A Public Feeling, Cvetkovich discusses depression not as a medical disease but as a cultural, political and historical category. Based on creative and speculative thinking, Cvetkovich experiments to craft new forms of writing and knowledge that are related to ordinary affective experience, alternative archives, crafting and creativity, theory and felt experience.

Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  She is the author of Mixed Feelings:  Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings:  Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression:  A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012).  She co-edited (with Ann Pellegrini) “Public Sentiments,” a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online, and (with Janet Staiger and Ann Reynolds) Political Emotions (Routledge, 2010). She has been coeditor, with Annamarie Jagose, of GLQ:  A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

 

Organized by Birkan Tas
To register for the masterclass please send an e-mail to birkanka@gmail.com