Tomorrow sees the launch of the excellent Queer Up North festival in Manchester. You can get full details of the 2010 programme here. Sadly, I don't think I'll be able to make it down there this year but please do post your comments on what you thought of it, if you do manage to attend. As part of the festival there is a Sexuality Summer School of free public lectures which will be of interest to many of you. Here's the lecture programme:Sexuality Summer School and Queer up North, 2010
Public Lectures Series at 5pm, Lecture Theatre A, University Place
Monday May 24th
(Co-sponsored with the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures, RICC) David Eng (UPenn): The Queer Space of China
This lecture explores the contemporary emergence of gay and lesbian life in the People?s Republic of China in relation to liberal distinctions between public space and private desires. Following anthropologist Lisa Rofel?s recent work on expressive desire, I investigate the ways in which certain self-identified Chinese gays and lesbians are positioning themselves as individuals who are uniquely capable of embracing their private desires and thus claim to represent the vanguard of a new modernity in China. The project explores the idea that when sexuality travels it becomes many other things as well: a discourse of development, an emblem of modernity, a
metric of human rights--and human rights violations. In this presentation, I will focus my discussion on Stanley Kwan's 2001 film, Lan Yu.
Tuesday May 25th
Mandy Merck (Royal Holloway, London): Screen Tests: Andy Warhol
Films Susan Sontag
He was a working class Catholic, trained in commercial art. She was a middle-class Jewish intellectual. He painted Coke bottles. She endorsed Absolut Vodka. He liked her look. She doubted his sincerity. They were both homosexual. In 1964 he filmed her portrait. In 1967 she called his work 'inhuman'.
Thursday May 27th
Richard Dyer (Kings College London): The Angel's Song: What about
Queer Music?
There has been much research in recent years into the presence of lesbians and gay men in music, but there remains the issue - can one hear their sexuality in the music itself? I shall look at some of the arguments around this question and focus on the case of the film composer Nino Rota (most famous for his scores for Fellini and The Godfather films), trying to think of the music of queers more in terms of strategies of pleasing, passing and pastiche than in terms of
sexual self-expression.
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