Schedule

Q-Grad 2024 Program

SCHEDULE

8:15am-9:00am – Breakfast & Registration (Salon & Lobby)

9:00am-9:15am – Welcome and Opening Remarks (Salon)
Patty, Lili, Benjamin

9:15am-10:30am – Panel 1
Pushing the Limits of Form (Salon): Elaina Lorenzo, Andreea Moise, and Krishanu Nath

10:45am-12:15pm – Panel 2 & Panel 3
Queering Corporealities: Nonsense in Artistic Practices (Salon): Eva Marie Gonzalez Ruskiewicz and Gray Golding, Moodzi (Abhijeet Mudgerikar), and Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou

The Senselessness of Violence (Meeting Room): Sam Brooks, Em Padilla, Evan [NAMI] Sakuma, and Fernanda Soria-Cruz

12:15pm-1:15pm – Lunch (Salon & South Courtyard)

12:45pm-4:15pm – Durational Performance
Handle with Care (Lobby & Foyer): Eva Marie Gonzalez Ruskiewicz and Gray Golding

1:15pm-2:30pm – Workshops
Cento as Nonsense (Salon): Jo Alvarado

Queerness and Academia (Meeting Room): Q-RAC (Micaela Bronstein, Jackson Gzehoviak, Jade Levandofsky, Mikaela Zetley, Amanda Giuliano, Belle Lee, Ingrid Tien)

2:45-4:00pm – Panel 4 & Panel 5
Body Beautiful, Body Monstrous (Salon): Tatum Howey, Jose Nateras, Ravindu Ranawaka and Gunindu Abeysekera

Querying Data (Meeting Room): Neerej Dev and Silpa Joy, Phoebe Mock, and Ingrid Tien

4:15-5:45pm – Keynote (Salon)
Chris E. Vargas and Eric A. Stanley

5:45pm-6 – Closing Remarks (Salon)
Patty, Lili, Benjamin

6:00-8:00 – Reception/Dinner (South Courtyard)

PANELS & ABSTRACTS

Panel 1 – Pushing the Limits of Form

Elaina Lorenzo – “Stop Making Sense: Queer Implications of Nonsense and Banality in Pop Music Performance”

“Facts don’t do what I want them to, facts just twist the truth around,” sings David Byrne in “Crosseyed and Painless,” a song by his New Wave band, Talking Heads. Byrne’s wild dancing and Dada-influenced babbling in the 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense physicalized a new type of pop performance, one that continues to invite dancing and engagement from its audiences, both in the original concert venue and at screenings of the film. For the band, as implied by the film’s title, making sense was something that just got in the way of something else – something deeper.

Using Stop Making Sense as a starting point, this presentation questions how “nonsense” and banality in pop music proposes new modes of communication, ones that don’t rely on sensical language. In popular music settings, whether they be concerts, raves, or queer bars, language takes second priority to sound, movement, and bodies. With endlessly repeating hooks, ear-splitting volume levels, and intimate locations, spaces of queer pop and techno render ideas of “proper” and neurotypical verbal communication futile, instead encouraging us to talk with the bodies often deemed by mainstream society as “improper” themselves.      

In what settings do cliches and nonsense gain new importance through their repetition? What does it mean to “Want It That Way?” To be someone’s “Wonderwall,” or their “USA?” How can these queer settings, often derided for being vapid, actually create new worlds, deeper connections, and community?

Andreea Moise (virtual) – “Towards a Queer Narratology: Queer Affectual Forms in Ann Quin’s Experimentalism”

In line with Susan Sontag’s call in her essay “Against Interpretation” to implement a study of the novel that highlights the inner workings of form, and marshal criticism in the direction of “show[ing] how [a novel] is . . . rather than to show what it means” (14), my research contributes to the question of queer narratology and the study of queer affectual forms. I am interested in the narratological conversations that unfold between the canon of queer Modernism – taking into account Virginia Woolf’s essential Orlandian heritage in particular – and the postmodernist epistemology of queer narrators that either blur the lines or dismantle the limits of traditional narratology in the works of American experimental novelist Kathy Acker and British novelist Ann Quin. By analysing passages from two postmodernist writers that pushed the limits of prescriptive and sexually normative literariness onto the field of ‘nonsense’ narratives, my presentation focuses on proving that these experimental texts abide by Sontag’s call for an “erotics of art” (14). This can account for the linguistic unease of queer(ed) narrators and the experimental techniques which render texts ‘erotic’ by their embodied intimacies with the reader, the queer potentiality of the readerly present conjured by the affectual dialectics, and the collection of excesses and absences of meaning inherent to their conceptualisation.

Krishanu Nath (virtual) – “Defiance in the Drapes: Queer Fashion in Contemporary India and the Politics of Excess” 

The perception of fashion has witnessed enormous shifts, from being a bourgeoisie and capitalist out turn to a tool for identity making and registering defiance. The enormous surge of defiant fashion trends initiated by queer identified persons in contemporary India, has not only stretched the very meaning of fashion, but has also debunked the aesthetic strands of appearances of a heteronormative conformist order. This paper intends to study the contemporary fashion trends, carried out by queer identified persons in India, in both real and virtual spaces, thereby rekindling the very idea of fashion as a tool of resistance and meaning making process. Over the decades, fashion has appeared as a channel for associating bodies with diverse categories, like gender, class, caste, race and ethnicity. Under such defined compartmentalization, any act of intermingling, is considered as an offense with the potential of disrupting the conformist social order. But the recent turn of fashion trends, staged by queer individuals in India, whether in form of drag performances, gender fluid makeup tutorials, flamboyant makeup and attires, reframes fashion as an embodied exercise, which disrupts the rational cisgender status quo of dressing and appearances. By critically studying the fashion statement posed by queer individuals in contemporary India, this paper intends to engage with the idea of excess, irrational and outrageous in queer fashion, and its implications over registering queer visibility.

Panel 2 – Queering Corporealities: Nonsense in Artistic Practices

Eva Marie Gonazlez Ruskiewicz and Gray Golding – Handle with Care

We will be discussing Handle with Care, our durational performance interrogating the politics of movement and disability in academic spaces. Using our bodies, we will explore the tensions between practices of care and normative conventions of knowledge production. In this talk, we will speak to the theoretical and artistic frameworks that inspired the performance, as well as the anti-logical, embodied knowledge that arose from rehearsing the performance.

Moodzi (Abhijeet Mudgerikar) – “Nazar: Queer Desire In The Face Of A Constructed Gaze In India”

As a child, my mother would put a kaala teeka (black mark) on the side of my forehead as a form of protection against any buri nazar (in this context, the “evil eye”).  I always found the marks comforting while being away from her at school. Growing up, nazar (translated in Hindi as sight, gaze, perception) came up in various media such as Bollywood films, television ads, printed behind vehicles, with the popular phrase, “Buri nazar wale tera muh kaala” (The one with the evil eye, may your mouth/face turn black). This expression speaks to the historical and racial connotations that have existed in India under its hegemonic structures. This association with an “evil eye” has strong cultural implications and still exists in my mind as a sense of always being watched or surveilled for my gender identity.

This paper will study the historical, cultural, and etymological references of nazar in India to decipher its origins and connect with contemporary narratives of societal perceptions affecting queer marginalized people. Broadly defined as a way of seeing, nazar can be interpreted as a gaze that imposes a form of appropriate societal conduct for the minoritarian subject within a majoritarian public sphere. Here, we look at queer expressions of desire in the face of this constructed gaze, and the various ways in which people and media choose to defy it. Through performance theory, I engage with notions of “desire” in the Indian context and how it is performed or withheld.

This research is developing in my graduate study focusing on movement-based explorations that violate the codes of intimacy, proximity, queerness for a South Asian person in the context of the United States. I explore the relationship of agency and borders with nazar. In these site-specific performances, “nonsense” is fostered where I profess my love for deemed private shameful acts by performing it in public and questioning their censorship. I break down stigmatization by naturalizing it through my relationship of being pushed to the corner of my bathroom to experience pleasure (anal, defecation, bodily fluids, orgasms, fantasies, desires). Here, I explore the hidden shame and stigmas with ways of being seen and unseen.

Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou – “Technodeviance as Queer Resistance: Radical Artistic Practices and Interdisciplinary Processes”

This presentation unveils my artistic research practice centered on the concept of ‘technodeviance,’ an approach that critically and creatively examines how queer resistance manifests through subversive artistic practices. These practices synthesize queer performance, extended reality (XR) spatio-temporalities, crip design, and DIY biohacking and biotechnological self-experimentation to challenge normative technological and social paradigms. The research rigorously investigates several key areas that embody technodeviance: deviant chronopolitics, queer vandalism, radical softness, trans-punk futurity, crip technoscience, and practicing-with methodologies. This interdisciplinary approach aims to disrupt and reconfigure the binary categorizations imposed by bio-techno-capitalist systems, using technodeviance as a tool for queer resistance. Through technodeviant practices, this research aspires to create expansive, collective, and radically soft spaces where queer communities and misfit subjectivities can flourish, reimagining embodiment and technology outside of heteronormative constraints.

Panel 3 – The Senselessness of Violence

Sam Brooks – “Finding Transmisandry: Illegible Violence and the ‘Trans Everyday’”

In May 2024, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) announced that 43 percent of known trans homicide victims so far this year were transmasculine. Yet, there is no working theory of how violence against transmasculine people operates. “Finding Transmisandry: Illegible Violence and the ‘Trans Everyday’” theorizes the systemic precarity (Judith Butler 2009) of transmasculine people as a widespread phenomenon that traverses identity categories, geographies, and temporalities. I propose “transmisandry” to describe the racialized hostility at the intersection of sexism, homophobia, and anti-transness toward people who are perceived to be transmasculine in order to develop dominant understandings of how violence against gender- and sex-nonconforming people operates. This paper draws on press archives, court transcripts, police records, and academic responses to contend that Brandon is a much less “exceptional” victim (Laurel Westbrook 2020; Chase Joynt and Morgan M. Page 2022) than previously thought. Unpacking Brandon’s “trans everyday,” as termed by Asli Zengin, in combination with statistics on transmasculine populations, reveals the ordinariness of Brandon’s experiences of homelessness, poverty, unemployment, incarceration, and sexual and intimate partner violences. Supported by my public data work, The Transmasculine Homicide Project, this paper explores how the Crenshawian illegibility of Brandon Teena (a white passing and indigenous person) functions to reinforce the framing of Black trans women as always already dead. Both the “unknowability” (Brittney Cooper 2019) of Brandon Teena and the “debilitating exposure” (Ruha Benjamin 2022) of Black trans women demand a reconsideration of the politics of visibility in trans anti-violence activism.

Em Padilla – “Sensemaking Within the Bounds of the War Machine: Transness and Meaning Making Through the Authentic Self”

My paper will consider the following questions: What does “sense” mean in the context of bodies that are able to serve in the United States military? Is it possible for Trans soldiers to “hack” U.S. military service by serving as their authentic selves and making sense of individual identity in a system otherwise meant to break it down? What does it mean for Transness to be “fully” integrated into the institution’s fold while the civilian sector remains and becomes increasingly violent for Trans and Queer people? I aim to answer these questions by providing a brief analysis of Trans inclusive policies that provided the groundwork for military inclusion in 2016 (DTM 19-004) and the basis for Donald Trump’s “Trans military ban” introduced in 2017. As the United States military employs a rigid and highly medicalized perception of the body, whether and how Trans bodies are allowed to serve has been highly contested. My analysis will point to how the bodies of Trans people, considering the regulatory mechanism of the institution, have shifted in and out of meaning and legibility over the past six years. Further, my analysis will be informed by the narrative of the ‘authentic self,’ which points to the sensemaking that occurs when Trans recruits and soldiers “hack” military service by engaging authentically with and in their gender identity despite the institution’s historically cis-heteronormative reality. In other words, what does sense mean in the context of identity reification that may occur when Trans soldiers serve authentically and unapologetically?

Evan [NAMI] Sakuma – “Good Shot, Babe!— Guns n’ Glamour Reimagining Asian American Womanhood”

The Asian body in America is already, always feminized. It follows, then, that the image of the Asian American woman is one mired in submissive imaginaries and bounded stereotypes. This hyper-feminized, fetishized image dawns “nonsense” when juxtaposed against historical and contemporary depictions of Asian women wielding guns. In this presentation, I examine how the image of the “strong Asian woman” complicates dominant narratives of Asian American femininity by exploring popular visual culture with the guns as weapon, as prop, as political performance—such as circulating photos during the Vietnam War, the 1992 LA Riots, and even VP Kamala Harris claiming gun ownership in the 2024 Presidential Debate. Similarly, I find this “strong Asian woman” in the aesthetic prosthetics of the Asian Baby Girl (ABG) subculture, characterized often by 1990s-inspired heavy makeup, acrylic nails, and a blonde balayage. As part of my research practice, I will also be showcasing my video art project, “Augmenting the Oriental,” which dresses trans, queer, and cis Asian women in this makeup style. I argue both the gun and ABG glamour become prosthetic extensions of unregulated agency, flirtations with an undeniable presence that extends the flesh and claims stake in the nonsensical for an unscripted Asian woman.

Fernanda Soria-Cruz – “‘¡No fue suicidio, fue feminicidio!’: Interrogating the Role of Forensic Evidence in the (Un)making of Feminicide in Mexico”

By analyzing three different cases of feminicide in Mexico, this paper analyzes the process through which feminicide gets materialized. Using Karen Barad’s agential realism framework, this paper argues that the phenomenon of feminicide does not precede the techno-scientific practices and socio-cultural discourses that produce it. With an emphasis on the factuality upon which the forensic apparatus is assumed to operate, this paper offers a center-intuitive path of reflection by arguing that feminicide appears as a result of––and not despite of––the state’s refusal of recognition; the absence of scientific techniques to prove intent, and the public imagination and demands triggered by the visual images that are turned into both evidence and narrative devices. The article suggests that feminicide is simultaneously materialized through the scientific practices and their limitations, the conceptual construction of feminicide and its criminalization, the public debates, the family’s activism, and the body of the victim to which contradictory stories, facts, and identities are attached and confronted. The ambivalence between the factual/subjective; human/technological; absence/presence; proof/narrative; visible/invisible elements that emerge from the systemic killing of women in Mexico, allow for feminicide to appear in this context.

Panel 4 – Body Beautiful, Body Monstrous

Tatum Howey – “ [An]aesthetic: On transmasculine beauty and surgical interventions”

Much has been written on the monstrosity of trans bodies in their regenerative capacity after ‘bodily modifications’––or the technical intervention made available by medico-surgical means.What rises up from the operating table with somatechnical possibility is suggestive of being made of ‘disparate parts’, a Frankenstein-esque creature of abject proportion. And no doubt there is state of abjection which immediately follows surgery: the drains which siphon liquid out of the body, sloughing skin, the murky yellow material which oozes from a site, the bandages wrapped precariously around wound, dark matter embedded into its surface. With the slow formation of scar tissue, the epidermis returns. Many parts eventually fit into an incoherent whole, which can never quite materialize cogently for political representation. This monstrosity has thus been mobilized and celebrated, perhaps most notably by Stryker and Barad, as “a source of political agency. It can empower and radicalize.” (Barad 392) Stryker announces: “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster.” (246) Difference becomes potential. It has also been mobilized against us, with courtesy from a Representative Webster Barnaby: “We have people that live among us today on planet earth that are happy to display themselves as if they were mutants from another planet.” Here, however, I read the trans body and surgical intervention as something else entirely, that is, through beauty. The differentiation between cosmetic and gender reassignment surgeries, as Aren Z. Aizura has already pointed out to us, is collapsed for the trans subject in that they are both true. My desire to be beautiful is pathologized, driven to its logical conclusion through a series of medical and psychological assessments: the blood is drawn, fingers are stuck into wounds. Bodily manipulation is granted only when a persistent dysmorphia is present and documented. What I want is to repossess beauty, and the desire for beauty, for the transmasculine body through aesthetic and anesthetic (re)assessment. Aesthetics, as formulated through Kant, is the science of sense, the science of the beautiful, and with it, the double-edge in the ability to cognize beauty in the first place. Anesthesia on the other hand is sense-withdrawal, non-sense:pain is suspended, one is in a state of insensibility. While sharing grammatical and etymological similarities, these two disparate terms mediate the body’s potential toward beauty for the trans subject, in and beyond the operating room. Part-essay and part-lyric, I explore my own bodily modification through a meditation on wounds, fear as central to aesthetics, and the precarious relationship of aesthetics to beauty through the state of nonsense, while also recuperating beauty’s centrality to our risky subjectivities.

Jose Nateras – “Queer Making in Pedro Almódovar’s The Skin I Live In”

Emerging from Spain’s ‘La Movida’ subculture of 70’s Madrid, director Pedro Almódovar has built a career telling stories that reimagine sensibilities of genre, gender, sexuality, and tone. As a gay filmmaker, Almódovar’s work challenges the cultural hegemonies of Western/European culture — specifically that of Spain — centralizing female, queer, and trans narratives. His 2011 Horror/Thriller, The Skin I Live In, presents the act of queer making as a challenge to the confines of heteronormative sense which reinforce hegemonic modes of control. I will examine the ways in which Almodovar’s creation and the creations of the characters within the work function in conversation with the work of such theorists as Kara Keeling, Jack Halberstam, Alexander Weheliye, and others. The Skin I Live In centers a narrative focused on modifications/manipulations of flesh/the body and gender, fear, violence, medical experimentation that defies the law, ideas of revenge that challenge traditional (sensical) understandings of justice, and methods for queer survival — all from the perspective of a queer auteur — and as such raises questions regarding the very nature of gender, sexuality, and the body as confined by heteronormative “sense,” presenting alternatives to such a sense by way of queer making.

Ravindu Ranawaka and Gunindu Abeysekera – “Devi Worship: Ritual Drag Performance for the Goddess Pattini in Sri Lanka”

In the verdant tropical hills of Kandy, Sri Lanka, the 2024 Samūla Heritage Festival gathered the island’s most celebrated ritual dancers to showcase performances that fused traditional movement practices with divine invocation. The festival’s grand finale featured the Pattini Devi ritual, where male performers in shimmering orange sarees, adorned with scintillating gold jewelry, took center stage. Lamps filled the air with a delicate fog of jasmine incense, while a procession of young men, carrying intricately embroidered umbrellas, shielded unseen goddesses from the light drizzle that had begun to fall.

Pattini Devi is a revered goddess of South Indian origin who became a prominent figure in Sri Lanka due to her legendary status as one of the island’s four guardian deities. She symbolizes chastity, forgiveness, justice, and healing. Her story derives from the Tamil epic Silappatikāram, where a mortal wife transforms into a goddess after avenging the wrongful death of her husband. In Sri Lanka, the worship of Pattini manifests in a night-long ritual where male hereditary priests embody Pattini Devi’s divine energy in ways that resonated deeply with us as Queer spectators. For example, the stylized or “exaggerated” displays of femininity, interactions with audience members and musicians, exchange of financial capital, and cosmetic and sartorial metamorphosis mirrored our experiences with drag performance and “diva worship” practices. Additionally, The Pattini ritual elucidates a tension where the state’s efforts to enforce orthodox heteropatriarchial and imperial rubrics of gender homogeneity and gendered labor are both in conflict with and yet supported by the ritual’s antinormative elements. This paradox demonstrates how the state’s values are simultaneously challenged and reinforced through such cultural practices, cultivating a space where conformity and resistance coexist. Section 399 of Sri Lanka’s penal code introduces a colonial (British) grammar for the erosion of gender heterogeneity through state-sanctioned regulation of sartorial presentation. This anti “cross-dressing” law inhibits Queer, Trans, and gender nonconforming individuals from utilizing gender-subversive fashion and clothing as articulations of gender identity and presentation. In this presentation, our Queer reading of this Pattini Devi ritual will elucidate how its implications are both contemporaneous with and against state regulations.

Panel 5 – Querying Data

Neerej Dev (virtual) and Silpa Joy – “Human Voices and Algorithmic Echoes: Resignification of Trans-experiences Through Poetic Inquiry”

This study embarks on an exploratory journey into the intricate landscape of transgender identities in Kerala, focusing on transfeminine experiences. Employing a methodological approach that intertwines poetic inquiry with qualitative analysis, this study draws upon data from Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) with transfeminine participants delving into their experiences with self-acceptance, incidents of hostility, repudiation, agency, and relationships. We then transform this text into data poems, creating a reflective and emotive exploration of the participants’ experiences unpacking collaborative poetics approach. This article details the process and impact of this engagement, illustrating how the integration of poetry enabled a profound exploration of participants’ experiences. Further to this, we tested the purported ability of the state-of -the art Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning, and Deep Learning algorithm; Chat GPT Plus to generate Trans-poetic experiences from raw data.  From the algorithmic samples (n=13), all poems were chosen (Human-out-of-the loop) and matched with human-written poems. In an incentivized version of the Turing Test, reactions of the focus group upon exposure were assessed in a separate experiment, giving evidence that participants succeeded to reliably detect the algorithmically generated poems. We discuss what these results convey about the performance of NLP algorithms to produce human-like text and propose methodologies to study such learning algorithms in human-agent experimental settings. The collaborative effort in crafting and reflecting upon these poems provided a novel avenue for both researchers and participants to investigate and confront issues of discrimination and marginalization. We also seek to bridge the cultural and technopoetic divides that exist between accounts of regional poetry in the Indian literary landscape.

Phoebe Mock – “It’s my job. Selling Sex in Ancient Greece”

The study of ancient Greek sexual labor is difficult because we have limited evidence of their lives, and what we do have is authored by elite men. Yet, those in traditional fields, like Classics, place an overwhelming importance on the need for precise facts and categories—categories that make “sense”. How can we settle on categorizations without the archives of those who were silenced, pushed to the margins, and stigmatized? The realities of ancient sex laborers can be re-imagined by looking at depictions on pottery at overlooked objects in these scenes (e.g., pillows and couches). Engaging with the works of Sara Ahmed, this paper examines the (non)sense ways that objects and spaces show who they are (normally) for, and when they are queerly used. As one of the most universal professions in the world, why do nonsense hegemonic systems in various cultures and societies render sex labor/sex work as wrong and unnatural? Looking elsewhere in the archives opens the potential to explore these problems and questions regarding these topics.

Ingrid Tien – “A Qualitative Exploration into Autism Diagnostic Barriers of Gender Diverse Individuals”

Historically, research investigating disparities within autistic individuals has been restricted to a binary scope, focusing on how females are often overlooked within the diagnostic process, causing a self-fulfilling prophecy of more males being recognized as autistic. This trend has been theorized to occur due to the dominant narrative of autism being a cisgender white male condition (Lai et al., 2015). While this has provided valuable insight, the literature neglects gender-diverse youth, limiting the understanding of why there are higher rates of autistic youth identifying as gender diverse compared to neurotypical children (Strang et al., 2014; Janssen et al., 2016; Corbett et al., 2023). A potential explanation is that challenges with understanding social norms—including performing gender roles— is a trait inherent to autism. As such, this qualitative study utilized reflexive interview methodology to examine how 23 autistic adults, 13 of which identified as nonbinary, make sense of their intersectional identities separate from dominant narratives within cisgender and autism spaces. Using the theories of gender performativity (West & Zimmerman, 1987; Butler, 1990) and the feminist model of disability (Garland-Thomson, 2002 ), we created themes from participants’ narratives that the rigidity of being autistic disrupts the system of internalizing gender socialization, as the lack of logic in gender as a social construct exists. Through this, our participants discussed the refusal to make sense within the dominant narrative of autistic and gendered presentations.

Workshop – Queerness and Academia

Q-RAC (Micaela Bronstein, Amanda Giuliano, Belle Lee, Jackson Gzehoviak, Jade Levandofsky, Ingrid Tien, Mikaela Zetley) – Queerness and Academia

Q-RAC will facilitate a workshop to address the tensions between queerness and academia, which we hope will manifest a queering of the (non)sensical hegemonic structure, practices, and norms within academia. The workshop will utilize elements of performance studies, group facilitation, and interactions as we create a space to talk about the embedded hypocrisies in supposed equity-centered academic spaces that ignore queerness or sexuality. Traversing the intricate realm of queer spaces within academia reveals a perplexing paradox: the very structures meant to encourage intellectual diversity often perpetuate exclusion. This inherent contradiction forms the core of our exploration into queering academia, where the powerful systems clash with diverse queer identities, rendering academia’s stance seemingly nonsensical. Our workshop is a collective reckoning with these paradoxes, aiming to illuminate and dissect the subtle hypocrisies within academic institutions. Despite claiming equity-centered spaces, academia often excludes discussions on queerness and sexuality, undermining its professed inclusivity and intersectionality. We aim to make space for the big, inappropriate, chaotic, excessive, negative energy that can emerge from being queer (or outside of the power structure) in academia. Employing innovative methodologies like performance and mimicry, the workshop becomes a stage to expose the absurdities of micro-level interactions within academia. Beyond critique, we seek tangible solutions together with our audience to envision how micro-level changes can catalyze broader structural shifts. The workshop is a call to action, urging scholars to reimagine and revolutionize academic spaces for a more inclusive, equitable, and intellectually vibrant future.

Workshop – Cento as Nonsense

Jo Alvarado – Cento as Nonsense

Following Barbara Jane Reyes’ poem “to proceed, you must first understand,” I offer a series of ten invitations as a way to construct alternative relationalities through the poetic. This collective work takes the form of cento poetry— from the Latin meaning “patchwork”— a method that collages lines and phrases from various writers to create one poem. Traditionally, cento poems take lines from published work which are often (but not always) from canonically “famous” poets. As I take on this practice, I reject the hierarchical form and instead hope to illuminate the artists, organizers, thinkers, and loved ones we write alongside. The objective of this poetic pedagogy is to interweave multiple voices, visions, and worlds as a way to imagine otherwise. This is a mode of shapeshifting, forging networks of connectivity that are illegible to dominant systems of language. As a result, we create a mosaic, a kaleidoscope, a portal to more possibilities.

This is an adaptation of a workshop I crafted in my WACD culture and performance seminar last quarter. Alongside such creative and curious artists, I was able to develop a kind of poetics that is tethered to the experimental, the frenetic, and the playful forces of beinghood. Especially in these times, where we are all shouldering the emergency of urgency, these poetics of collectivity form a counter-emergence that expands into worldmaking possibilities.

To proceed, you must first understand that this world is moveable; it is shakeable. So, here I ask: Where are we dreaming towards? What worlds can we create on this page? What is on the horizon? Will you hold my hand on the way there?

Durational Performance – Handle with Care

Eva Marie Gonzalez Ruskiewicz and Gray Golding – Handle with Care

Handle with Care is a four-hour durational performance that makes nonsense of linear transition, normative ability, neoliberal individuality, and built spaces through which trans bodies were never meant to move. For the labor of the performance, we will take turns carrying, moving and caring for each others’ bodies. Our motion will be peripheral: against edges and corners; through, under and above tables; in closets and corridors. Relying on each other to move, we have no specific destination, agenda or schedule, only a commitment to care for each other throughout the piece. Care may manifest as periods of rest, the assistive application of technologies and objects, and ongoing consent practices between the performers. The performance does not aim to accomplish; like our gender transitions, we will be moving without a destination or expectation of an end result. We aim to develop forms of movement and to embody the meanings, edges and sensations of interdependence. Both performers are transgender, mixed-race, neurodivergent, and disabled, moving with bodies that tend to be rendered nonsensical within the logic of production and capitalism. Our piece also challenges the limits of the conference talk and table – we ask to move unencumbered by the social conventions that demand all attention be placed on the speaker, constative conveyor of knowledge. Doing so offers a deconstruction of the hierarchical format of knowledge production so common to academic conferences. We include an artist talk, speaking to both the theoretical and artistic frameworks that inspired the performance, and the anti-logical, embodied knowledge that arose from rehearsing the piece. Thank you to our patron, Sarah Rose Layton.

PRESENTER BIOS

Gunindu “Guni” Abeysekera (he/him) is a Queer Sri Lankan-American ethnic studies scholar, digital media storyteller, and community-based archivist. Guni’s work centers on narratives of immigrant artists and activists and how they manifest memories of their homeland through their work. Guni is a third-year PhD student in Culture and Performance at UCLA where he studies the sociopolitical and gender implications of traditional Sri Lankan dance.

Jo Alvarado (she/they) is a PhD in the UCLA Department of English who is passionate about the process of self-discovery and liberation through the means of art and storytelling. Her literary research investigates the affectual and aesthetic practices of contemporary queer Asian American cultural productions, weaving together queer of color critique, performance studies, and decolonial thought. As a poet, she writes from a place of healing and reclamation and hopes to provide a space for others to do the same.

Micaela Bronstein (she/her) is a second year PhD student in Urban Schooling at the School of Education and Information Studies. Her research interests include immigrant and refugee education, alternative space of learning, and political and critical consciousness in education. She is passionate about education equity and uplifting marginalized student voices. 

Sam Brooks (he/him) is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers, New Brunswick in the WGSS Department specializing in trans theory and prison studies. His dissertation explores what he calls “transmisandry,” or the racialized hostility directed at people who are read as transmasculine, and overlooked violence against transmasculine people. For this work, he created the Transmasculine Homicide Project, possibly the first project to track transmasculine homicide victims across gender categories. Prior to coming to Rutgers, he was the Operations Director of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, an anti-prison nonprofit that fosters the power of system-involved women, girls, trans and nonbinary people.

Neerej Dev (he/him) teaches at the department of Media Studies, St. Joseph’s College, Devagiri, India. His research is centered around the intersectionality of mortality, sociocultural systems, and technological evolution, with a specific interest in discourses around the formation of identities and collective memory in democratic systems.

Amanda Giuliano (she/her) is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Social Research Methodology Division (SRM) at UCLA’s School of Education & Information Studies. Her research explores applied theatre as both an innovative methodology to study learning and a pedagogical tool for supporting creativity and learning, particularly within sexual health education. In her work, she draws from sociocultural theory and narrative inquiry in addition to participatory theatre methods such as improvisation and Theatre of the Oppressed. Amanda is especially interested in using her approach to educational research to advocate for more progressive sex education strategies and policies within our current universities.

Gray Golding (they/them) has a background in architectural design and history. They study the modern history of architecture in the United States of America by drawing on analytic frames from disability studies, critical whiteness studies, settler colonial studies, history of medicine, and trans studies.

Eva Marie Gonzalez Ruskiewicz (they/them) is a fourth year PhD student in UC San Diego’s department of Communication, with a specialization in Critical Gender Studies. They work at the intersection of transgender studies and performance studies, focusing primarily on trans- and queer dancers of color. Prior to graduate school, Eva was a public school music teacher. Outside of the academy, they are a singer-songwriter, beginner ballet dancer, and cat dad.

Jackson Gzehoviak (they/them) is a Ph.D. student in Urban Schooling at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. Prior to entering the doctoral program, Jackson was a high school teacher of social studies and ESL in a specialized program for refugee and asylum seeker youth. They are also the Education Director of an NGO dedicated to English language education in the Palestinian refugee camps of South Lebanon. Jackson is interested in understanding the languaging practices of multilingual refugee youth and Indigenous Latinx youth in transnational contexts.

Tatum Howey (they/them) is a writer and PhD student at the University of California, San Diego whose work circles around questions of visuality and the political implications and potentials of risk, particularly through artists who deliberately trouble notions of entanglement with an aesthetics of toxicity and contagion. Their research is currently centered on the artist Hamad Butt, a seropositive artist making toxic work at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Silpa Joy (she/her) teaches at the Department of Language and Literature, St. Joseph’s College Devagiri, India. Her research interests encompass the intersections of gender studies, critical theory and cultural studies, with a particular focus on the interplay between how sexual, gender, racial, and feminist minority subjects construct social worlds within the nuanced spaces of recognition and discrimination.

Belle Lee (she/her) is a second year PhD student in Higher Education and Organizational Change at the School of Education and Information Studies. Her research interests include first-generation student experience, inclusion of Asian American in higher education research, and institutional commitment to student success. Belle is particularly interested in advocating for equity to accessing higher education.

Jade Levandofsky (they/them) is a second year PhD student in Information Studies at the School of Education and Information Studies (SEIS). Their research ranges from the use of AI in writing practices and Information Seeking Behaviors, to Museum Technology and what values are baked into approaches to User Experience and Interface design.

Elaina Lorenzo Marino (she/they) is a writer, playwright, and filmmaker studying at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. Her research primarily centers on queer nightlife, specifically these spaces’ unique potential to create community, identities, and euphoric, embodied lives for trans people. In her plays and films, she often blends aspects of autofiction and popular music performance to create communal spaces and experiences out of subjective stories. In September 2024, she released the feature-length film Big Rock: The Rockumentary (co-directed with Ben Yawn, produced by Speaking of Home Productions), a docufiction centered on a UCLA theater production.

Phoebe Mock (she/her) is a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is earning her Master’s degree in Classical Art and Archaeology and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests are focused in Ancient Greek art, ancient sexual labor, addressing past and current intersectional gender and sexuality issues, and she is dedicated to using queer theoretical approaches in her scholarship. 

Andreea Moise (she/her) is a PhD candidate currently researching queer narratologies and genderless/genderqueer narrators in Modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary experimental works of fiction that narrativise queer affects. She holds a Master’s degree in British Cultural Studies, and in 2023 she defended a dissertation on s/Sapphic archives of affect in the works of Ali Smith and Selby Wynn Schwartz. She is the translator of Ramona Dima’s book “Queer Culture in Romania, 1920–2018” (Palgrave, 2023). Her interests are experimental Modernist and contemporary literature by women, women in translation, and queer and mad identities.

As a performance artist, Moodzi (Abhijeet Mudgerikar) narrates stories on the intersections of architecture, gender experimentation, social activism, community engagement, and freestyling over music. For their undergraduate degree in architecture, they wrote a thesis on the causal link between movement and performance spaces of Indian classical dance forms. Paranoid Dance Crew gave them access to perform unconventional dance styles in South Asia, such as Waacking, Vogue Femme, and House. This led to conceiving a community center in Ahmedabad that helped them learn and teach such dance forms. Working on this venture, they trained other young artists from similarly marginalized backgrounds in various skills required to run an organization. Their practice expanded to performing and facilitating events in public spaces where self-expression was celebrated and nurtured. Such setups helped individuals from underrepresented communities develop a sense of belonging and confidence in claiming spaces. At present, Moodzi is pursuing the MFA in Choreographic Inquiry at UCLA to study the historical, cultural, and etymological references of nazar in India, and form its connections with contemporary narratives of societal perceptions affecting queer marginalized people. Their recent performances portray the desires of a queer South Asian person affected by a constant gaze.

Jose Nateras (he/him) is a PhD student in Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA. He has his BA in Theatre from Loyola University Chicago and his MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Alongside his experience teaching (SAIC, Truman College Chicago), Jose is a published novelist, accomplished screenwriter and filmmaker, and has an extensive career as an actor on both stage and screen. His research explores the performance of Horror in relation to marginalized identity.   

Krishanu Nath (he/him) is pursuing a Ph.D. in the Department of History of Art, Kala Bhavana, Visva- Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal, India. He has completed his M. Phil in Visual Arts from School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Presently he is working as an Assistant Professor at Government College of Art & Craft, Calcutta. Considering himself both as an art practitioner and researcher, his interest revolves around gender, masculinity, LGBTQIA+ politics, and its representation in the visual domain. Beside participating in exhibitions and workshops he has also presented papers at international and institutional conferences and webinars. He has presented papers at International webinars like Perspectives on South Asia: Approaches to Practices and Histories of Art, Department of History of Art, Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, 2022; Conferences like – I was looking high and low: Towards a redistribution of the sensible, School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, 2021; International Conference on Visual South Asia: Anthropological Exploration of Media and Culture at Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2017. Apart from this a paper of his, titled, “In Search for an Alternative Frame: The Recent Display of Queer Art” has been published in articulate.org.in, in the year-2022.

Em Padilla (they/them) is a 6th year doctoral candidate in the Feminist Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Their research examines the relation between military policies on Trans inclusion, the Trans Latinx soldiering experience, and Trans masculinity/femininity as they emerge and exist in and out of national institutions and socio-cultural sites. Their work aims to better understand the intersection between Latinx and Trans (national) identities and how this intersection plays into national sentiment, identity and, ultimately, the concept of inclusion and its history.

Ravindu “Ravi” Ranawaka (they/them) is a Queer Sri Lankan American scholar, model, artist, and activist. They are second-year PhD. student in Culture and Performance at UCLA. Their research focuses on Queer aesthetics in contemporary Sri Lankan fashion and art. In their free time, Ravindu enjoys styling outfits, thrifting, critical gossip, and critiquing str*ight culture.

Evan [NAMI] Sakuma (he/they/she) or NAMI (when she is a femme Asian Baby Girl Enchantress) hails from the East Asian ethnic enclave of Monterey Park. They were accustomed to being surrounded by Asian culture, meaning they didn’t experience “minor(ity) feelings” until after they left this bubble. As a result, they were allowed to reckon with their sexuality devoid of the additional othering from their Asianness. Their sexuality became their artmaking, became their community–an ouroboros. Excitingly, they think there has been a break in the cycle. Through their research, these identities collide, dance, perform–beauty ensues?

Fernanda Soria-Cruz (she/her) is an international doctoral student at USC Annenberg. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of STS, visual studies and gender and sexuality studies. She has focused my research on exploring the phenomenon of feminicide and female forced disappearance in Mexico. Her research attends to the articulation of forensic discourses, practices and technologies that produces the body of the victim as well as the body of the crime.

Eric A. Stanley is the Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity and an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where they are also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory. Eric’s first manuscript Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke 2021) argues racialized anti-trans/queer violence is foundational to, and not an aberration of, western modernity. Atmospheres of Violence was awarded the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from CLAGS. Eric is currently working on two other projects, the first is a study of nonsovereignty and radical hospitality through the ephemera of trans/queer insurgents organizing underground in the 1970s and 1980s. They are also starting a new project on architectures of attack and trans sociality, focusing on the Bay Area. Along with Tourmaline and Johanna Burton, Eric edited the anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), which won the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature and the John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies from the Popular Culture Association. With Nat Smith, they edited Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press 2011/15), which won the Prevention for a Safer Society Book Award.

Ingrid Tien (she/her) is a third-year doctoral student in Developmental Psychology in the School of Education at UCLA. Ingrid’s research interests include disparities in treatment and diagnosis of girls with autism and influencing educational recommendations and public policy to equitably provide resources for neurodiverse children. Additionally, Ingrid is interested in how autistic children make and maintain friends.

Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou is a multidisciplinary artist from Athens, Greece based in Los Angeles, California. Their work spans video, installation, performance, and sculpture, forming experimental, immersive, interactive, and cinematic environments. Their world-body-building practice centers on themes of softness, deviance, kinship, affect and community building as resistance tools for a queer transfeminist universe. They are Inspired by sci-fi literature, speculative fiction, queer poetry, feminist cinema, creating radically fluffy hubs for unruly presents and hope-punk futures. Antigoni is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Media Arts and Practice at USC School of Cinematic Arts. They also hold an MFA in Media Arts from UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, and a BFA in Sculpture from the Athens School of Fine Arts in Greece. They have received numerous scholarships and awards, including from the Fulbright Foundation, the Onassis Foundation, and the ARTWORKS Fellowship from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. 

Chris Vargas is a video maker & interdisciplinary artist currently based in Bellingham, WA whose work deploys humor and performance in conjunction with mainstream idioms to explore the complex ways that queer and trans people negotiate spaces for themselves within historical & institutional memory and popular culture. He earned his MFA in the department of Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011 and his BA in the Film & Digital Media department from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2006. He is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital award and a 2020 John S. Guggenheim fellowship. From 2008-2013, he made, in collaboration with Greg Youmans, the web-based trans/cisgender sitcom Falling In Love…with Chris and Greg. Episodes of the series have screened at numerous film festivals and art venues, including MIX NYC, SF Camerawork, and the Tate Modern. With Eric Stanley, Vargas co-directed the movie Homotopia (2006) and its feature-length sequel Criminal Queers (2015) which have been screened at Palais de Tokyo, LACE, Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, and the New Museum among other venues. Vargas is also the Executive Director of MOTHA, the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art, a critical and conceptual arts & hirstory institution highlighting the contributions of trans art to the cultural and political landscape.

Mikaela Zetley (she/her) is an educator and researcher, currently a first year PhD student in  Urban Schooling within the School of Education and Information Studies (SEIS), where she studies the intersection of disability justice, racial justice, and mathematics education. Drawing from her years working as a middle school mathematics and special education teacher in an inclusive classroom in Boston Public Schools, Mikaela aims to create affirming and humanizing learning environments for disabled and neurodivergent learners and educators.