Public Feelings Salon

The inaugural event in BCRW’s new Salon series, this engaged dialogue brings together several prominent and influential scholars whose work explores how affect and emotion influence public life. Just as feminism has sought to identify the ways in which the personal and the political are linked, the study of “public feelings” draws our attention to how and why feelings and emotion (assumed to be a private, personal experience) influence politics and notions of social belonging and intimacy. This interactive conversation, moderated by BCRW Director and Professor of Women’s Studies, Janet Jakobsen, will focus on how perceptions of citizenship and solidarity are often bound up in emotions—like optimism, rage, and disgust—and how feelings can govern policy and political debates.

Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, and the author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship and The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life. Her most recent book is The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture.

Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is the author of Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy and Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity.

José Muñoz is chair of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He is the author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.

Tavia Nyong’o is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, where he teaches African American and black diasporic performance, popular and subcultural musics, performance historiography and research methods, and queer studies. His book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory, won the 2010 Erroll Hill Award of the American Society for Theatre Research.

Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University, where she also directs NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race; co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance; co-editor, with Daniel Boyarin and Daniel Itzkovitz, of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question; and co-editor, with Jakobsen, of Secularisms.

More from this event:

• VIDEO: Public Feelings Salon with Lauren Berlant
• VIDEO: José Muñoz: Queer Utopianism and Cruel Optimism
• RESPONSE: Handle with Care (PDF) by Jill H. Casid
• RESPONSE: The Irony of the Solution (PDF) by Kandice Chuh
• RESPONSE: The Transformational Object of Cruel Optimism (PDF) by Patricia Ticineto Clough
• RESPONSE: Slutwalk NYC and Cruel Optimism: A Reaction to Public Feelings Salon (PDF) by Jamia Wilson
• REPLY: Cruel Optimism, Becoming Event: A Response (PDF) by Lauren Berlant
• PODCAST: Public Feelings Salon with Lauren Berlant