The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics
Accessibility
Live-captions provided by Total Caption are available here.
ASL interpretation will be provided on screen by All Hands in Motion.
Please email any additional access needs to ekausch@barnard.edu.
Janet R. Jakobsen’s new book, The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics. is a study of the ways in which debates over religion and sexuality in American politics are embedded in a wide range of political struggles, including but not limited to those over secularism and religious freedom. Gender and sexuality are also in play in debates over healthcare, immigration, police violence and war, implicated in the politics of housing and the environment, and critical to struggles against racial capitalism. The Sex Obsession shows how sexual politics are part of kaleidoscopic shifts that are supposed to instantiate progress, even as very little actually changes. The progress narrative claims that democracy expands, but instead injustice remains intransigent. The book connects interdisciplinary scholarship to what Jakobsen learned from collaborative projects with activists, artists and other scholars during her time as director of BCRW. These collaborations and continuing projects like them provide inspiration for utopian possibilities even in these dangerous and melancholy times. Reimagining perversity and possibility can animate action on behalf of a world that might be otherwise.
This virtual event will celebrate the publication of The Sex Obsession through discussions with some of the many collaborative partners who contributed so much to the book, led off by Ann Pellegrini on religion, secularism and religious freedom. The hour will also provide material from projects, like the Poverty and Public Housing Working group at BCRW, led by Pamela Phillips along with an excerpt from Sydnie L. Mosley Dances’ “Purple,” and a preview of a new series, Continuing Conversations, beginning with Tourmaline and Dean Spade.
This event is free and all are welcome.
Buy the book
Word Up! Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria, a volunteer-run community bookshop in Washington Heights, is partnering with BCRW to sell books related to our fall events online. Visit their BCRW shop to purchase this book and support your local bookseller!
About the speakers
Janet R. Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and the author of the newly published The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics and co-author with Ann Pellegrini of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance.
Sydnie L. Mosley is an award winning artist-activist and educator who is interested in creative work that is both artistically sound and socially aware. She produces experiential dance works with her collective SLMDances. Through their choreographic work, the collective works in communities to organize for gender and racial justice. Her evening length dances, The Window Sex Project and BodyBusiness, their creative processes and performance experiences, are a model for dance-activism.
Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race and Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (coauthored with Janet R. Jakobsen). She coedits the “Sexual Cultures” series at NYU Press, in which The Sex Obsession appears.
Pamela A. Phillips is Senior Program Assistant at BCRW and leader of the Poverty and Public Housing Working Group, which has produced the website, “Changing the Narrative: A Public Housing Project,” housing community stories and alternative understandings of public housing in New York City.
Dean Spade is a trans activist, writer and teacher and Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law, where he teaches Administrative Law, Poverty Law, Gender and Law, Policing and Imprisonment, and Law and Social Movements. In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. Dean is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law.
Tourmaline is an artist and filmmaker whose work includes Salacia, Mary of Ill Fame, Atlantic is a Sea of Bones, the Personal Things, Lost in the Music and Happy Birthday, Marsha! She is also an editor of Trap Door, an anthology on trans cultural production published by the New Museum and MIT Press. Her work has been presented across the country including at the Highline (2019) the Museum of Modern Art (2019), the Brooklyn Museum (2016, 2019), MoMA PS1 (2019), The Kitchen (2019, 2018), BFI Flare (2018), Portland Art Museum (2018), BAM Cinematek (2018), The New Museum (2017), The Whitney Museum (2017), MOCA LA (2017), the Studio Museum in Harlem (2017), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2017).
Image credit: Zoe Leonard, “I Want a President,” 1992. Photograph from the installation at the High Line, NYC 2016-2017. Source: Wikipedia.