Events in the New York City community
The fall 2012 Harm Reduction Training Calendar is available here.
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center's schedule of events can be viewed here.
Events at The New School
Screening of XXY and post-screening discussion with Julia Honkasalo
Friday, December 14, 6:00 p.m.
2 West 13th Street, Bark Room, ground floor
Join us for our next installment of Coming Out In the Developing World's Fall First Friday Film Series. Following the screening, there will be a discussion led by Julia Honkasalo, PhD candidate in politics at The New School for Social Research. Pizza and refreshments will be provided.
Lucia Puenzo's drama XXY probes the psychological aftereffects that adolescent transsexuality can yield. With a name easily applicable to either gender, young teenager Alex's (Ines Efron) hermaphroditic physiology causes a massive identity crisis and severe emotional withdrawal. The problems create social issues in the family's home of Argentina and virtually force Alex and his/her sympathetic parents Kraken (Ricardo Darín) and Suli (Valeria Bertuchelli) to move to nearby Uruguay just as Alex wrestles with the throes of puberty. The situation grows increasingly complex when several friends of the family arrive: married Erika (Carolina Pelereti) Ramiro (German Palacios), a plastic surgeon, and their adolescent son, Alvaro (Martin Piroyanski), who Alex instantly propositions for sex. As Alex battles local punks who try unsuccessfully to rape him/her (saved at the last minute by Kraken), Alvaro finally accepts Alex's promptings for intercourse and comes to a gradual realization of his own gayness. Meanwhile, the rift between adults and youth widens with increasing rapidity. (Description courtesy of Nathan Southern and Rovi at Fandango).
View the movie trailer here, and read a film review by the San Francisco Chronicle here.
Sponsored by Global Studies at The New School
Spring 2013 course
Homonormativity and The American Ideal
6605 PLVS 3003 A
Instructor: Tony Whitfield
Tuesdays, 12:10–2:50 p.m.
open to undergraduate junior and senior New School students only
Since the emergence of "homosexuality" and "transexuality" as identities in the late 19th century, queer culture has been presumed to develop in the margins of American life, ancillary to and shaped by heterosexual norms. Yet the vast majority of queer people in the last hundred years have lived (to at least some degree) in the closet, allowing them to exist in the mainstream while maintaining a distinctly non-normative identity. Thus, to quote bell hooks, allowing them "to bring the margin into the center."
As America transitioned into a consumer culture, many of these queer people found themselves working in the design fields: interior design, architecture, fashion design, illustration, and product design. How did their queerness, as an identity and a body of experience, shape their vision of the world, and how did they repackage this vision as the ideal of normality for mainstream America? Conversely, how did they also resist? What does it mean for Elsie de Wolfe to have so influenced the interior design of the American family home from inside her lesbian relationship with Elisabeth Marbury? If the "Arrow Collar man" defined masculinity in the early 1900s, what does it mean for illustrator J. C. Leyendecker to have based him on his lover, Charles Beach? Is it any wonder that Eileen Gray, lesbian architect and furniture designer, was at the forefront of the Modern Movement in architecture, looking to create dwellings that were live/work spaces for single people who lived outside the traditional family structure? Though mostly done in France, her work has been profoundly influential worldwide. How did queerness, as an identity and a body of experience, shape these practitioners' visions, and how did they repackage that vision as the ideal of normality for mainstream America?
Through the lenses of current queer theory, evolving queer history and mainstream design history from the late 19th century until the present, this course will engage students in the practice of mining not only the available literature but archives and collections ranging from The New School's Kellen archives to the libraries at the Cooper Hewitt and Bard's Design Center to collections of the Museum of Sex, Leslie Lohman Museum of Lesbian and Gay Art, and the New York Public Library to piece together little explored manifestations of queer history and culture.
It is anticipated that research resulting from this class will contribute to an exhibition proposal that will be submitted for consideration as an exhibition in the Kellen Gallery in the fall of 2014.
For more information, contact Tony Whitfield, associate dean for Civic Engagement and associate professor of Product Design, at 212.229.8950 ext. 4147.