PLEASE NOTE: THIS SESSION WILL BE CONDUCTED IN THE ENGLISH GRADUATE STUDENT LOUNGE, 330 FISHER BENNETT-HALL

ALL ARE WELCOME!

Please join us for the Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies (GSWS) Graduate Student Colloquium with presentations from Don James McLaughlin (English) and Bronwyn Wallace (English).

Don James will be presenting a paper entitled "Between Influence and Exemplarity: Locating LGBT Universalism"; Bronwyn will be pre-circulating a paper entitled "Precarious Typology: Failure and Futurity in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum."

This monthly interdisciplinary colloquium is open to graduate students working on all things women, gender, queer and sexuality studies, and it offers an opportunity to workshop parts of chapters, articles, essays, or to practice conference papers and presentations. Please join us and participate in the discussion!

Don James McLaughlin (English) "Between Influence and Exemplarity: Locating LGBT Universalism"

In 'Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," Joseph Massad critiques the universalist ethos of LGBT politics as fundamentally imperialist in its aims. The question to which the essay speaks is whether universal recognition of a singular human right is a thing worth struggling for or whether it is always an instance of the particular imposing itself upon the global. In a discussion of Edward Carpenter's writings on Walt Whitman as well as Philadelphia's 2012 Equality Forum, I suggest that the universal is dangerous precisely because it ignores the particularities that constitute it. Rather than fully jettison the universal as a framework, I redefine it as a form of political affiliation worth articulating only when it is reduced to the local iterations that give it shape.

Brownyn Wallace (English) "Precarious Typology: Failure and Futurity in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum"

"Precarious Typology: Failure and Futurity in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum" makes use of patristic theology and contemporary queer theory to address the poetic and political limits of Lanyer's investment in feminist exegesis and in women's community. (paper will be pre-circulated - RSVP for paper)