Graduate Colloquium: Danielle Hanley (Political Science) and Natalie Shibley (Africana Studies/History)

Thursday, February 16, 2017 - 8:30am

Please join us on Thursday, February 16 from 12pm-1:30pm in the GSWS conference room (second floor, 3810 Walnut Street) for a colloquium featuring Danielle Hanley (Political Science) and Natalie Shibley (Africana Studies/History). Please RSVP below to reserve your lunch.

"Toward an LGBT African American Military History," Natalie Shibley
This presentation discusses the effects of homosexuality investigations and discharges on African American military personnel. Using military memos and correspondence, court records, administrative discharge board hearing records, newspapers, and statistical data, I present cases in which African Americans were involved in military homosexuality investigations as subjects, informants, and other actors. I argue for the importance of considering sexual orientation discrimination against black service members as part of the field of African American military history.

"The Affective Work of Crying," Danielle Hanley
This essay is an excerpt from the second chapter of my dissertation project, which is currently titled, "Crying Together: From Precarity to Solidarity through Tears." The chapter takes up the affective work of crying, in an attempt to further illuminate a political function of this phenomenon. Moreover, questions of politics are often absent scholarship on affect. Crying engenders many affects, and performs various forms of affective work. However, the discomfort that typically surrounds crying obscures the work it performs. I distinguish between two kinds of work here: existing affective work performed by crying, but often overlooked, and potential work that crying can realize once the shroud of discomfort is shrugged off. After describing the affective work that crying already carries out, I turn to consider the contours of additional, potential forms of affective work, which illuminates a political dimension of the phenomenon at hand. I end the essay by arguing that crying holds the potential to generate a novel form of solidarity, linking its affective and political dimensions.