GSWS Graduate Colloquium with Caroline Hodge and Dixion Li

Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm

GSWS Conference Room (Fisher-Bennett Hall 345)

This location is ADA accessible

 "Beyond Birth Control: The Social Life of Contraception in the US Heartland" Caroline Hodge (Anthropology)

 Caroline Hodge is an MD/PhD student in anthropology, earning her MD from the University of California San Francisco, and her PhD at Penn, under the supervision of Adriana Petryna. Previously, she earned a master’s degree in medical anthropology from the University of Oxford, where her research focused on the way bioethical accounts of abortion articulate with embodied experiences of it in the US. Her clinical and scholarly interests converge on reproductive health and politics in the United States, and her dissertation focuses on contraception, asking how the diverse technologies and practices that fall under that rubric of contraception shape social life in the American Midwest. 

“Lost Girls, Stranded Affects” Dixion Li (English)

Dixion Li is a third year PhD student in English at Penn. This talk precedes from the difficulties posed by theorizing a form of gendered and racialized resistance that does not necessarily have a clear political program, but surfaces through the aesthetic forms and figurations of what cinema studies scholar Homay King has called the “Lost Girl.” Through readings of Denver in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the sculptural works of Theresa Cha, and the character Gong Er in Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster, I trace gestures of longing and refusal that dislocate gendered and racialized subjectivity from their normative choreographies in ways that ultimately result in a form of psychic and social isolation replete with what I call “stranded affect.” 

 

Lunch will be provided.