Yingchen Kwok, "Is Diversity Always Already Heterosexual? The Hereditary Roots of Biological Diversity in the Sexual Division of Labor"
What does biological diversity have to do with gender norms? In this presentation, Yingchen argues that to understand their connection, we must trace the roots of diversity back to the late 19th century, when the German zoologist August Weismann first proposed that hereditary variation was the purpose of the evolution of sexual reproduction. Far from being self-evident, this supposition was met with intense resistance from other naturalists. Yingchen demonstrates how this debate involved competing philosophies about the sexual division of labor, which was not something that could be observed in nature but rather something naturalists assumed to observe nature. She argues that this history is crucial to the emergence of diversity as a biological concept in the 1950s. Unlike variation, which could be positive or negative, diversity acquired an intrinsically positive valence. However, it could only achieve this by pushing the threat of disorderly variation into the realm of the unintelligible.

Claire Elliot, "Ghost, Corpse, Skeleton: Ambivalent Meditations for Imperfect Monastics"

Meditation, like many other aspects of Buddhism when altered for Euro-American digestibility/legibility, has often been removed from its social, political, and cultural contexts and divorced from its supernatural elements, even in the academy. Drawing from ethnographic work with northern Thai monks and nuns, this article challenges conventional notions of meditation as calm and epiphanic by exploring meditation on ghosts, corpses, and skeletons. On the surface, these meditations call for the practitioner to conquer their fears through concentration, their lust through disgust, and their self-hood through confronting their temporality. Stereotypical epiphanic scripts obscure how practitioners evoke a rich variety of affects, none of which are primarily ‘tranquil.’ The meditator must first construct lust, fear, and selfhood with the aid of ghosts, rotting corpses, and skeletons, so that these ‘imperfections’ might then be defeated. Furthermore, instead of epiphany and permanent peaceful change, I argue these meditations and their non-calm contain ‘truth-content’—a cognitive element within these affect—that means that, in addition to possibly moving the meditator towards nirvana, these meditation’s do supernatural, relational, and political work.

Upcoming dates:
Wednesday, 12/11, 10:30 – 12, on Zoom: UD Collab with Davy Knittle and Graduate presenter Bonnie Maldonado (Africana Studies)
Thursday, 2/6, 12 – 1:30, location tbd: Deion Dresser and Hank Owings
Thursday, 3/6, 12 – 1:30, location tbd: Annie Ting and Aurora De Lucia
Thursday, 4/17, 12 - 1:30, location tbd: Apurva Prasad and Austin Svedjan