Together with the LGBT Center, GSWS offers an informal lunchtime
session to discuss and workshop the precirculated work of one graduate
student and one faculty member whose research touches on issues
pertaining to gender, sexuality, and queer studies.

Jessa Lingel (Assistant Professor, Annenberg): "Drag Queens, New Brooklyn and the Queer Imaginary"
Brooklyn is in the midst of a drag renaissance, with dozens of active performers taking the stage every night of the week. In this talk, I draw on a year-long qualitative investigation with Brooklyn drag queens, focusing on the geometries of power (Massey, 2005) that surface from the social and spatial intersections of sexuality, geography and technology. New York looms large in the queer imaginary, and as the drag community has blossomed in the last few years, it has illuminated social, cultural and spatial tensions, including: how do queer communities lay claim to space? How are concepts of community bound up in alterity and geography?  What role does technology play in the queer constructions of space and place? Part of a larger project on countercultural communities and digital technology, this talk  draws together critical geography, media studies and queer theory.

Danielle Hanley (PhD candidate, Political Science): "Rereading Plato to Recover Tears: Crying in the Platonic Corpus"
The purpose of this essay is to challenge the conventional reading, or rejection, of tears. I argue that amidst the criticism, it is possible to discern a productive reading of tears from within the Platonic corpus. Further, I argue that the productive reading exposes the way in which crying might be recovered as a legitimate form of behavior. While much of the discussion on tears focuses on rejection, I think that it is possible to conceive of reasons to recover tears from within these texts themselves. I argue that trepidation about the disruptive quality of tears blinds Plato’s interlocutors to the productive potential of both disruption and tears. This disruption is rooted in the body, and can be examined along its material, communicative and gendered dimensions. The essay proceeds in the following format: first, I will offer a brief overview of the standard commentary on tears within the Platonic corpus. Then I will examine some passages that trouble this reading. I will then turn towards the Phaedo, and the Symposium, to offer a distinct reading of these critiques through a positive lens. Finally, I use Plato’s works to explore additional questions that arise in this recovery, moving beyond the confines of these works to consider the broader implications of crying.