The Erotic: 2021 CSA Graduate Student Workshop

May 7, 2021 | 12:30PM TO 5:00PM Pacific

Organizers: Rishika Mehrishi (Ph.D. Candidate in Theater and Performance Studies) and Ankita Deb (Ph.D. Candidate in Art and Art History)

The erotic is powerful, provocative, and performative. The 2021 CSA Graduate Student Workshop explores the genealogies of the erotic as they traverse the entangled terrains of precolonial, imperialist, nationalist, postcolonial, and neoliberal thought.

Do the ideals of a modern nation-state recuperate and redefine precolonial iterations of the erotic? What have been the valences of tethering the sensual with sexuality for gendered and queered discourses, intimacies, and activisms? How do we decenter the erotic from the carnal in postcolonial legacies of South Asia? In what ways does the erotic “queer” realms of the uncanny, impossible, and the unnamable? And what other modes of libidinal conditions arise that produce new formulations of desire, consumption, and pleasure? Animated by these broad questions, the workshop gathers an interdisciplinary group of graduate students at all levels to explore the embodied, political, social, and affective textures of the erotic.

Due to the pandemic, the workshop participants will discuss pre-circulated papers in Zoom breakout rooms from 12:45 pm to 1:45 pm Pacific. The participants will reconvene at 2pm Pacific for a discussion of pertinent issues that emerged around the theme of The Erotic.

The workshop will conclude with a keynote lecture by Professor Anjali Arondekar (UCSC) at 3:30pm Pacific. The lecture is open to the general public. See more details about the keynote below.

Workshop Schedule

May 6, 2021

12:00 - 1:00pm:      PRE-WORKSHOP OPTIONAL EVENT