WEDNESDAY: Ropes Lecturer Talks About Penguin Love and Doll Sex

For UC's Department of English and Comparative Literature, the annual

Ropes Lecture Series

is the highlight of winter quarter. Named after Cincinnati industrialist Nathaniel Ropes, whose endowment to the University of Cincinnati funds the program, the Ropes Lecture Series brings a collection of prominent writers and scholars to campus to present public lectures, take part in panel discussions, and participate in graduate classes on both the master’s and doctoral levels, all focused on a unifying theme.

Writing Sex
This year’s theme is “Writing Sex” — an introduction to the study of the representation of sexuality in a wide variety of literary forms. Drawing energy from lesbian and gay studies and from queer theory, “Writing Sex” casts a critical gaze over the construction and representation of all sexualities, not just queer ones. In the process of studying the representation of sex and sexuality, the hope is to learn more about one of the most important dimensions of how contemporary Western individuals define themselves, both individually and collectively.

Judith Halberstam, Feb. 7: Transbiology: Penguin Love, Doll Sex and the Spectacle of the Non-Reproductive Body

This talk explores the narrative and visual leaps that we have made in our understandings of terms like “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality,” male and female, individual and community, in an age of artificial insemination, transsexuality and cloning. Halberstam also proposes that popular culture has already imagined multiple alternatives to male and female, masculine and
feminine, family and individuality and that contemporary popular culture, specifically horror film and animation, can provide a rich archive for an alternative politics of embodiment, reproduction and non-reproduction.

Judith Halberstam, PhD, is professor of English and director of the Center for Feminist Research at USC. Halberstam teaches courses in queer studies, gender theory, art, literature and film. Halberstam is the author of Female Masculinity, The Drag King Book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters and a new book from NYU Press titled In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.

All the lectures, which are free and open to the public, begin at 8 p.m. in ERC 427.  For more information, contact Jonathan Alexander at (513) 556-6173.

The Ropes 2007 Lecture Series is sponsored by the Nathaniel P. Ropes Endowment and the Department of English and Comparative Literature, McMicken College of Arts & Sciences. 

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