Left of Black S3:E11 | Everyday Racism, Everyday Homophobia

Left of Black S3:E11 | Everyday Racism, Everyday Homophobia

November 26, 2012

On Thursday, November 8, 2012, HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) sponsored Everyday Racism, Everyday Homophobia:  A Symposium on the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Sexuality at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. 

The event featured Jack Halberstam, Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California, and author of the recently published Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon);  Marlon Ross, Professor on English at the University of Virginia and author  of  Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era (NYU Press); Kathryn Bond Stockton, Distinguished Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Utah and author of Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer”; and Sharon Patricia Holland, Associate Professor of English and African & African American Studies at Duke University and the author of the just published The Erotic Life of Racism (Duke University Press). 

The event was moderated by Left of Black host and Duke University Professor, Mark Anthony Neal.

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Left of Blackis a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

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Episodes of Left of Black are also available for free download in  @ iTunes U

Live Symposium: Everyday Racism, Everyday Homophobia with Marlon Ross, J. Jack Halberstam, and Kathryn Bond Stockton

Everyday Racism, Everyday Homophobia:  

A Symposium on the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Sexuality.   

November 8, 2012   1 pm to 4 pm 

A provocative, scholarly, and lively event, "Everyday Racism, Everyday Homophobia:  A Symposium on the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Sexuality,” will take place on November 8, 2012, from 1-4 p.m. at the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke University.   

Bringing together some of the nation's most urgent thinkers on race theory and gender and sexuality studies, the Symposium is free and open to faculty, students, and the general public.  A reception will follow.  

PARTICIPANTS: 

Jack Halberstam is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and four other books including The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2012). Halberstam writes and lectures widely on issues of gender, cultural production, popular music and sexuality and blogs at both bullybloggers.wordpress.com and www.jackhalberstam.com. 

Marlon B. Ross is Professor of English and of African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses on British romanticism, African American literature, race, gender, and queer theory, and the cultural theory of space. He is currently completing his second book, The Color of Manhood: Remaking Black Masculinities within and beyond the Civil Rights Era, which examines the figuration of masculine competence as a racialized phenomenon in the domains of labor, political protest, and sexuality across the second half of the twentieth century. He is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lilly Endowment Fellowship.

Kathryn Bond Stockton is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Utah.  Her most recent books, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” and The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, are published by Duke University Press, and both were finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies.

RESPONSE: 

Participating and responding to this discussion, and honored in this symposium for her key contribution to this debate, will be Sharon Holland of Duke University, whose searing, controversial, and prescient new book, The Erotic Life of Racism, is a key document helping to define and understand these typically unspoken interconnections between what she terms “everyday racism” and “everyday homophobia,” including the intertwined histories of racial eugenics and reproductive rights.  These recurrent strains in American society also form much of the discourse of critical race theory, transnational studies, American studies, gender theory, queer theory, and sexuality studies.   

MODERATOR : 

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University. Neal is engaged in interdisciplinary scholarly work in the fields of African-American, Cultural, and Gender Studies that draws upon modes of inquiry informed by the fields of literary theory, urban sociology, social history, postmodern philosophy, Queer theory and most notably popular culture. His books include New Black Man and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (Routledge). Neal hosts a weekly webcast, Left of Black, produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center of International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.

War Stories from the Faculty Blogosphere

Panel of Faculty Bloggers and Tweeters Discuss Why Researchers Should Use Social Media

Stories from the Faculty Blogosphere
By Karl Leif Bates

Durham, NC -- The popular coinage "social media" would have been an oxymoron only five years ago.

Back then, "media" was a giant megaphone that broadcast information only one way and "social" was being in the same room with other people. Today, everyone is "the media," and we don't even have to be in the same time zone to be social.

While they may take some getting used to, the new tools of social media can be a wonderful way to teach for scholars who used to broadcast (often one-way) to a room full of flesh-and-blood students, according to four social media experts assembled on Sept. 17 to coach about 70 Duke faculty.

The workshop was organized by Duke's Office of News and Communications and the Center for Information Technology.

"Blogging is an ideal forum for scholarly communication," said Laurent Dubois, the Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History. Dubois said he started using blogs only about a year ago as a virtual class discussion for his sections on soccer and politics, Haiti and contemporary France. But he quickly saw how the tool added the ability to bring in outside sources of information and have engaging class discussions round the clock.

And his personal dispatches from the World Cup in South Africa led to an invitation to write a commentary for CNN.

"I take risks on my blog," Dubois said. "It's a relief, frankly, to be able to change voices."

Rather than being a distraction from his scholarly duties, contemporary social critic and New Black Man Mark Anthony Neal, sees his social media output as central to his efforts to bring scholarship to a wider audience.

"After a decade of writing for a broader audience, I see myself as a public intellectual," said Neal, a professor of African & African American Studies and a regular columnist on the site Loop 21.com. Neal has become pretty much a one-man social media movement. He maintains three blogs, and also connects with the world through Facebook and Twitter. He recently started a weekly YouTube show, "Left of Black."

He started using Facebook because he found students were ignoring his emails and Twitter (just this year) because he found "alumni still wanting to have the Mark Anthony Neal experience." Now the two sites serve as drivers to bring people to his blog posts, "the home base," where longer, more thoughtful work appears.

Neal is publishing his scholarship digitally and in a timely fashion, and the audience is as wide as it wants to be. "The technology has caught up to my ambitions."

"This sounds like 'knowledge in service to society,' " said moderator David Jarmul, associate vice president for news and communications.

Cathy Davidson, Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English, blogs, tweets and posts, but spent most of her portion of the panel extolling the connectivity of Twitter. The 140-character bursts from her Twitter connections has almost entirely replaced traditional media for her, and has saved, not consumed, her time, she said. "Twitter is the most efficient thing I do in my day," she said.

The mini-posts themselves, called "tweets," don't say much in themselves -- "it's like Haiku," she said. But the best tweets contain links to larger resources, and by watching trusted streams of updates and passing things along to her own followers, Twitter becomes a new way of staying current, Davidson said. "I use Twitter as my filter on the news. It's a great way of receiving and sending information, but it requires commitment."

The other payoff, Davidson said, was the sense of connectedness and community that social media gives her. Her posts garner immediate feedback and spark interesting discussions.

Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy assistant professor Misha Angrist, aka the blogger GenomeBoy, said blogging doesn't have to feel like homework. In fact, he took a break from blogging for a while when it started to feel burdensome, and now he has found a happy balance where he blogs about things he knows about ,when and where he feels like it. "I've managed to find a way to do this and not go crazy or have it take over my life." Angrist recently joined the ranks of PLoS Blogs, a new family of science bloggers hosted by the Public Library of Science open access journals.

"You don't have to worry about it becoming overwhelming because you can control how much you do it," Dubois added

Lynne O'Brien and her staff from the Center for Instructional Technology showed faculty how they too could easily use Facebook, Twitter and WordPress blogs and answered questions from the technical to the philosophical. Their tutorials can be found at cit.duke.edu/blog/2010/09/17/socialmediaworkshop/ or you can see what participants thought of the session, as it happened, by checking the hashtag #dukesocial on Twitter. (Or just click here to execute a Twitter search on that tag.