Featuring:

Queer Transversal: Adam Lamberts Cock Rock Fever

by Elizabeth Gould, Associate Professor, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto

Staging the Queer Womans Body: Decoding Dirty Plotz

Laine Yale Zisman Newman, PhD student, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto

Beyond the Chronic: HIV and the Sharing of a Virus

Matthew Halse, Doctoral candidate, Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism, Western University

Reception to follow.

Thursday January 29, 2014 5-7 pm Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University College room 240

ABSTRACTS and BIOGRAPHIES:

Elizabeth Gould - Queer Transversal: Adam Lamberts Cock Rock Fever

Fox Networks television show American Idol carefully manages its narratives. In part because dissident sexualities are not among those that the show allows, Idol packaged and commodified season eight runner-up Adam Lambert as glam rock spectacle. The media spectacle Adam Lambert, an extravagant moving and sounding visual and aural display, functioned to normalize Lamberts musical persona and performances in relationship to dominant discourses of gender and sexuality. While ubiquitous and apparently hegemonic, corporate-orchestrated spectacles do not go uncontested, and may be mobilized as sites of resistance. Lambert set the terms of his spectacle Adam Lambert in contradistinction to the media spectacle Adam Lambert by enthusiastically taking up a persona associated with the historical spectacular music of glam rock while simultaneously exceeding its conventions and undermining its narratives as an ethical act of Deleuzian transverse thinking. Affirming and intensifying difference in ways that put the incommunicable in communication, Lambert asserted queerness as a Deleuzian transversal zigzagging across the spectacle Adam Lambert to construct queer subjectivities as a musical life worth living. Refracted through a queer feminist lens, my analysis consists of close readings of Lamberts semi-final through finale performances during Idols 2009 season, focusing here on his cover of Led Zeppelins cock rock anthem, Whole Lotta Love. Having dragged failed heterosexuality the week before with his performance of Feeling Good, I argue that the spectacle Adam Lamberts trans-informed, as opposed to glam, performance of queer masculinity in Whole Lotta Love not only re-formed hegemonic rock masculinity, but foreclosed it altogether.

Elizabeth Gould serves as Associate Professor for the University of Toronto Faculty of Music where she teaches philosophically based courses in music and music education, as well as a course on music and sexuality for the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, and music in the context of feminisms and queer theory. She served as a featured curator for Queer Americana, the theme week posted August 8-12, 2011 on in media res: a media commons project, for which she wrote on queer potentialities of Meredith Willsons musical, The Music Man.

Laine Yale Zisman Newman - Staging the Queer Womans Body: Decoding Dirty Plotz

In 2013 a queer cabaret entitled, Dirty Plotz was staged at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, in Toronto, Canada. It was produced once in February and remounted for their Pride festivities in June. The cabaret was comprised of musical, interpretative, video and theatrical performances by women associated with Torontos LGBT community. While not mandated to do so, the performances in the cabaret demonstrated unique facets of queer womens subcultures through the provocative presentations of staged queer womens bodies. Through a phenomenological reflection of the authors subjective experience as live spectator and videographer at Dirty Plotz, this article explores the performance of queer womens subculture and the ways in which the corporeal form can be employed as a subversive means of queering hetero/homonormative ideologies and practices. Constructed norms and expectations mold a universalized perception of the womans body and how one is oriented towards her. When we are compelled to see her through the lens of a nonconforming and queer cultural frame, the singular and universalized womans body is shattered to reveal the diversity within queer womens experiences. Applying Sarah Ahmeds queer phenomenology as a theoretical and methodological framework, this paper examines queer womens subcultures in a Canadian context. Through an analysis of two productions of Dirty Plotz this paper explores the ways in which staged queer womens bodies are both shaped by and help to shape queer subcultural practices.

Laine Zisman Newman is a PhD student at the University of Torontos Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and the collaborative programs in Sexual Diversity Studies. She received a Masters degree in Drama in 2010 and a Masters of Fine Arts Degree in Documentary Media in 2013. Zisman Newman is co-organizer of a new national initiative called Equity in Theatre. Her creative and scholarly work has been published in Canadian Theatre Review; Studies in Documentary Film; Able Muse; The Rusty Toque; and Journal of Dance, Movement and Spiritualties.

Matthew Halse - Beyond the Chronic: HIV and the Sharing of a Virus

In both theoretical thought and artistic practice, conceptualization of the temporality of HIV has shifted from the future anterior the will have been, in which the immanence of future death is projected such that that future will have already been experienced, to the chronic, in which the future is always already deferred in the service of managing the now. The becoming-chronic of HIV resultant from life sustaining antiretroviral therapies, however, has produced a marked decrease in political and activist energies within the North American queer community, further marginalizing populations without access to health care, normalizing the epidemic, and displacing fervent hopes for a cure. Bolstered by Jean-Luc Nancys The Intruder and increasing attention to viral politics, this paper considers a temporal-political model of re-understanding HIV termed being-before a virus as to radically understand HIV as originary to all queer bodies. This model of thought understands HIV as preceding both who we are and who we will become, understanding the virus as latent within us all. Whenregardless of actual serostatusno queer body may claim a space immune to HIV, urgency, vulnerability, and mortality must become reinserted into contemporary queer politics, and HIV must once again become a collective problem.

Matthew Halse is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University. He is also instructor in the department of Women's Studies and Feminist Research.