Friday, April 10 2015, 12:30pm Special Collections Library rm. 271 Special Information: FREE, open to the public, First-Year Odyssey Andrea Carson Coley Lectures “Sexual Affects: Visualizing Pleasure, Troubling Politics” presented by Juana María Rodríguez, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Graduate Group in Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. She is the author of Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (2014) and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (2003) and has published numerous articles related to her research interests in sexuality studies, queer activism in a transnational American context, critical race theory, technology and media arts, and Latin@ and Caribbean studies. This presentation is part of a larger book project that considers the quandaries of representing racially gendered violence, pleasure, and trauma in visual culture. Using the biography of Vanessa del Rio, this paper considers how images and text function as complicated triggers for the attachments, identifications, desires, and traumas of our own corporeal embodiments and sexual histories. It reflects on those moments, when as readers and viewers, we encounter the limits of our own understandings of pleasure in our attempt to make meaning out of the experiences of another. The Andrea Carson Coley Lecture was endowed by a donation by Andrew and Kathy Coley in memory of their daughter Andrea Carson Coley (1972-1993), who was a certificate candidate in Women's Studies. Each spring, our Andrea Carson Coley Lecture brings to campus scholars doing cutting-edge research in the area of lesbian and gay studies. A reception honoring the Coley family will precede the lecture at 11:30am.
