WSQ Unbearable Being(s) Launch
Mon, Dec 16th, 2024
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM (virtual)
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM (in-person)
This hybrid launch event will take place in-person in Room C198, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC, and virtual attendance ia available via Zoom livestream. Register to attend in-person or online below. This event is wheel-chair accessible and ASL interpretation will be provided.
Join us to celebrate the launch of WSQ special issue “Unbearable Being(s),” co-edited by Debarati Biswas and Laura Westengard, who will moderate a discussion on the significance of this issue with the following contributors Juana María Rodríguez, Peter Hitchcock, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Nadia Huggins (cover artist), Kassandra Sparks, and Marci Blackman. Each speaker will read and/or reflect on their contribution by addressing the relevance of the issue’s theme to their piece, ongoing work, or the state of our world. We will also be joined by special guest, musician Fala La, who will perform the song, Fathom inspired by “Unbearable Being(s),” followed by a meet-and-greet where we will enjoy socializing and refreshments.
This WSQ special issue launch event is co-presented and sponsored by CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, Center for the Humanities, Center for the Study of Women and Society, and Feminist Press. Free and open to all. Please register here to attend in-person in Room C198 at the CUNY Graduate Center or virtually via Zoom livestream. ASL interpretation will be provided.
About WSQ Vol. 52 (Fall/Winter 2024) “Unbearable Being(s)”:
“Unbearable beings” are the subjects who inhabit abject and/or revolutionary positions in relation to the sociopolitical apparatus and offer alternate possibilities of living and being in this world. On the other hand, “unbearable being” is an affective state of being and becoming that indexes the intolerableness of existence within the normative.
Treated as the refuse of urban renewal and gentrification, and/or displaced by environmental crises, wars, and ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and extractive capitalism, marginalized subjects have, however, fostered socialites in spaces deemed unhomely and unclean and have effected enormous sociopolitical changes over time. How do abject spaces—prisons, hospitals, segregated housing projects, war-torn zones, disaster sites, nightclubs, single-room occupancy hotels, digital spaces, and other similar sites—function as generative locations for the creation of alternate socialities?
FEATURING CONTRIBUTORS:
Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman • Damali Abrams • Robert Azzarello • Megan Behrent • Marquis Bey • Debarati Biswas • Marci Blackman • James Bliss • Jennifer Cho • Lan Anh Chu • Em Eason • Spenser Shelley Feller • Sherese Francis • Jess A. Goldberg • Summer L. Hamilton • Peter Hitchcock • Nadia Huggins • Gracelynn Chung-yan Lau • Katherine McKittrick • Kristin Moriah • Conor Tomás Reed • Morgan L. Ridgway • Nayeli Rincon • Juana María Rodríguez • Susan Silas • elin o’Hara slavick • Kassandra Sparks • Neferti X. M. Tadiar • Kirin Wachter-Grene • Erik Wallenberg
About the Co-Editors
Debarati Biswas
Debarati Biswas (she/her) is an assistant professor of African American studies and coordinator of the Black Visual Cultures minor at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Her teaching and research interests include contemporary Black and U.S. ethnic literatures, queer theory, radical Black feminism, climate fictions, and decolonial thought. Biswas is currently working on her first book monograph about the affective and embodied dimensions of Blackness and queerness in carceral spaces—prisons, inner cities, and single-room-occupancy hotels—in African American men’s literature. She serves on the editorial board of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly and is the cochair of the board of directors at CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies. Her writing appears in Social Text, WSQ, Public Books, and Teen Vogue. Biswas has also coproduced an award-winning docu-fictional webseries, Three Trembling Cities, on immigrants of color in NYC.
Laura Westengard
Laura Westengard (she/they) is a professor of English at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. She serves on the board of directors at CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies and is the Coordinator and inaugural faculty member for the new Advanced Certificate in LGBTQ Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Laura sits on the advisory board for WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly and on the editorial board for the Peter Lang book series Vampire Studies: New Perspectives on the Undead. Her book Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) shows how queer culture adopts gothicism to challenge heteronormative and racialized systems and practices and to acknowledge the effects of microaggression and insidious trauma on queer communities.
This WSQ special issue launch event is co-presented and sponsored by CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, Center for the Humanities, Center for the Study of Women and Society, and Feminist Press.
