Applications for Winter 2022 SPAN Reading Group are now OPEN!
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Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN)
Reading Group
Winter Quarter 2022
Deadline Extended: Monday, December 6, 2021
SPAN invites faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students to participate in a small, focused reading group (15 to 18 people) that will meet during Winter Quarter 2022. The topic for this year is Queer Nightlife Ecologies: Arts of the Underground in the Era of COVID and will be facilitated by Charles McDonald (Sava Ranisavljevic Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Crown Family Center for Jewish Studies).
The Reading Group will meet five times during Winter Quarter to discuss short readings (for example, three or four articles or book chapters per meeting) that explore the reading group’s theme. Meetings will be on the following Thursdays from 5:00-6:30 pm: January 13, January 27, February 10, February 24, and March 10. It is expected that participants will attend at least four of the five meetings. The format of the Reading Group will be determined by the preferences of the selected participants (e.g., remote, in person, hybrid).
While the main reward for participation is good company and intellectually engaged discussion, Northwestern participants who attend regularly will receive a research stipend of $750 at the end of the quarter.
Reading group description:
In the U.S. and elsewhere, the past decade witnessed a revival of queer “underground” nightlife organized around electronic dance music, even as other traditional queer urban spaces like bars and large clubs were closing in droves. During the first year of the COVID pandemic, nearly all in-person queer nightlife was extinguished, including bars, clubs, warehouse events, bathhouses, sex parties, and festivals. Already subject to much greater risk of poverty, unemployment, and illness than the general population, queer people who make their living in nightlife (especially trans people and people of color), found themselves in even more precarious circumstances. In the summer of 2021, in-person queer nightlife began to “return,” and along with it the DJs, promoters, producers, performers, dancers, sex workers, bartenders, artists, and music lovers who make-up the underground. This reading group seeks conceptual tools that are adequate for analyzing the forms of labor, care, pleasure, and community that queer communities developed to live through and with COVID. If one aim of the reading group is to track the conditions of possibility for the resurgence of such scenes in recent years, another is to reckon with the ways that their viability is threatened by a virus that is both novel and all too familiar. Over the course of the five sessions, we will ask how queer ecologies are produced and sustained, and what flourishes (or doesn’t) within them. Our readings are resolutely interdisciplinary, intended to equip us with theories, methods, and vocabularies with which we might construct a history of queer nightlife’s present.
Planned Readings
Selected readings
A selection of proposed readings across the five meetings (Meeting 1: Dispatches from the Present I: Death and Resurrection; Meeting 2: Nightlife Methods; Meeting 3: Bodies, Space, Race; Meeting 4: Attunements: Pleasure, Community, Utopia; Meeting 5: Dispatches from the Present II: COVID) are included below. However, the group will collectively discuss additional topics and readings.
Adeyemi, Kemi, Kareem Khubchandani, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, eds., Queer Nightlife (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2021), selections.
Adeyemi, Kemi, “The Practice of Slowness: Black Queer Women and the Right to the City,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies vol. 25 no. 4 (October 2019): 545-567.
Anderson, Reynaldo, “Fabulous: Sylvester James, Black Queer Afrofuturism, and the Black Fantastic,” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 5(2), 2013.
Bailey, Marlon M., “‘It’s Gonna Get Severe Up in Here’: Ball Events, Ritualized Performance, and Black Queer Space,” in Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2013), 124-181.
Black, Blair, “The Queer of Color Sound Economy in Electronic Dance Music,” Current Musicology, no. 106, 2020, 9-24.
Buckland, Fiona, Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), selections.
Butler, Mark J., Playing with Something That Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and Composition in DJ and Laptop Performance (New York: Oxford University Press).
Carrillo, Héctor, Pathways of Desire: The Sexual Migration of Mexican Gay Men (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2017), selections.
Chambers-Letson, Joshua, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life. NY: New York University Press, 2018), selections.
Florêncio, João, Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig (New York: Routledge, 2002).
Garcia, Luis-Manuel, “Feeling the Vibe: Sound, Vibration, and Affective Attunement in Electronic Dance Music Scenes,” Ethnomusicology Forum, 2020, 1-19.
Kornhaber, Spencer, “How Quarantine is Reshaping Queer Nightlife,” The Atlantic, June 10, 2020.
Lawrence, Tim, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), selections.
Moore, Madison, “Up in the Club,” in Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 113-153.
Muñoz, José Esteban, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), selections.
Orne, Jason, Boystown: Sex & Community in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), selections.
Race, Kane, “Queer Chemistry: Gay Partying and Collective Innovations in Care,” in The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments with the Problem of HIV (New York: Routledge, 2018), 25-45.
Rivera-Servera, Ramón H., Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2012), selections.
Salkind, Micah E., Do You Remember House? Chicago’s Queer of Color Undergrounds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), selections.
Thrasher, Steven W., “An Uprising Comes from the Viral Underclass,” Slate, June 12, 2020.
Wark, McKenzie, Reverse Cowgirl (South Pasadena: Semitotext(e), 2020), selections.
Questions about the reading group or application process may be sent to Cassilyn Ostrander at sexualities@northwestern.edu.
For more information on previous years’ reading groups, click here.