Join the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) community on Friday, April 3rd for our annual Yulee Lecture. We are excited to feature two groundbreaking scholars: Professor Deborah A. Thomas and Professor Jade Power-Sotomayor.

Deborah Thomas
Chair and the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology
University of Pennsylvania
"Bodies Unbound"

If abyssally generated knowledge is material, social, and psychic, what kind of proprioceptive capacities does it engender? In this talk, Thomas argues that the recursive phenomena of modern social and material landscapes generate proprioceptive patterns rooted in cyclical, rhythmic fluctuation across scales that have unpredictable and complex effects – materially, socially, and psychically. She will discuss the ways bodily orientations are tied to both geophysics and particle physics, collective movement, and heritability. If the boat, Glissant’s “womb abyss,” created both collective rupture and the conditions of possibility for new collective orientations, and if the middle passage thus generated new proprioceptive attunements, then what would it mean to imagine labor in motion across the globe as a kind of imperial proprioception, one that both reproduces and exceeds colonial geophysics? What would it mean to return?

Jade Power-Sotomayor
Head of Performance Studies
Assistant Professor, Dance Faculty
UC San Diego
"Embodied Code-Switching and Listening to Our Dances"

Using Afro-Puerto Rican bomba as a point of departure—a centuries-old drum, dance, and song practice defined by how the dancer’s movements are marked in precise simultaneity by the drummer—this talk theorizes the mutual indebtedness between the sonic and corporeal. In dancing to make sound, to be listened to, we require and depend upon something outside of ourselves for its completion and success. Thinking the corporeal through the sonic teaches us something about embodied entanglements and embodied freedoms. We put into practice protocols of giving and receiving outside of the demands of capital accumulation. Power-Sotomayor frames this as a practice of “embodied code-switching” which both indexes the interplay between the linguistic and the embodied, while also re-routing/switching from the logics encoded in the project of modernity.

RSVP online.