Muhlenberg College Hosts Series Of Events On The Ethics And Politics Of Identity
The Muhlenberg College Center for Ethics will sponsor The Ethics and Politics of Identity, a series of programs about the ethical challenges that surround the changing categories of social, national, and global identities.Wednesday, August 24, 2005 01:59 PM
Each year, the Center for Ethics sponsors an intensive series designed to encourage discussion and reflection on a timely, pertinent topic. Center for Ethics programs are open to all members of the Muhlenberg campus and the local community. For more information on the series, visit www.muhlenberg.edu/cultural/ethics.
Fall programs sponsored by the Center for Ethics will include:
"Recognition, Representation, and the Ethics and Politics of Identity: An Exploration Focusing on the Comic Identity of Margaret Cho"
Thursday, September 1, 7 p.m.
Miller Forum, Moyer Hall
Muhlenberg faculty present selections from the concert videos of comedian Margaret Cho and introduce the Center's major questions for the year. A Korean-American queer-friendly artist, Cho points up the hilarious complications of individuality. Her provocative stand-up acts raise questions about how certain identities get to be “normal.” As Cho teases us into seeing, the strict parameters of normal guarantee that others become “abnormal”– these categorizations define and limit individuals and groups grappling with society’s socio-economic and cultural categories of class, race, gender and sexual identification. Join us for conversation, more jokes and food at a reception.
Lecture by Brenda Dixon Gottschild: "Reading Race, Performing Race – Parameters and Potentials"
Thursday, September 8, 7 p.m.
Miller Forum, Moyer Hall
Public talk by Brenda Dixon Gottschild, cultural historian, choreographer and performer. Her recent book, The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool, challenges the concept of race by interrogating the perceptions, images, and assumptions, both past and present, that have accumulated around this topic. Dixon Gottschild will guide students in the process of recognizing the ethical problems that present themselves everyday around the construction and protection of American “whiteness.” She will also explore the corollary societal effect of muting "blackness" in American culture.
Dance Workshop with Rennie Harris (for students only): “Hip Hop Rhythm, History & Theory”
Saturday, September 10, 10 a.m.
First Floor Dance Studio, Trexler Pavilion
This master class will provide students with a brief historical and practical context about funk & hip hop dance according to ideas set forth by the Creators and Masters of the forms. Participants will learn the basic foundation of authentic movement forms. We will discuss the differences between commercial hip hop and authentic hip hop; this in turn will give participants a deeper understanding of the dance form, its evolution and culture.
Performance by Rennie Harris: “Prince ScareKrow's Road to the Emerald City”(a work in progress)
Saturday, September 10, 8 p.m.
Baker Theatre, Trexler Pavilion
The “Prince ScareKrow’s Road to the Emerald City” project traces the journey and development of the artist and the many profiles in the life of Rennie Harris through dance. The work includes the solo “Endangered Species” and “Lorenzo's Oil,” followed by a discussion with the artist.
Discussion with Brenda Dixon Gottschild: “Reading Race, Performing Race - A Plan of Action”
Thursday, September 15, 3 p.m.
Brown Dance Studio, Brown Hall
Brenda Dixon Gottschild will lead an additional conversation with students and faculty to consider generating a "plan of action" for our campus around the issues brought up in her lecture.
Documentary Film Viewing: “Banana Split,” by Kip Fulbeck
Thursday, September 22, 7 p.m.
Recital Hall, Center for the Arts
This experimental video interweaves narratives, stories and media clips to explore biracial ethnicity and Asian self-identity. The filmmaker examines his parents’ relationship (his father is Caucasian and his mother is Asian) and also explores ethnic dating patterns and media stereotypes of Asian American men. He combines improvisation, stand-up comedy, political activism and personal stories to questions where Hapas (people of mixed race with Asian or Pacific Islander ancestry) belong in a country that ignores multiracialism.
Lecture by Josh Gamson: "Freaks Talk Back: Television and Sexual Nonconformity"
Thursday, September 29, 7 p.m.
Recital Hall, Center for the Arts
A talk by Joshua Gamson, associate professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco, a prominent sociologist of culture. His award winning Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity explores the consequences of Jerry Springer-style, ratings-driven outrageousness focused upon labeling certain sexual identities as “deviant.” His presentation raises questions of conscience around media visibility and identity – who gets to be visible and in what ways? He challenges us to scrutinize media concepts of “normal” and “freaks” and to explore the unstable relations between media portrayals and group identities. Have shifts in media technology really generated a more fluid series of identity options?
Film Viewing: Sadie Benning “Videoworks” (three short films)
Monday, October 3, 7 p.m.
Recital Hall, Center for the Arts
Independent film-maker, Sadie Benning has been making entries in her video-diary since she was 15 years old. Tonight’s program consists of three short films made when she was 19. In “Girl Power” (1992), Benning relates her personal rebellion against school, family, and female stereotypes with musical support from an all-girl band, Bikini Kill. In “It Wasn’t Love” (1992), Benning recounts an erotic encounter with a “bad girl” through the gender posturing and interplay of Hollywood stereotypes. “A Place Called Lovely” (1991) explores the violence of everyday life, using small toys as props to suggest the ways we allow ourselves to be controlled and manipulated by larger social forces. A faculty panel discussion featuring Patrice DiQuinzio (Philosophy & Women’s Studies) among others will immediately follow the film-screenings.
Documentary Film Viewing: “Juggling Gender,” by Tami Gold
Thursday, October 6, 7 p.m.
Recital Hall, Center for the Arts
A loving portrait of Jennifer Miller, a lesbian performer who lives her life with a full beard. Miller works as a performance artist, circus director, clown and as the "bearded lady" in one of the only remaining sideshows in America. In public she is often mistaken for a man, an experience she handles with the wit and intelligence that characterize her stage performances. JUGGLING GENDER explores the fluidity of gender and raises important questions about the construction of sexual and gender identity.
Performance and post-show talk with Kate Bornstein: “On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us"
Monday, October 10, 8 p.m.
Empie Theatre, Center for the Arts
Artist and author Kate Bornstein’s playful performances about gender make hir work accessible and entertaining. Bornstein was assigned the gender “male” at birth and was raised as a boy. As an adult, Bornstein chose to have a sex change and become a woman, but later realized, “being a woman didn’t work for me any better than being a man …. So just like I gave up being a man, I gave up being a woman. And I settled in to being neither.” This fluid gender identity plays out in the language Bornstein uses when writing about hirself, substituting “hir” for “her” and “ze” for “he.” Published works include the plays The Opposite Sex is … Neither! and A Queer and Pleasant Danger, as well as the books My Gender Workbook and Gender Outlaw. Hir performance invites us to ask why constructions of normal exert so much sway in medicine, and how the pressure to fit into a gender binary generates ethical questions for us all. If there were no category “normal,” what might happen? Come enjoy Kate Bornstein’s performance and ask hir yourself after the show.
Film Viewing: “Bad Education” (dir. Pedro Almodovar, in Spanish with subtitles)
Monday, October 17, 7 p.m.
Recital Hall, Baker Center for the Arts
The most recent film by the Academy Award winning Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, “Bad Education” is by turns lurid melodrama, surreal fairy-tale, morally-charged indictment of sexual abuse, transvestite satire, and a boy’s own love story. Moving rapidly between a Catholic boys school in the 1960, a grungy neighborhood in 1980s Valencia, and an upscale film studio in 1990s Madrid, “Bad Education” intensifies Almodovar’s ongoing exploration of identities in crisis. All the film’s characters are ruled by some form of compulsion and everyone finds himself trapped either in the institutional madness of the church, the social madness of ambition, sexual opportunism, romantic longings, or the manufactured fantasies of cinema itself. Featuring Gael Garcia Bernal. A faculty panel discussion featuring Francesca Coppa (English) among others will immediately follow the film screening.
Indian Dance Performance
Friday, October 21, 7:30 p.m.
Dance Studio Theatre, Trexler Pavillion
The Nrithyanjali Dancers featuring Ramya Ramnarayanan will perform classical and fusion pieces based on South Indian Bharata Natyam traditions, with a focus on the many-layered issues of identity inherent in this art form. Discussion will follow. The performances raise questions about identity concerning the transplantation of traditions in the Indian diaspora. How do the dancers perform and experience multiple identities in their training, experience and on stage? The scenario in India has changed radically in the past century. But it is still the case that Dance is power, and the dancer is a player in the struggle between traditional India and modernity, especially as influenced by the west.
Lecture by Alice Dreger: “Conjoined Twins, Intersex, and the Future of Normal”
Tuesday, November 8, 7 -- 8 p.m.
Miller Forum, Moyer Hall
Talk by Alice Dreger, Associate Professor of science and technology studies at Michigan State University. A historian and bioethicist whose observations center broadly on the relationships between science, medicine, and identity, Dreger examines the treatment of people born with “abnormal” bodies, including reproductive anatomies (Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex) and conjoined twins (One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal). The larger goal of Dreger’s work has been to critically examine the socio-political structures of power that define normality and abnormality within the clinic. Dreger’s scholarship has also helped to catalyze activism within the intersexed community; she currently serves as the Director of Medical Education for the Intersex Society of North America. Like all of the previous speakers, Dreger examines the ethics of identity as it relates to normality/freakishness, but with a special attention to medically-defined otherness and the social function of the clinic.
Film Viewing: Boys Don’t Cry (dir. Kimberley Pierce)
Monday, November 14, 7 p.m.
Recital Hall, Center for the Arts
Based on actual events, “ Boys Don’t Cry” powerfully recreates the “sexual identity crisis” of Teena Brandon who, for a short time, became Brandon Teena, the popular new guy in a small Nebraska town. Teena sinks into her identity as Brandon as seamlessly as Academy Award winning actor, Hilary Swank, sinks into her double role. As Brandon establishes a mutually-satisfying sexual relationship with hometown beauty, Lana (Chloe Sevigny), many of our stereotypical ideas about what is or what is not “same-sex” desire begin to become provocatively unraveled. Their romance does not last long, however, and the last, graphically brutal section of the film is not for the faint of heart. A faculty panel discussion featuring Tom Cartelli (English) among others will immediately follow the film screening.
Lecture by Craig Calhoun: “Cosmopolitanism and Belonging”
Thursday, December 1, 7 – 8 p.m.
Miller Forum, Moyer Hall
Craig Calhoun, one of the world’s leading sociologists, is president of the Social Science Research Council and University Professor of the Social Sciences at New York University. He has authored a number of books, including Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (1994), Nationalism (1995), and Critical Social Theory (1995). Calhoun has long reflected on questions of identity and difference, most recently in relation to globalization. In his talk, Calhoun will address the neglect of ethnic and cultural identity in the way we speak about about globalization. According to Calhoun, we too often assume that our social solidarities—in the sense of belonging to an ethnic group, nation or religion—will get swept away in the new global currents. Calhoun’s lecture will challenge this assumption. He will argue that attachments to particular communities still matter.
