Queer Dialogues, 20-24 May 2019

Featuring: Split Britches, Cheddar Gorgeous & Kate O’Donnell
 

The Sexuality Summer School presents its 12th programme of public events for May 2019 exploring the theme of ‘queer dialogues’ through lectures, performances, workshops and readings in venues around Manchester.

The Sexuality Summer School in 2019 delivers a five-day, city-wide, public conversation on gender, sexuality and culture, engaging with international artists, academics and activists involved in feminist and queer debates about life and death, love and loss, collaborations and failures, illness and therapy.

The Sexuality Summer School welcomes back to Manchester long-time North American collaborators and lesbian icons Split Britches performing Retro(per)spective, a medley of 30 years of Split Britches’ performances that made the politics of gender and sexuality and the humour of human relations accessible to all ages and persuasions. Retro(per)spective is a Split Britches greatest hits album for those who remember the 1980’s and a Split Britches primer for those who may have missed it.

Opening the programme, Beside Her in Time sees writer and academic Elizabeth Freeman, author of the acclaimed Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010), in dialogue with Jackie Stacey (University of Manchester) exploring her contributions to queer studies and the theme of queer dialogues.

The scholar and poet So Mayer (Club Des Femmes) author of Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2015) and The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love (Wallflower, 2009) presents Dial(ogue) D for Dyke Disruption: A Queer Toolkit for Blowing Up the Film Canon? at HOME as part of their Celebrating Women In Global Cinema programme. With talking points from queer and feminist filmmakers and critics from around the globe, So will set out why things need to change, and what we can learn and do to take down mainstream cinema.

Madhavi Menon, author and professor at Ashoka University, India, speaks publicly on her research into India’s queer history and about her book, Infinite Variety: A History Of Desire in India, at The University of Manchester in The History Of Desire in India.

Artist Gemma Parker and Manchester’s infamous House Of Ghetto present The Hidden Pin Up, a powerful and beautiful piece of dance and spoken word, performed by Justina Aina and Lenai Russell, looking at the fetishisation of the black female body and tackling a legacy of racial stereotypes.

Closing the programme, performer and artistic director of award winning Trans Creative, Kate O’Donnell, and international drag superstar, Cheddar Gorgeous host A Queer Dialogue on Trans and Drag, supported by Superbia at Home. Kate and Cheddar will discuss what drag and trans have meant to them artistically, historically and personally.

The Sexuality Summer School will also be collaborating in 2019 with The University of York and the Sedgwick Memorial Foundation to deliver a full day event on queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s memoir A Dialogue on Love bringing together ten queer writers and a roundtable of five writers and translators who all dialogued with Sedgwick in different ways during and after her lifetime.

The week of public events run alongside a limited capacity postgraduate course which explores in more detail the themes and questions raised by the artists, academics and performers in the programme.

The Sexuality Summer School has been organised since 2008 by Professor Jackie Stacey (Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture at the University of Manchester); it has been regularly funded and supported by the School of Arts, Languages and Culture and the North-West Consortial Doctoral Training Programme at University of Manchester, as well as by Superbia/Manchester Pride, Contact, HOME and Screen.

American performance artist Dan Fishback said of his experience at the Summer School in 2018, “When I’m in an academic space I like to rattle things a little bit because I think that particular way of looking at the world can suffer when it is not constantly being re-infused by people’s real experience. I think it speaks really well of this programme that it’s bringing academics and practicing artists… into a really generative mix.”

Please see below for the full list of theatre, spoken word, lectures, readings, dialogues and live art, from one of Manchester’s most exciting and provocative queer culture programmes.

Monday 20 May, 12.00 noon – 2.00pm Professor Elizabeth Freeman (UC Davis)

Beside Her in Time: A Conversation with Elizabeth Freeman with Jackie Stacey (UoM) SALC Graduate School, Ellen Wilkinson, University of Manchester, Oxford Rd. M13 9PL

Monday 20 May, 6:30-8pm

So Mayer (Club Des Femmes and independent scholar and poet)

Dial(ogue) D for Dyke Disruption: A Queer Toolkit for Blowing Up the Film Canon?

Introduction and post-talk dialogue with Samar Ziadat (Dardashi) HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, Manchester M15 4FN

Tuesday 21 May/Wednesday 22 May evenings at 7pm

Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw (Split Britches) Retro(per)spective 1980-2018

John Thaw Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, Oxford Rd. M13 9PL (tickets from MHC) Presented by the Department of Drama and the SSS

Wednesday 22 May, 10am-9pm Sedgwick Memorial Symposium

In collaboration with the University of York and the Sedgwick Memorial Foundation

10-5: Dialogues on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love

Jason Edwards (York), Angus Brown (Birmingham), Meg Boulton (York), Mary Baine Campbell (Brandeis), Victoria Coulson (York), Monica Pearl (Manchester), Katie Kent (Williams), Jonathan Flatley (Wayne State), Jane Hu (Berkeley), Sarah McCarry (Brooklyn-based author)

7-9: Evening roundtable with: Adam Frank (University, British Columbia), María José Belbel (Digmeout, 2009), and others; chaired by Jason Edwards (York)

John Casken LT, 2nd Floor, Martin Harris Centre, Oxford Rd. M13 9PL

Thursday 23 May, 5:30-7pm Madhavi Menon (Ashoka University)

The History of Desire in India: Dialogues with Queer Theory, chaired by Jackie Stacey John Casken LT, 2nd Floor, Martin Harris Centre, Oxford Rd. M13 9PL

Thursday 23 May, 7.15pm

House of Ghetto and Gemma Parker

The Hidden Pin-Up

Samuel Alexander Foyer, University of Manchester

Friday 24 May, 6:30 – 8pm

Cheddar Gorgeous (The Family Gorgeous) and Kate O’Donnell (Transcreative)

A Queer Dialogue on Trans and Drag

HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, Manchester M15 4FN

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