Lorenze 3

Los Huecos Negros: Cannibalism, Sodomy and the Failure of Modernity in Tierra Firme

By Marcia Ochoa »»» To tunnel into the black hole of modernity and the coloniality of gender: this essay proposes time travel between early contact texts in the Americas and the contemporary life world of Yhajaira, a transformista from Caracas. I engage a chronopolitics that works against the developmental logic of modernity to inhabit and embody queer forms of pleasure, though I will attach these to the quotidian violence lived by transformistas in Caracas in the early 21st century rather than to a queer existence.

Lorenze 4

The Future of Lesbian Genders

By Lisa L. Moore »»» Does “lesbian” have a future? Queer and transgender theories are sometimes understood to have supplanted the analytic and cultural usefulness of the term lesbian. This essay identifies a tradition of intertwined lesbian, trans, and woman of color feminist work on gender that has deeply shaped current theories of gender. As an example of the interpretive possibilities of lesbian genders, the essay then sketches out a lesbian history of the sonnet to show how what starts out as a limit or exclusion can be creatively and campily refigured as an aesthetic.

Lorenze 8b

The Cultural Politics of Perversion: Augustine, Shakespeare, Freud, Foucault

By Jonathan Dollimore »»» I want to say something about the intellectual context out of which this paper grew, acutely aware of the problems facing humanities departments in both the US and the UK, and the seemingly grim outlook for them in the future. This essay argues that perversion is not only a culturally central phenomenon but, thereby, also a crucial category for cultural analysis.