In the spring of 2015 the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies in cooperation with the Graduate Gender Programme (GGeP) at Utrecht University organises the fourteenth round of the DOING GENDER Lecture Series. These lectures stress the importance of doing gender work combined with an active involvement in the practice of gender theory and research. The concept of DOING GENDER supports a hands-on approach to gender issues in the sense of social and political engagement with the new forms of gender inequalities that are taking shape in the world today. The lecture series wants to give space to the new generations of gender theorists and practitioners and to perspectives that innovate the field and do gender in new ways. Key is the notion of doing gender: what is the state of the art definition of gender? How do contemporary scholars and activists utilise this definition?

On Monday March 23, 2015 Professor Ann Cvetkovich will give a Doing Gender Lecture on ‘Archival Turns and Queer Affective Methods’.
This talk will focus on the recent proliferation of LGBTQ archives as a point of departure for a broader inquiry into the power of archives to transform public histories. The push for LGBTQ state recognition, civil rights, and cultural visibility has been accompanied by a desire for the archive—a claim that the recording and preservation of LGBTQ history is an epistemic right. Yet new LGBTQ archival projects must also respond to historical and theoretical critiques, including decolonizing ones, that represent archives as forms of epistemological domination and surveillance. This talk address these tensions through case histories of actual archives, as well as projects by artists whose creative and queer approaches to the archives are simultaneously critical and transformative.

Ann Cvetkovich is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work focuses on how affects, emotions and feelings have become tangible commodities in neoliberalism and late capitalism. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012). She co-edited (with Ann Pellegrini) “Public Sentiments”, a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online, and (with Janet Staiger and Ann Reynolds) Political Emotions (Routledge, 2010). She has been coeditor, with Annamarie Jagose, of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Her current writing projects focus on the current state of LGBTQ archives and the creative use of them by artists to create counterarchives and interventions in public history. In 2014-15, she will be a Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, where the annual theme is Sensation.

Lecture details:

  • Monday March 23, 2015: Professor An Cvetkovich (University of Texas at Austin)
  • Lecture: Archival Turns and Queer Affective Methods
  • Time: 11.45 – 13.00 hrs
  • Location: Utrecht, Drift 21, room 0.05
  • Chair: Dr. Marta Zarzycka

The Doing Gender Lecture Series (flyer) takes place in Utrecht and is free of charge. Registration is not compulsory, but highly appreciated: nog@uu.nl or 030 – 253 6001.