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Monday Night Seminar: Queer Archives
Session Description
November 28, 2022 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Join the Mcluhan Centre for Culture and Technology for a roundtable conversation with Bliss Lim, SA Smythe and Rachel Corbman, moderated by Patrick Keilty.
With a sense of the entanglements of racialized sexuality, historical erasure, and material precarity, queer scholars grapple with the problems and pitfalls of curation, evidence, memory, epistemology, and historiography when queerness is an archival object. An archive is not simply a site for historical accumulation and administrative power. Instead, it is also a site of creative irruption that re-assembles history to serve as the contestatory ground over the boundaries of community, identity, pleasure, and desire.
Please note this is an in-person event. To protect more vulnerable members of our community we strongly encourage you to wear a mask.
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What are Monday Night Seminars?
The “Monday Night Seminar” carries on the tradition of public seminars at the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. All seminars take place within the same intimate Coach House on the St George Campus; in this up-close and personal environment, a range of thinkers – academics, activists, scientists, artists, designers and planners – will challenge prevailing cultural notions about technology and provoke new insight on the possibilities for a more equitable technological future. Join us!
Our annual theme, Our Selfies Our Selves, investigates contemporary technologies of the self. A number of such technologies have seemed salient in recent years: the selfie and its revolutions in our practices of imaging and self-imaging; our constant presentations of self in everyday life online; the endless online avatars we create, from dating profiles to VR avatars to the advertising profiles platforms collect; the intimate biometric technologies of the “quantified self”; or, simply, the endlessly irritating rectangle in the Brady Bunch grid of a video call that shows us back to ourselves—that we hopefully have now mostly grown numb over the last two pandemic years.
About the Speakers
Bliss Cua Lim is Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic and Temporal Critique (Duke University Press, 2009; Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2011) and a member of the Editorial Collective of the journal, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies and the Advisory Board of Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication. Her forthcoming book, The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (Duke University Press), analyzes the crisis-ridden history of film archiving in the Philippines.
Rachel Corbman is a postdoctoral fellow in community data in the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Toronto. Her current project, “Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation,” is a history of the conflicts that shaped women’s studies and gay and lesbian studies in the 1970s and 1980s. “Conferencing on the Edge” was recognized by the CLAGS fellowship award and the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize. Portions of this project have been published or are forthcoming in GLQ, Feminist Formations, and the Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities. Her book manuscript is currently under review at Duke University Press.
SA Smythe is Assistant Professor of Black Studies and the Archive in the Faculty of Information and an affiliate faculty member of the Women & Gender Studies Institute (WGSI). Prior to joining UofT, they were Assistant Professor of Black European Cultural Studies and Black Trans Poetics at UCLA and a Fellow awarded the 2022 Rome Prize for Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome. Smythe is a critical theorist, poet, transdisciplinary artist, and translator committed to black belonging beyond all borders and the study of how archives of otherwise possibility come to be narrated, realised, and remembered. They hold a PhD in History of Consciousness with emphases in Feminist Studies and Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Patrick Keilty is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. He is the editor of Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader and of the forthcoming volumes Queer Data and Handbook of Adult Film and Media. He serves on the editorial board for Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience and serves as Co-Chair of the Adult Film History Group in the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. He is currently working on a monograph, tentatively titled Database Desires, about the politics of digital infrastructures in the sex industries and the materiality of sexual media.
