Hypothetical Arrangements

I will be co-leading the workshop with Professor Rachel Mattson on March 31.

CLAGS Seminar in the City: Queering the Curriculum
Spring Series Helps Educators Develop LGBTQ Curriculum

This spring, beginning February 4, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS), The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, and The Hetrick Martin Institute will host a series of workshops addressing queer pedagogies and culture in the classroom. Seminar in the City: Queering the Curriculum will take place over the course of four Saturdays at the Urban Justice Center in downtown Manhattan.

This past summer, queer people and our allies cheered the California State Legislature’s requirement to include the contributions of LGBTQ people to history in social studies textbooks and in-class curriculum.. While California’s legislation represents an unqualified first, teachers in New York City—including teachers at Harvey Milk High School—and across the country have already experimented with introducing queer pedagogies in primary, intermediate, and secondary school classrooms. These and other strategies will be addressed in the CLAGS spring seminar series.

In addition to including historical figures as varied as Bayard Rustin, an architect of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, and Sylvia Rivera, a long-time activist for transgender rights and economic justice, these workshops also offer primary, intermediate, and secondary educators the opportunity to investigate the queer past before the invention of the term “homosexuality” from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the bedroom of Abraham Lincoln. Furthermore, Queering the Curriculum means calling into question the meaning of “civil rights” by investigating the historical experiences of queer people, as well as other taken-for-granted assumptions such as how gendered categories or ideas of “normal” are socially determined. The seminars will also explore how the history of sexuality complicates the study of race, ethnicity, and gender in the existing curriculum.

Queering the Curriculum will take place over four Saturdays spaced out over the spring 2012 semester. We hope that in addition to new ideas and inspiration, teachers can walk away from these sessions with ready-made lesson plans and resources in hand.

Queering the Curriculum is a series and we encourage participants to come to as many sessions as possible. Educators from all disciplines, fields, and age groups should feel welcome to attend. Teachers and teaching assistants are especially invited, but we also welcome counselors, principals and other administrators, school volunteers, and parents to join us for these exciting workshops. We also wish to welcome participants from across the region, including Long Island, Upstate New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Seminar the City: Queering the Curriculum
2012 Spring Schedule

February 4
Introduction to the major concepts and ideas of queer pedagogies in the classroom as well as possible institutional and other hurdles that primary, intermediate, and secondary teachers might face.

March 3
Exploration of the existing civil rights curriculum and strategies for including the history of queer activism in the broader histories of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, and other political movements that sought to expand and redefine civil liberties in the United States and abroad.

March 31
Primary and secondary resources in the development of lesson plans, curriculum design, and school-wide programming.

May 5
Exploration of the institutional resources available to teachers and administrators, classroom and school advocacy for both queer students and queer curriculum, and solutions for moving forward in local and state school boards.

Participants in the seminar and discussion include:

• Darnell Moore and Sam Stiegler at the Hetrick-Martin Institute
• New York City teachers Jesse Chanin and Kevin Connell,
• Pop-Up Museum of Queer History Founder Hugh Ryan
• Professor Rachel Mattson at SUNY-New Paltz
• Professor Robbie Cohen at NYU,
• Education Associate Christine Hou of the Dia Art Foundation,
• CLAGS board members Christopher Mitchell and Daniel Hurewitz

Seminars in the City will be held at the Urban Justice Center on 123 William Street in downtown Manhattan.

If you can attend, please RSVP to queeringthecurriculum@gmail.com by January 29, 2012

What follows a strict chronology has no memory.

          —Lyn Hejinian, My Life

Longing produces modes of both belonging and ‘being long’ or persisting over time.

          —Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

November 10, 2011                                                                                     

To begin

To begin in time

To imagine alternatives

As forms of doubt and curiosity

As persistent restlessness

As a form of resistance

Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly

Reusable Parts/Endless Love

Homage/critique

Begins and begins again

In 2010, Gerard and Kelly encountered Tino Sehgal’s Kiss at the Guggenheim. Drawn to both its physical and ephemeral nature, as well as Seghal’s consistently heteronormative casting, Gerard and Kelly visited the piece several times to create an audio score of the work, “notating the dancers’ movements as accurately as possible and in real time. We deciphered the work consisted of a roughly 12-minute choreography, performed on a loop.”

An other is a possibility, isn’t it.

           —Lyn Hejinian, My Life

Initial performances that stemmed from the recording consisted of reenactments with the heterosexual couple replaced by same-sex pairs and trios. However, Gerard and Kelly didn’t want to “simply swap one representation for another” a seemingly superficial response that parallels the all-too familiar gay-friendly trend to “normalize” or “equalize” queer lifestyles without challenging the status quo that excluded them in the first place. Reusable Parts/Endless Love is not a reenactment of Sehgal’s work, but a queer critique of notions of progress, a reconstructed system, an experiment of the body in time.

Experienced as an installation, spectators move in and around five partitions composed of two mobile walls meeting at right angles. Cylindrical speakers suspended by copper wires hang in a grid-like pattern over the floor. The moving spectator becomes part of the work. Time is not marked in seconds, minutes or linear narrative, but the mere repetition of language and movement.

“His hands on her lower back.”

“She’s straddling his right thigh.”

“Hand on her crotch.”

“Three steps…and she’s crawling towards him.”

Observation becomes text. Text becomes score. And score is transformed into movement. After three dancers (Yves Laris Cohen, Jose Tena and Roger Prince) have created their own scores, a fourth dancer, devynn emory, steps in to observe and record the movements of the three dancers. This generates a new 12-minute score, which is then performed as a duet watched by two other dancers. New duets are formed and new scores are generated.

We are caught in a recursive loop. Time slows, stammers…falters. The highly systematic approach feels senseless amidst the heaving and determined bodies in the room. No longer am I trying to follow the rules of the system, rather feel time’s effects; its tactility reverberating in my psyche. Gender roles are reversed. Genders meld into one another and expand upon each other. Intimacy reveals itself in repetition with variation. The present signifies not a continuation of the past, but a series of layers—an accumulation. Time does not signify progression, but an investigative poetics of bodies in space.

Gerard and Kelly cast a marvelous group of dancers, all of who possess distinct identities that antagonize society’s restrictive gender binary. Cohen, a transgender performer, opens the Thursday night performance by reciting Gerard and Kelly’s recording (via headphones) as accurately as possible, including all the slips, hesitations, and elongations, into a recording device. He has a powerful presence, bearing an uncanny similarity to a play-by-play announcer. As soon as he finishes recording, it is played back while he follows his own instruction, enacting both the “he” and the “she” of Sehgal’s Kiss. His movements are confident and mesmerizing to watch as he exhibits both a sense of ownership and estrangement in relationship to the words that surround him—familiar in that it is his voice, unfamiliar in its duel-gendered content. In an opposite corner, Tena’s speech is gentler and softer than Cohen’s. Language and movement are layered on top of one another to create a repetition with variation, a strange and seductive stutter.

Where Sehgal’s dramatically drawn-out Kiss elongates chronology, Reusable Parts/Endless Love expands and twists it—queers it, suggesting that our bodily experience are the basis of our memories and identity. Reusable Parts/Endless Love privileges intimacy and our physical relationships with our bodies over maximum capitalist production. Emotions like passion, desire, empathy, and affection do not abide by the same rhythms as the 9-to-5 “work time” rather adopt a psychic space that has no predetermined logic or system.  

Because of my body

In the absence of system

(It is both in ruins and still under construction)

          —Lisa Robertson, R’s boat

In the end, a recording from one of the microphones used to generate one of the new scores is played back into the headphones of all the dancers. An uncomfortable silence pervades the room. The sounds of heavy breathing, falling, and the friction of cloth and carpet replace the multi-layered text scores. I am on the verge of tears. I am enthralled.

Not the sum of parts

But permutations

Of bodily rhythms

Imagine alternatives

As substitute for progress

Bodies and boundaries blur

We have yet to begin…






**Special thanks to Austin Alter.

I have stumbled upon a voice that isn’t my own 
I do not suppose I really am a consolation 
glue is used on almost all occasions that are to be 
numbers as stand-in phenomena joined to achieve 
what you would call an “alienated majesty”
the readymade is deceptively passing its consent to time 
churning radiance on a handsome display history 
as part of the object as part of contact to wish
something different is long enough briskly forgotten
round is not a shape streamlining through the water 
distinction suck speech playful and emasculating face 
uncertain those swimming animals should be swimming 
joyously by putting a tiny object into it 
a syllable is a suggestion 
contemporary boredom
is the beginning of inclusion
his eyes were closed by a student and close friend

an infinite strange good in length straightened in bad taste
a cat is “in time” jostling and whistling through the backyard floor
between wind and water a queer character outsider peers 
over the curvature in curiously nervous scenes by condemning 
straight colors joyously swerving over the permeable text
indifference is the language of ennui
curiosity is worked into a word beguiled by the cat 
memory is a trick of coincidence which overturned 
has invisibly legible use likewise we are parting with description 
termed blue may be perfectly blue arranged transparency occurs 
all small colors have colors with an infinite number of images
obscure inflated currencies who deals in flowers 
whom we love is ourself in multiplication regularly

*all italicized text from Lyn Hejinian’s Writing Is an Aid to Memory
**Image: Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2010. Graphite of paper, 30 5/16 x 22 inches.

Daytrip to the beach, tarot card
Reading, old habit preserved on
Paper

Succulent open mouths
Mossy rocks for a little bounce

Our own resplendent departure 

We gather around recreation
Flickering observations  

Lover to be painted over

Glamorous this and that
In queer morning light 

I am walking home
I am walking alone
Q: How to live through pictures?

Rain comes and goes through a
Large hole
Marriage packed with sugar 

This a souvenir for Celeste
Slow seeing slow thinking
Wandering dog laughing along the patterns 

Cool white, cloudlike
Covered in ash and tipped over

**Image: Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Tarot Reading. Oil on canvas, 41 x 50 ½ inches.