KEYNOTE SPEAKER: ALEXANDER WEHELIYE
Critical discourses about gender and sexuality frequently find their starting point in the body of an individual. This individual body performatively constitutes its gender, experiences desire for other (individual) bodies, undergoes biopolitical administration, and operates as the proverbial battleground for a range of political struggles. Yet the collective body—the body of political assembly, of masses and crowds—is an equally generative basis for the analysis of gendered and sexual processes. Congealing in physical and conceptual spaces alike, crowds and masses invoke, rehearse, and destabilize the terrain of gender and sexuality.
The fourth annual conference of the Princeton Department of Comparative Literature will grapple with this fraught but productive entanglement. How can we think of gender and sexuality operating not on (or between) individual bodies but on bodies gathered in space, legible in moments of collective excitation and assembly? How do crowds and masses rely on gendered imaginaries, social practices, or divisions of labor? How does the form of the crowd, broadly conceived, put pressure on the categories and processes of gender and sexuality—or on our ability to analyze and describe them—and vice versa?
Moreover, how are gender and sexuality shaped or affected by the discourses, structures, or cultural practices that form alongside crowds and masses? After all, just as masses themselves are conditioned and disrupted by gender and sexuality, so, too, are the technologies, institutions, and symbolic regimes that analyze, represent, and contain those masses. The image of the crowd, for instance—raucous, frenzied, ecstatic, by turns genderless and indelibly gendered—occupies a central place in the imaginaries of democracy and popular sovereignty, in visions of revolutionary upheaval, and in fascist dreams of rapturous, obedient throngs. The gendering and sexualization of crowds likewise manifests in anxieties of ruling elites, ranging from paranoid obsession and prurient fascination with impoverished urban masses to racist fearmongering about rape, contamination, and disease. Institutions and systems built up around real or potential masses—policing and incarceration; public health and epidemiology; immigration policy and border control; mass communication and social media; urban infrastructure and public space—are mediated in innumerable ways by the forces and fissures of gender and sexuality.
Cosponsored by Princeton University: Departments of German; Slavic Languages & Literatures; Art & Archaeology; Religion; Anthropology; English; and Classics • Programs in Gender & Sexuality Studies; Judaic Studies; Latin American Studies; European Cultural Studies; and Media + Modernity • University Center for Human Values • Humanities Council
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