UCLA Queer Studies 
Conference 2011
OCTOBER 14-15, 2011
This year’s conference will explore and exploit issues of fashion, queerly construed. We have invited a wide range of questions and panels on subject topics as drag, female masculinities, male femininities, queer making and self-fashioning, cloning and styling, and, of course, the culture and politics of the fashion industry itself. Questions of class, economics, history, ethnicity, race, (im)migration, geography, exploitation, and sublimation are at the forefront of our query. We seek to know what might be a new analytic or interdisciplinary methodology through which to attend to multiple registers of fashion.
The conference is free and registration is not required.
Plenary Speakers:
Michael Bronski, Jack Halberstam, Monica Miller,
Mignon R. Moore, Karen Tongson, and Deborah R. Vargas
Closing Performance:
“Queerture: A night of rocket science and fashion design”
with artistic director Tania Hammidi
Tentative Conference Schedule:
<Friday, October 14th>
10:00 – 11:15
Against the Grain
Speakers:
“Refashioning Queer Counter Culture: Liquid Sky’s Avant-Trash Aesthetics and the Detritus of the President”
Corella Difede, Visual Studies, University of California – Irvine
“Strategic Spectacles, Excessive Embodiments: The Campy Paradox of Nicki Minaj”
Uri McMillan, African-American Studies and Women’s Studies, University of California – Los Angeles
“Lady Gaga’s Fashion: ‘The Monster’ as a new gender”
Rachel Jordan, English, California State University of Northridge
10:00 – 11:15
Latina/o Excess: from Synthetic nails to textual resistance
Speakers:
“Chongalicious Style: The Queer Politics of Latina Girls’ Sexual-Aesthetic Excesses”
Jillian Hernandez, Women and Gender Studies, Rutgers College
“Dirty Girl, Clean Dress?: The Dressing of the Queer Latina Body in Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’ Dirty Girls Social Club”
Ramon Gabriel Mayora, English Literature, University of Florida
“Camping the Self: Manuel Ramos Otero’s ‘Hollywood Memorabilia’ and Aesthetics of Opaque Resistance”
Christina Leon, Comparative Literature, Emory University
11:30 – 12:45
Drag Race: Fashioning Queer Masculinities through Corporeal Drag
Speakers:
“Manifest Faggotry: The Imperial Court System and the Queer Jingoism of the Western Metropole”
Katie Horowitz, Rhetoric, University of California – Berkeley
“The Gesture of Difference: “Bad” Drag in the Neoliberal City”
Ivan Ramos, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, University of California – Berkeley
“Dragging the Museum: Pussy-Cunt Realness and Voguing in the White Box”
Ariel Osterweis Scott, Performance Studies, University of California – Berkeley
“Turn this Mother Out! Techniques for Black (Male) Re/Dress”
Naomi Bragin, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, University of California – Berkeley
11:30 – 12:45
Women of Color Performing Gender as Public and Counter-Public Spectacle
Speakers:
“Jenny Shimizu’s Online Traces: An Empty Signifier Overwriting Normativity”
Vivian Chin, Ethnic Studies, Mills College
“Fashioning the (Mighty) Real”
Rebekah Edwards, English, Mills College
“’Sir, You Have just Done the Unthinkable’: Black Butch and Transmasculine Performance as Queer Gender Rebellion in the East Coast ‘Girl Ball’ Scene”
Ajuan Maria Mance, English, Mills College
[1:00 – 2:45 LUNCH – on your own]
3:00 – 4:15
The Williams Institute – Trans Black Identities in the United States
williamsinstitute@law.ucla.edu
Moderator:
Kylar W. Broadus, Business Law, Lincoln University
Speakers:
Kortney Ryan Ziegler, Ph.D., Award-winning filmmaker of “Still Black: A Portrait of Black Transmen”
C. Nicole Mason, Ph.D., Executive Director of The Women of Color Policy Network, NYU Wagner School of Public Service
Marisa Richmond, Ph.D., President, Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition
3:00 – 4:15
Techno-Queer Self Fashioning: Digital Theory by Digital Praxis
Speakers:
“The Real and the Fake: Asian American Digitality, Drag Kings, and All of me”
Margaret Rhee, Ethnic Studies, University of California – Berkeley
“Borrowed Time: Fan Video and Queer Temporality through a Cylon Digital Remix Machine”
Alexis Lothian, English, University of Southern California
“Please Select Gender: Video Games and Butch Expression”
Amanda Phillips, English, University of California – Santa Barbara
“Wearable Electronics as Femme Disturbance”
Micha Cardenas, Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California
4:30 – 6:00
Plenary I
Speakers:
Karen Tongson
Jack Halberstam
Michael Bronski
[ 6:00 – 7:30 RECEPTION –LGBTQ Resource Center]
——————————————————————————————
<Saturday, October 15th>
[9:30 – 10:00 BREAKFAST]
10:00 – 11:15
The Runway of Life: Fashion Design, Performance, Transitional Logic
Speakers:
“Choreography Costume Causes”
Tania Hammidi, Diversity Studies, California College of Art
“Transitional Logic and Temporal Drag”
Julian Carter, Program in Critical Studies, California College of Art
“Queer Fashion as Armor: Identity Formation, Self-Fashioning, and Everyday Life”
Parisa Parnian, Senior Designer Menswear Guess
“Swatch: The Dematerialization of a Wardrobe”
Aaron Valenzuela, M.F.A. candidate, University of California – Irvine
10:00 – 11:15
Fashioning Solidarity
Speakers:
“Fashioning Trans Selves”
Elias Krell, Performance Studies, Northwestern University
“And the Walls Came Tumblr-ing Down? Internet Activism, Queer Identities, and Possibilities of Fashionable Resistance”
Catherine Connell, Sociology, Boston University
“Outfitting the Outcast: Writing Fishnet Femifestos from Out Dark, Queer Closets”
Shereen Inayatulla, English, York College CUNY
11:30 – 12:45
The Williams Institute – Dress coding Transgender: The case of Jespersen v. Harrah’s Casino
williamsinstitute@law.ucla.edu
Speakers:
Jennifer C. Pizer, Legal Director and Arnold D. Kassoy Senior Scholar of Law, Williams Institute
Jody Herman, Public Policy Fellow, Williams Institute
Peter J. Cooper, Public Policy Fellow, Williams Institute
11:30 – 12:45
Bodily Manifestations
Speakers:
“No Apologies: Discussing Public Hair in Public Spaces. An application of Humor Theory and Relational Aesthetics”
Erin D. Coleman-Cruz, Art, McHenry County College
Bianca McGraw, Education, Northern Illinois University
“Affective Fashion and Queer Becomings”
Stephen Seely, Women and Gender Studies, Rutgers University
“Anatomy’s a Drag: Leigh Bowery’s Birth Shows”
Kristen Galvin, Visual Studies, University of California – Irvine
[1:00 – 2:00 LUNCH - patio]
2:15 – 3:30
Butch, Femme, and Beyond
Speakers:
“Boots, belts and bling: fashion and female masculinities in Kampala, Uganda”
Melissa Minor Peters, Anthropology, Northwestern University
“Appearance Can Be Deceiving: Butch Femme Styling and the Accuracy of Visual Cues”
Alix Genter, History, Rutgers University
“Oh Baby, What Are You? Black Women’s Dandyism from The New Negro to the Present”
Allison J. Hamilton, Philosophy, New York University
2:15 – 3:30
Materializing Blackness
Speakers
“Queer Assemblages and Irruptions of Blackness”
Rizvana Bradley, Literature, Duke University
“Mi(red): Cotton, Black Self-fashioning, and the Gap (Red) Campaign”
Cecilio Stephanie Cooper, Performance Studies, University of California – Davis
“Queerly Clothed: The Queer Telepistemology of Clothing in Representations of Black Gay Men”
Alfred L. Martin Jr., Media Studies, University of Texas at Austin
2:15 – 3:30
Self Iconography
Speakers:
“Gay? Prove it: Queer Discourses of Self-Fashioning and the Transnational Production of Sexual Subjects in LGBT Asylum Cases”
Rachel Lewis, Gender and Women’s Studies, Oklahoma State University
“The Prisoners”
Nissim Gal, Art History, University of Haifa
“Make it Work: Tim Gunn, Celibacy, and the New Queer Dandy”
Karli June Cerankowski, Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University
4:00 – 5:30
Plenary II
Speakers:
Mignon R. Moore
Deborah R. Vargas
Monica Miller
[5:30 – 6:00 RECEPTION - patio]
6:00 – 7:30 Royce 314
Queerture: Queer + Couture
