BONUS EPISODE: Queer Bodies: Gender and Power in Art and Society

Academics, artists, and authors will have a wide-ranging conversation exploring gender, sexuality, queerness, and the body in art, culture, fashion, and society. Topics will include, but not be limited to, an inside look at being a professional dominatrix, queer performance art and theory, and fabulousness as resistance.

Chris Belcher is a writer, professor, book coach, and assistant professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Writing at USC. Under her working name, Natalie West, she edited the acclaimed anthology We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival. Her debut memoir, Pretty Baby, is a searing, darkly funny account of being a lesbian and professional dominatrix with male clients that upends ideas about desire, class, and power. Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Faculty and Research at the USC Roski School of Art & Design and curator and scholar of contemporary art, performance, and feminist/sexuality studies. Jones’s most recent book, Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance, explores the history of performance art and queer theory since the 1950s from a queer feminist point of view. madison moore is an artist-scholar, DJ, and assistant professor of Critical Studies at the USC Roski School of Art & Design who is broadly invested in the aesthetic, sonic, and spatial strategies queer and trans people of color use to survive and thrive. madison’s first book, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric, offers a cultural analysis of fabulousness as a practice of resistance. madison has performed internationally at a range of nightclubs, parties, and art institutions. Moderator: Karen Tongson is Chair and professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, as well as professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, where she also directs the Mellon-funded Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture. Her books include Why Karen Carpenter Matters and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries.