Heritage Lecture Series
Robert McRuer
'Some Women Like To Be on Top':
National Fantasies and Queer Anti-National Sexual Positions
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
SSU Rachel Carson Hall 68 at 12:00 p.m.
Admission is Free
Reception at 3:00 p.m. in the Center for Culture, Gender & Sexuality
(located in the Sonoma Student Union, 1st floor)
Dr. McRuer will present his research entitled, "'Some Women Like To Be on Top': National Fantasies and Queer Anti-National Sexual Positions". He argues that the playful gender trouble and foregrounding of sexual pleasures put forward by Murderball (2005) allow for the contingent unraveling of aspects of conventional masculinity and for the imagination of new sexual and identificatory possibilities. He considers how the national fantasy of (disabled) men on top for the U.S.A. conflicts with a range of anti-national sexual positions, including women on top and the threatening possibility represented by queerness.
McRuer is currently working on a project on Marxism and disability, considering locations of disability within contemporary political economies and the roles that disabled movements play in countering neoliberalism and hegemonic forms of globalization. His first book centered on contemporary lgbt writers, particularly lgbt writers of color, and his most recent book attends to cultural sites where critical queerness and disability contest heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness.
Robert McRuer is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the George Washington University, where he teaches queer studies, disability studies, and critical theory. He is the author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (NYU, 2006), winner of the 2007 Alan Bray Memorial Book Award and The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities (NYU, 1997). With Abby L. Wilkerson, he co-edited Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies, a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Duke UP, 2003).
For more information on this event email ccgs@sonoma.edu or call 707-664-2710.
This event is presented by the Center for Culture, Gender & Sexuality Heritage Lecture, Queer Lecture Series, Women's and Gender Studies, Instructionally Related Activities and the Sonoma Student Union Corporation.
