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Libraries

From Ethno- to Indigi-pornography. Public Lecture by Professor Joseph M. Pierce (Stony Brook University)

April 4, 2023 at 4:00pm6:00pm EDT

Bird Library, Peter Graham Scholarly Commons (Room 114)

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The Indigenous body cannot fully be represented in the settler photographic regime. There is always a slippage, an underlying ambivalence in the moment of photographic capture that retains the possibility of disrupting settler theologies that presume to know Indigenous embodiment in advance. To understand this ambivalence, I focus on moments in which the Indigenous body is stripped bare, a convention meant to reveal the truth of Indigenous peoplehood but which nevertheless cannot fully apprehend Indigenous forms of embodiment. In other words, this presentation is about how nakedness operates on multiple registers of signification, creating contradictory understandings of the body across time and place. It attempts to shift from the settler regime of ethnopornographic visuality to Indigipornographic register.

Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published recently in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, Latin American Research Review, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. Along with SJ Norman (Koori, Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

This event is co-sponsored by Program in Latin America and the Caribbean, Latino-Latin American Studies, The Humanities Center, Department of Art and Music Histories, Anthropology Department, LGBTQ Studies, Art Photography Program and VPA, and Department of English.

This event was first published on February 1, 2023 and last updated on March 27, 2023.


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