Perverse Modernities transgresses modern divisions of knowledge that have historically separated the consideration of sexuality, and its concern with desire, gender, bodies, and performance, on the one hand, from the consideration of race, colonialism, and political economy, on the other, in order to explore how the mutual implication of race, colonialism, and sexuality has been rendered perverse and unintelligible within the logics of modernity.

Books in the series have elaborated such perversities in the challenge to modern assumptions about historical narrative and the nation-state, the epistemology of the human sciences, the continuities of the citizen-subject and civil society, the distinction between health and morbidity, and the rational organization of that society into separate spheres. Perverse modernities, in this sense, have included queer of color and queer anticolonial subcultures, racialized sexualized laborers migrating from the global south to the metropolis, nonwestern desires and bodies and their incommensurability with the gendered, national or communal meanings attributed to them, and analyses of the refusals of normative domestic “healthy” life narratives by subjects who inhabit and perform sexual risk, different embodiments, and alternative conceptions of life and death. The project also highlights intellectual “perversities” from disciplinary infidelities and epistemological promiscuity, to theoretical irreverence and heterotopic imaginings.

3:00-3:30 PM Introduction (Lisa Lowe and J. Jack Halberstam)
3:30-5:00 PM Panel I: Temporality, Violence, and the Problem of Rights: Neda Atanasoski, Elizabeth Freeman, Chandan Reddy, Lisa Lowe
5:00-5:30 PM Break
5:30-7:00 PM Panel II: Modernity, Perversion, and Queer/Trans Survival: Marcia Ochoa, Cindy Cruz, Lisa Rofel, J. Jack Halberstram