The Critical Visual Geographies Collective presents:
Professor Rachel C. Lee
Wednesday, June 1 @UCI
June 1 | 5:30 PM | UCI HG 3341 | Virtualness of Race: Target Practice, Crowd Sourcing, Haircuts, and Bodily Resourcefulness
Join the Critical Visual Geographies Collective this June for our final conference event featuring Professor Rachel C. Lee who will present a multimedia talk on the virtualness of race. Using examples from video games, bioart, surveillance videos, plastic surgery, and online crowd sourcing, this talk theorizes the distinctive gendered and racialized ways that contemporary artists and laypersons use the platform of Asian embodiment (and its exquisite corporeal materials) to outline attenuated and symbiotic rather than sovereign acts of agency. Lee attends to the various sensory techniques and spatial scales through which these artists comment upon and variously unsettle the continuities among imperial vision, xenophobia, war tactics, and the harnessing of a somatic, erotic, and biological plasticity coded as Asiatic. The talk expands upon the critical biopolitical studies method outlined in The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality and Posthuman Ecologies (NYU, 2014).
Rachel C. Lee is a Professor of English and Gender Studies at UCLA. Her most recent book, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (NYU 2014) received the 2016 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Cultural Studies. She is currently the Director of the Center for Study of Women at UCLA and heading a multi-year research project entitled “Life(Un)Ltd,” addressing the question of what impact recent developments in the biosciences, biotechnology, and clinical practice have had on feminist studies, especially those theorizing the circulation of population data and biomaterials in relation to race and (neo)colonialism.
The Critical Visual Geographies Collective (CVGC) is an interdisciplinary initiative led by graduate students in the Culture & Theory and Visual Studies programs at UCI. The CVGC seeks to foster an engaged community of students and faculty that complicates how the “visual” and “geographic” are theorized. We believe that these terms are particularly impacted/impactful in this contemporary moment marked by incredible global racial violence. The CGVC is committed to rethinking sites of knowledge production, archival practices, and collaborative digital work.
Free and open to the public. To RSVP visit http://goo.gl/forms/ZddswcClcfOYOEgE3 and for more information visit http://cvgc-uci.tumblr.com/. Event made possible by a grant from the Humanities Commons and co-sponsored by the Culture & Theory and Visual Studies programs at UCI.