A Talk by Kathryn Bond Stockton

Kathryn Bond Stockton, Distinguished Professor of English at University of Utah, will give a talk at the Humanities Center in late September. Her landmark book The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (2009) addresses intersections of childhood and queerness. She has since continued to write about queer children in a variety of other venues, including GLQ and Queer Game Studies. On September 29th from 4:00-5:30 p.m. in William Pitt Union 548, Professor Stockton will deliver a lecture called "Race, Face, Ravage, and Lyrical Fat: Deleuze and Childood Poverty," on rethinking the figure of the child in poverty through the lenses of queer sexuality and queer childhood." The description of the talk from the Humanities Center is as follows: "Might we strike at the monolith of Poverty by using the blade of the sexual child?  Might we cut the face of the racial cliché of the child-in-peril-in-the-third-world?  We must be seduced . . . by a face . . . on the move—even by its motions in lyrical fat.  Bringing Deleuzian movement to bear on the face of childhood poverty—raced and gendered faces in literature, documentary, and film—stirs new matters.  Specifically, surprisingly, the body has sex with the notion of (its) face.  What does this mean?  How does it queer perspectives on poverty?"