The Social Justice Institute Noted Scholars Series presents
Joyful Defiance in Performance
Dr. Isabel Machado
&
Dr. Rosanne Sia
WHEN & WHERE
Wednesday November 1st, 12-1pm
Buchanan Tower 225 / Zoom
Please RSVP below in advance
Please wear a mask if you are attending this event.
A sandwich lunch will be served at 1pm.
ABSTRACT
This talk opens up a conversation about histories of joy, performance, and race. Joy has often been imposed upon the racialized body in performance, serving as a mode of consolidating violence and exclusion. And yet joyful performances have also been vital for the survival of oppressed people, opening towards other possibilities and futures. We will explore this tension in case studies of performances through photographs of a 1977 public protest against the Ku Klux Klan in Mobile, Alabama and oral histories by Asian diasporic and Latinx entertainers on postwar exoticism in American nightlife. How have joyful performances been underpinned by pain, suffering, and struggle? How do we walk a thin line between understanding joy as oppression and joy as defiance? What happens when we as scholars are touched by joy in our historical inquiry?
ABOUT Dr. Isabel Machado
Dr. Isabel Machado is a Lecturer at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ). A cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries, she specializes in the fields of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Festive Studies. Her first book, Carnival in Alabama: Marked Bodies and Invented Traditions in Mobile (University Press of Mississippi, 2023), uses Mardi Gras as a vehicle to understand social and cultural changes in Mobile, Alabama (USA) in the second half of the 20th century. By exposing the systems of oppression reflected in and reinforced by the celebration, while also acknowledging the festivity’s potential in reaffirming resistance and joy for historically marginalized groups of people, it dialogues with scholarship that focuses on joyful defiance, or Critical Joy Studies.
For the ongoing oral history project, “Queens of the South(s)”, she is interviewing performers who defy gender normativity in different parts of the globe while supporting efforts to create accessible queer community archives in collaboration with local artists, activists, and archivists.
Her work has been published in Study the South, Oral History, O Olho da História, and Journal of Festive Studies (where she currently serves as co-editor-in-chief). She is also a host for the New Books in Gender Studies podcast.
ABOUT Dr. Rosanne Sia
Dr. Rosanne Sia works across Cold War cultural history, performance studies, critical race studies, and queer studies. Her book manuscript, Mujer Peregrina: Performing Racial Fantasies in the early Cold War, focuses on women of Asian and Latinx descent who danced and sang on nightclub circuits in the early Cold War. Drawing on forty-five oral histories, she argues that performers crossed boundaries of genre, nation, language, race, and sexuality that exceeded Cold War narratives of racial integration. Community engaged scholarship through oral history methodology and practice is at the heart of her research projects.
Accessibility
- This will be a virtue and in-person event in Buchanan Tower. A wheelchair accessible and single-user, gender-neutral washroom is located across from the room. Otherwise, gendered washrooms are located on alternate floors in the stairwell between floors.
- The room has a capacity of approximately 40 people and will have open windows.
- Please wear a mask if you intend to attend this event. There will be masks available in the room.
Please include any additional access requests or questions in the RSVP form above.