May 11, 4:30 PM: Deborah Gould, “Becoming Coalitional: The Perverse Encounter of Queer to the ...

2017 Distinguished Alumni Lecture Deborah Gould, PhD '00 “Becoming Coalitional: The Perverse Encounter of Queer to the Left and the Jesus People USA” In this talk I consider a Chicago low-cost housing coalition that included a group of secular queer leftists and an evangelical Christian group. Strikingly, difference here was both pronounced and a non-event: the two groups never confronted each other about homosexuality or their widely divergent cosmologies. I use this case of affinities across chasms of perceived difference to explore coalitions as contact zones, analyzing in particular what desires, capacities, and potentialities a coalition might generate and nourish. Interested in political appetite and the not-yet of politics, the talk traverses a number of themes including: convergence without unity; hopes generated through surprising encounters; a longing to live belonging differently; and desire for activism that holds out the possibility of being changed. Deborah Gould is an associate professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz (and affiliated faculty in Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Politics). She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in Political Science in 2000 and was a post-doctoral Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago, 2000 – 2004. Her first book, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (University of Chicago Press, 2009) won the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Political Sociology Section (2010), the Ruth Benedict Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association (2010), and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies (2010). She is currently working on a second book, also about political emotion, called Emotional Terrains of Activism: Appetites, Encounters, and the Not-Yet of Politics. She was involved in ACT UP/Chicago for many years, and later in Queer to the Left, and was a founding member of the research/art/activism collaborative group, Feel Tank Chicago, most famous for its International Parades of the Politically Depressed.

Date: May 11, 2017
Time: 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM