The Sex of a Star and Other Sports Problems

We are delighted to welcome Jennifer Doyle as she presents the first of our Research Seminars this term.  Jennifer is the 2013-2014 Fulbright Chair at the Transnational Centre for Research on Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at the University of the Arts, London. While in London, she will be developing her new book project, The Athletic Turn: Contemporary Art and the Sport Spectacle. She is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside where she teaches American literature and culture, gender, performance and visual culture. She is the author of Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013) and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2006). She co-edited The Athletic Issue, a special issue of the journal GLQ.   

The sports world is arguably one of the largest aspects of popular visual culture, and critical analysis of popular culture is a major area of interest for visual studies and for queer theory. Athletic practice is no small feature of day-to-day queer life - and yet, even as sports studies scholars draw from these fields, few scholars working in visual culture and queer studies have explored what happens when we apply the language of these fields to the analysis of the sport spectacle; or what progressive sports studies scholarship has to offer to queer conversations about embodiment and being in the world. "The Sex of a Star" considers what athletes and sports studies have to teach queer theory and performance studies. 

Image: Slava Mogutin, from "Brosephines" for Vice (October 2011)

Admission is free and everyone is welcome!