Visual Culture at Wayne State University

Tonight: Critical Theory Reading Group: How the Body Knows. Read whatever you can; ask questions about the rest. All are welcome!

Join us for our 9th Annual Visual Culture Symposium keynote address!

Amber Jamilla Musser, George Washington University

“Mickalene Thomas and the Black, Q***r Female Origin of the Universe”

This talk works through Mickalene Thomas’s Origin of the Universe, a version of Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World that positions her black bedazzled v***a in place of an anonymous white model’s genitalia. In Thomas’ production of a decorative and intimate landscape, I argue that she portrays Audre Lorde's theories of the erotic as feminine and maternal. In this way, Thomas shows us the racialized contours of black q***r female sexuality and illuminates through her use of the rhinestone how an attachment to surface and its excesses might redraw eroticism.

The deadline for proposals to the 2020 Visual Culture Symposium--The Optics of Excess: How the Body Knows--has been extended until Monday 2/10 at midnight!

Thank you all for joining us last week for our Winter Faculty Lecture with guest speaker Dr. Lauren McLeod Cramer!

Interested in presenting at the VC graduate student symposium on 3/6? CFP posted here!

This month at WSU!!!!!

Brownbag by professor renée c. hoogland this week at the Humanities Center at Wayne State -- 12:30pm.