Join the Department of Gender Studies, Memorial University for the third and final event in their series of public job talks. With Michelle Mohabeer

Abstract: This talk draws on the opening sequence from my creative essay documentary, Blu in You (2008), to explore the performative practice and aesthetics of refusal through a visuality of performative resistance in the evocation of Saartje Baartman. The talk takes up how these visual-performative strategies disrupts the distorted images of the black female body as excess and troubles the spectacular representations of Baartman, a Khoisan woman from South African who was taken from her home and put on display in 19th century Europe, where she was simultaneously hypersexualized and reviled. My talk concludes with a recuperation project which asserts a present-day queer world making potential of Blu in You, despite past devaluation or a failure to engage with a pioneering Canadian work, which complexly traces the thorny representations of black female subjectivities across a historic arc, to explore black female embodiment and queer black female sexuality.
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