Extinction Thresholds Symposium

cosponsored by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities

Women Buy Sex Too: Chippendales and the Rise of the Gigolo with Hallie Lieberman

In 1979, near the height of second-wave feminism, a thirty-one-year old Indian immigrant started one of the first male strip clubs for women in Los Angeles. Within a few years The Chippendales spread to New York, and a touring show brought the oiled, muscled studs to fly-over country. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Chippendales were more than mere entertainment: the male strip show gave women permission to behave in a sexually aggressive manner never seen before in public. From ogling males bodies, to paying to kiss the Chips, tearing at their clothes, grabbing their penises and having sex in the back of the club (sometimes for a fee), the Chippendales legitimized the female gaze, allowing women to nakedly express desire for men in public and objectify male bodies.

The Chippendales were far from the first male sex workers for women. While the talk will tell the story of the male sex worker through the lens of the Chippendales, it will also zoom back thousands of years to tell the history of gigolos, which begins with wealthy women who paid for sex in Ancient Greece. Women didn’t hire sex workers as often as men, but not because of biology. Rather, patriarchal cultures have ensured that women are usually the sellers of sex, not the buyers. Even though women have always been punished more harshly for sexual promiscuity than men, there have always been some women willing to shell out cash for sexy studs.

Hallie Lieberman is a sex historian and journalist. She is the author of “Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy.” She’s currently working on a book on the history of gigolos.

Co-Presented by the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia Maison Française, Columbia Department of French, Columbia Department of History, and Columbia Department of English and Comparative Literature

The Third Part of the Third Measure, a film about Julius Eastman, Film Screening and Discussion

with visual artists and film directors: Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar (The Otolith Group)

Ellie Hisama (Professor of Music, Columbia University)

and Isaac Jean-Francois (Columbia College ’20)

Moderated by: Saidiya Hartman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature

About the Film

The Third Part of the Third Measure (2017), a new audiovisual composition commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and Sharjah Biennial 13, creates an encounter with the militant minimalism of avant-garde composer, pianist, and vocalist Julius Eastman. The Third Part of the Third Measure focuses on what The Otolith Group describe as “an experience of watching in the key of listening,” invoking political feelings of defiance and the collective practice of movement-building that participates in the global struggles against neoreactionary authoritarianism. The Third Part of the Third Measure invites viewers to attend to exemplary ecstatic aesthetics of black radicalism that Eastman himself once described as “full of honor, integrity, and boundless courage.”

The Otolith Group is an award-winning collaboration whose practice spans the moving image, audio, performance, installation, and research. Founded in 2002 by the artists and theorists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, the group engages with the cultural and political legacies and potentialities of non-aligned movements, new media, Black Study, Afrofuturism, and Indofuturism while thinking speculatively with science fictions of the present. Their methodologies incorporate post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the anti-human. Expanding on the work of The Otolith Group is the public platform The Otolith Collective, whose work spans programming, exhibition-making, artists’ writing, workshops, publication, and teaching aimed at developing close readings of image and sound in contemporary society. Approaching curation as an artistic practice of building intergenerational and cross-cultural platforms, the collective has been influential in critically engaging the works of Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Anand Patwardhan, Etel Adnan, Black Audio Film Collective, Sue Clayton, Mani Kaul, Peter Watkins, and Chimurenga in the UK, US, Europe, and Lebanon. The work of The Otolith Group and Collective has been presented widely, most recently at the Berlinale 13th Forum Expanded; Khiasma, Paris; The Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; Sharjah Biennial 13; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and Haus Der Kulturen de Welt, Berlin. The Otolith Group was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010.

Co-Presented by: The Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality; Columbia University Department of Music; The Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music; Film and Media Studies, School of the Arts; and Columbia University Department of Art History and Archaeology

Archival Inheritance with Clare Hemmings

‘Archival Inheritance’ crafts a series of stories that make up a memory archive, drawing on older work on telling feminist stories differently, and focusing on ‘inheritance’ as an unstable, unreliable but significant frame for thinking the present.

The overall project’s aim is to provide texture to the pains and pleasures of gendered, sexual and national encounter. At the centre of the work lies the resilience and force of gendered, sexual, classed and national affects as motivating and ‘making’ history. As such, each story seeks to play out the experiences of masculinity and femininity as loss and violence, as heterosexual dividend, or as that which enables an everyday. Hemmings is interested in ‘memory archiving’ as part of telling a story of post-2nd world war UK national identity within a white kinship structure. The hope is to reaffirm the importance of attention to the detail of the everyday in the context of right (and left) populisms, to explore both complicity and resistance in ways that aren’t necessarily known in advance.

This presentation introduces you to this work through one of these stories.

Clare Hemmings is a Professor of Feminist Theory in the Department of Gender Studies at LSE in the UK, and is currently Leverhulme Visiting International Professor at IRWGS Columbia. Clare’s work lies at the intersection of feminist and queer studies, and she is interested in how participants in these fields tell stories about their history as well as current form, and in exploring how such stories resonate with (rather than only against) more conservative agendas. She is particularly concerned with the ways in which ideas travel (or do not) across geographical and temporal borders, and with the relationship between nationalism, feminism and sexuality. Recent work is interested in multiple forms theory takes, and she has been working with creative and fictional modes. She is the author of Bisexual Spaces (2002), Why Stories Matter (2011, which was the winner of the 2012 FWSA book award), and Considering Emma Goldman (2018). She has co-edited twelve anthologies or journal special issues, most recently ‘Haunting Feminism’ with Ilana Eloit for Feminist Theory (Dec 2019).

Queermuseum: Art & Resistance in Contemporary Brazil with Gaudêncio Fidelis

The exhibition Queermuseum: Cartographies of Difference in Brazilian Art opened in August 2017 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and was censored and shut down approximately one month before its closing date, after accusations of blasphemy, pornography, pedophilia and others, made by far right wing and fundamentalists groups. All these accusations were subsequently dismissed by the Public Prosecutor’s Office. I would argue that as a platform to challenge normative inclinations on gender against the canon of art history, this exhibition revealed how fascist and fundamentalist views of the world surfaced in Brazil as never before and are now growing exponentially. By attacking Queermuseum, the groups espousing these views entered into the realm of art and culture. A successful international campaign was carried out to reopen the exhibition one year later in Rio de Janeiro, which entailed an extensive judicial and political battle and culminated with the most successful crowdfunding campaign ever made in Brazil. I will discuss the model of the exhibition and the specifics of such political trends in light of strategies of resistant in the face of the growing extremist ideologies at full play in the current political spectrum of Brazilian society today.

cohosted with New University in Exile – Scholar Lecture Series | Columbia Global Center. cosponsored by by Barnard College Art History, Department of Art History and Archaeology

About the Speaker

GAUDÊNCIO FIDELIS (Brazil, 1965) is a curator and art historian specialized in modern and contemporary art from the Americas. He holds an M.A. from New York University (NYU) and a Ph.D. in Art History from the State University of New York (SUNY-Binghamton). He has organized and curated more than fifty exhibitions and published extensively. Most recently he curated the exhibition Queermuseum: Cartographies of Difference in Brazilian Art in 2017, exhibited in Porto Alegre at Santander Cultural and in Rio de Janeiro at the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts (EAV). Mr. Fidelis is a Fellow of the Institute of International Education (IIE) – Scholars Rescue Fund, and a Fellow of the New University School in Exile Consortium (UIE) as a Research Scholar at Parsons School of Design in New York.