UC San Diego features lecture on ‘Black Queer/Trans Art’ by ‘Black nonbinary femme writer’
Gossett calls himself a ‘Black non-binary writer and critical theorist specializing in queer/trans studies, aesthetic theory, abolitionist thought and black study.’
Williams’s exhibits include ruined version of the American flag, and an exhibit showing ‘suckling pigs adorned with the paraphernalia of police uniforms.’
The University of California, San Diego, recently hosted a lecture titled “Catastrophe and Care: Black Queer/Trans Art in the Afterlife of Slavery.”
The lecture, which took place Feb. 18, featured as speaker Che Gossett, the Associate Director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies at the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
Gossett identifies as a “Black non-binary writer and critical theorist specializing in queer/trans studies, aesthetic theory, abolitionist thought and black study.”
During the lecture, he discussed the work of Kiyan Williams, a self-described artist whose work, according to the event description, “negates” and “abolishes” the “anti-black and racial capitalist World.”
Williams, a man who identifies by the pronoun “they,” claims his work is a “meditation on the unruliness of ruination” and on “the precarity and malleability of symbols and structures of power.”
His work frequently featured battered and ruined versions of the American flag, and one exhibit, titled “Pig Roast,” involves Williams “roasting suckling pigs adorned with the paraphernalia of police uniforms.”
Several other universities have hosted events and courses with similar intersectional themes.
New York University, for example, will begin offering a course on “Marxism Beyond Marx,” during which students will learn about “Black Marxism, Postcolonial Marxism, and Queer/Trans Marxism.”
Fordham University in New York also recently hosted an event on Feb. 20 discussing the “queer possibilities of black religion.” The event featured a talk about the work of writer James Baldwin and his “vision” of “queer sexuality.”
A recent study from University of San Diego researchers also promoted the idea that rocks and geology can contribute to the process of “healing” from racism.
Campus Reform has contacted the University of California, San Diego and Che Gossett for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.