Canceled: Andrea Carson-Coley Lecture: Dr. Ann Pellegrini

This event has been canceled and will be rescheduled at a later date, if possible.

Dr. Ann Pellegrini is professor of social and cultural analysis and performance studies at New York University. Her scholarship in LGBT studies, as well as in feminist and sexuality studies, has been foundational to these fields, and she continues to produce relevant and impactful work. In 2014, her book “You Can Tell Just By Looking and 20 Other Myths About LGBT Life and People,” was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Non-Fiction. She’s also a contributing editor for the journal Gender and Sexuality Studies and was awarded the first ever LGBT Faculty Ally Award by Harvard University's Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Association in 1999. Cosponsored by UGA’s Institute of Women’s Studies.

Her talk, “‘How Dare You’: Rage and Resistance in an Age of Catastrophe,” returns to Audre Lorde’s still timely essay “The Uses of Anger” to ask about contemporary politics and uses of anger at a time of climate catastrophe and the global rise of right-wing extremism. How do we distinguish between moral and political anger that protests social injustice and anger that perpetuates social dominance and inequality? Certainly, many people who participate in or gravitate toward right-wing populist movements understand themselves to be acting in the service of “just” causes. In an era of “fake news,” how do we challenge the false claims of justice and justifiable self-defense? But this is not just a left–right issue. Even amongst those opposed to right-wing extremism, important distinctions need to be drawn: between, for example, moral anger and a moral righteousness (“cancel culture”) that itself seems to delight in us/them distinctions and vilifying “enemies.” These are not easy issues to tease apart. This talk attempts to do so, drawing on Lorde as well as on recent work in queer of color critique.