Sexual Cultures at 25: Staging Queer Critiques of Empire

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

In marking 25 years of the Sexual Culture series at New York University Press, this roundtable reflects on how sexual cultures elucidate critical strategies for living with and against the violent contradictions wrought by late-stage US empire. This session stages a conversation among editors and authors of the series to contemplate how we might build upon the intellectual conversations generated during these past twenty-five years to dissect, strategize, and mobilize against the rising tide of authoritarian state violence. Throughout its publication history, the Sexual Cultures series has sought to expand the potential of queer theory by unfixing the subjects of LGBTQ studies. Taking its cue from women of color feminisms and queer of color critique, the series publishes projects that offer alternative mappings of queer life in which questions of race, class, gender, temporality, religion, and region are as central as sexuality. Such multi-focused and open-ended explorations are even more vital today, when the mainstreaming of lesbian and gay lives and cultures risks foreclosing other possible ways of being in, and relating to, the world. With a scope that moves from the properly historical to queer futurity, the series seeks to make interventions into the genealogy of queer studies, broaden its archive, and imagine its horizons anew. Books in this series often have critical perspectives large enough to take into account the current transformations of knowledges, identities, and capital on a shifting world stage. Following the goal of the series, this roundtable’s participants will speculate on ways for expanding what queer studies, queer theories, and queer publics can become.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Ann Pellegrini, New York University

Panelists

• Tavia Nyong'o, Yale University

• Eng-Beng Lim, Dartmouth College

• Juana María Rodríguez, University of California-Berkeley

• Chris A. Eng, University of Maryland, College Park

• Sarah Ensor, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Robert F Reid-Pharr, Harvard University

Biographical Information

Chair:
Ann Pellegrini is Professor and Chair of Performance Studies at New York University, and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. They are the author or co-author of four books: Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997); Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, co-authored with Janet R. Jakobsen (NYU Press, 2003); “You Can Tell Just By Looking” and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People, co-authored with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico (Beacon Press, 2013); and Gender Without Identity, co-authored with Avgi Saketopoulou (The Unconscious in Translation, spring 2023). “You Can Tell Just By Looking” was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Nonfiction. And Gender Without Identity received the 2024 IPPY Silver Medal in LGBTQ+ Nonfiction. Pellegrini has co-edited two anthologies — Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (2003) and Secularisms (2008) — and, with José Muñoz, is founding co-editor of the “Sexual Cultures” series at NYU Press. Pellegrini now co-edits that series with Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o. Pellegrini is the 2008 recipient of the Constance Rourke Essay Prize from the American Studies Association, and an essay they co-wrote with Avgi Saketopoulou was awarded the first Tiresias Paper Award from the International Psychoanalytical Association, in 2021.

Participants:
Tavia Nyong’o is a scholar of Black studies, queer theory, and performance studies. He is a professor of American Studies and Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies at Yale University. His work explores race, sexuality, aesthetics, and politics. He is the author of Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life(2019) and The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009). His latest book, Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (2025), examines Afrofuturism, Black counter-speculation, and the ongoing apocalypse of Black life. Nyong’o co-edits the Sexual Cultures series at NYU Press and writes widely on Black radical aesthetics and queer of color critique. His scholarship engages figures such as Octavia Butler, Sun Ra, and Samuel R. Delany. He is also a curator for the Park Avenue Armory public program.


Eng-Beng Lim is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the founding director of the Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality at Dartmouth College, and Social Text editorial collective member. He is the author of the award-winning Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (NYU Press, 2014), and is currently working on two projects titled, Megastructures of Feeling, and Ethnocuties: Notes on Queer Friendship.

Juana María Rodríguez is a cultural critic who writes about sexual cultures, racial politics, and the many tangled expressions of Latina identity. A Professor of Ethnic Studies and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, she is the author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP 2023); Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014); and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003) and served as a co-editor of the special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on “Trans Studies en las Americas.” In 2023, Dr. Rodríguez was honored by The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies with the prestigious Kessler Award in recognition of her lifelong contributions to the field of LGBT Studies.

Chris A. Eng is Assistant Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches courses on US ethnic literatures and queer of color critique. His first book, Extravagant Camp: The Queer Abjection of Asian America, was published by NYU Press in the Sexual Cultures series. Chris’s research has appeared in such venues as American Quarterly, GLQ, Journal of Asian American Studies, Lateral, MELUS, and Theatre Journal. His 2020 article received an honorable mention for the Crompton-Noll Article Prize, awarded jointly by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association and the Queer/Trans Caucus of the American Studies Association. His work has also been recognized by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars through a Career Enhancement Fellowship and by the WashU Graduate Student Senate through an Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award. In 2023, he received the Early Career Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.

Sarah Ensor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also a faculty associate in the Center for Culture, History, and the Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Her work engages the intersections between queer and environmental thought in American literature from the nineteenth century through the present. She is the author of Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World (NYU Press [Sexual Cultures series], 2025) and, with Susan Scott Parrish, co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment (2022). Before arriving in Madison, she was Assistant Professor of English at the University of Michigan and Portland State University.

Robert F. Reid-Pharr is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and an M.A. in African American Studies from Yale University as well as a B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been the Jess and Sara Cloud Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at the College of William and Mary, the Edward Said Visiting Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut, the Drue Heinz Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oxford, the Carlisle and Barbara Moore Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oregon, and the F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. A prominent scholar in the field of race and sexuality studies, he is the author of four books and numerous essays. His research and writing have been supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and the American Academy in Berlin. His work has been honored by the Publishing Triangle and the Modern Language Association. In 2015 he was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars and he is the recipient of a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

Joshua Chambers-Letson is the Chair of Performance Studies and Professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. With expertise in performance theory, queer of color critique, and race and ethnic studies, JCL is completing a book on queer love and loss for NYU Press andis the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (winner of the 2019 Outstanding Book Award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education and the 2019 Erroll Hill Award from the American Society for Theatre Research) and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America (winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award from ATHE). JCL is also the co-editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown with Tavia Nyong’o, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital with Christine Mok, and series co-editor of NYU Press’s Sexual Cultures series with Tavia Nyong’o and Ann Pellegrini. In addition to a host of publications in scholarly journals, art writing appears in publications for the Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA, the 57th Venice Biennale, Boston ICA, SCHUNCK, the Haus der Kulturen der Velt, and SAVVY Contemporary.