Butch Futurities: Lola Flash Queers Time and Race

Abstract: In this talk, Jaime interrogates the relationship between racialized masculinities, performances of gender, and queer temporalities through the work of photographer Lola Flash. Specifically, Jaime attends to how Flash’s Afrofuturism series troubles contemporary framings of “butch” as a gender performance that exists in the past and an ever diminishing present. Flash’s photographs visually present a future that includes butches, black butches specifically, challenging their erasure in contemporary queer life worlds.

Bio: Karen Jaime (Ph.D., Performance Studies, NYU) is Assistant Professor of Performing and Media Arts and Latina/o Studies at Cornell University. A former Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Junior Faculty Fellow, Scholar in Residence at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (NYU), Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellow and Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Associate (UIUC), Karen’s current monograph, The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida (under review, NYU Press), argues for a reexamination of the Nuyorican Poets Café as a historically queer space, both in terms of sexualities and performance practices. Her critical writing has been published in: Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, e-Misférica, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and in an upcoming anthology entitled Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press). Karen is also an accomplished spoken word/performance artist who served as the host/curator for the Friday Night Poetry Slam at the world-renowned Nuyorican Poets Café. As a published poet, her writing is included in: The Best of Panic! En Vivo From the East Village, Flicker and Spark: A Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, in a special issue of Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary and Art Journal, “Out Latina Lesbians,” and in the anthology Latinas: Struggles and Protest in 21 Century USA. https://latino.cornell.edu/karen-jaime

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Artist

Co-sponsored by Department of English, Department of Prfomring and Media Arts, Latina/o Studies Program.