Technologies of Silence Schedule

Drag:  Performing Gender

Feminist and Queer thinkers have long been committed to the idea that gender is not a fixed biological category, with some authors arguing that we should understand gender to be a performance.  Whatever one makes of these arguments about what gender is, it seems fair to say that drag is a performance of gender in which actors have (some) power to play with, to expand, and even to contest the conventional gender scripts.  These days, it also seems fair to say that drag has achieved mainstream visibility and no little popularity.  In this artist’s conversation, Darius Rose will reflect on what they have learned from performing as Jackie Cox, a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race, and from their work in off-Broadway LGBTQ productions.

Resisting Reproductive Regulation II:  Deep Histories

In overruling the right to abortion access provided by Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization criticized Roe’s “faulty historical analysis” and asserted that it was “important to set the record straight.”  The Dobbs Court purported to do that by offering a crude sketch of the status of abortion from the “earliest days of the common law until 1973,” the year that Roe was decided, and it pronounced that there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to an abortion.  The speakers on this panel will help to demystify and complicate the history that Dobbs traverses. Beyond raising a litany of questions about the use of premodern legal sources in modern decisions, the Court ignored issues with which any competent historian would have to grapple, including manuscript transmission; culturally and historically specific notions of felony, personhood, and justice; and medieval medical contexts and practices.  Conversants include Sara Butler (Ohio State History), Katherine Churchill (UVA English), Deborah McGrady (UVA French), and Sayantan Saha Roy (University of Connecticut Anthropology). 

The Lawyer-Poet/The Poet-Lawyer

This panel is a conversation among three speakers who are lawyers as well as poets.  Andrea Dennis (UGA Law), Farah Peterson (Chicago Law), and Amy Woolard (ACLU of VA) will reflect on their work as lawyers and as poets, on the connection between the texts they create in these two fields, on how their work as lawyers influences their poetry, on how their poetry shapes their approaches to law.  

Scenes from Big Mouth/Testimony

Big Mouth is a feature-length documentary film in production, directed by Bremen Donovan, and co-produced with Nomi Dave. It tells the story of three women – a journalist, a lawyer, and an activist – investigating a series of sexual violence cases in the Republic of Guinea. These women and their allies embrace the term “Big Mouth” because they are provocateurs, willing to say the unsayable. In an increasingly repressive political landscape, the State distrusts them and the public is ambivalent. Survivors and their families turn to them, though, as they operate between the edge of speaking out and saying too much.

In this session, we will share scenes and original research from the film project, focusing on questions of testimony, audiovisual access, and vulnerable witnesses. Our examples stem from a high-profile criminal trial that has taken place in Guinea since 2022, in which survivors of violence have confronted an ex-president and his top commanders, sometimes before the cameras. How do audibility and visibility become sites of conflict between perpetrators, victim-witnesses, the courts, and the media? In a publicized trial, whose rights are pre-eminent? How, if at all, does film serve as a form of testimony for sexual justice?