Alice Freidman Lecture – Queer Old Things
February 11, 2015
Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts and the Arcus Endowment Present:
Queer Old Things: image, myth and memory in 20th century Paris
Wednesday, 02/11/15 –
112 Wurster Hall
UC Berkeley
This lecture will offer a critical analysis of “queer space” through an examination of key episodes in the lives of American lesbians in Paris in the years between 1903 and 1978. Focusing on the politics of image-making, the instability of the archive, and the challenges facing historians of gay and lesbian culture, the lecture defamiliarizes such well-known figures as Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Janet Flanner, Solita Solano, and Margaret Anderson by considering the changes across the long spans of their lives as cultural and political activists. An examination of the psychic and physical “lesbian archipelago” that these women created offers a new paradigm for Queer Studies.
Alice Friedman is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor of the History of American Art at Wellesley College. She received her A.B. from Radcliffe College; M.Phil. from the University of London; and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her research and teaching focus on modern architecture and the history of design in the United States. Friedman is an innovative scholar in the area of gender, sexuality and the built environment, and is known internationally for her acclaimed books, House and Household in Elizabethan England (1989), Women and the Making of the Modern House (2007), and American Glamor and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (2010). Friedman is the inaugural recipient of the Arcus/Places Prize, a biennial award made to an outstanding scholar whose work operates at the intersection of queer theory and the built environment. Her lecture is based on a longer article to be published in Places Journal in early 2015, and was written in part during her residency at UC Berkeley in 2014, with the support of the Arcus Endowment.
This lecture is sponsored by the ARCUS Endowment.
Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts
Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts brings together locally and nationally renowned artists, writers, filmmakers, and scholars for a series of conversations to discuss a broad range of LGBTQI topics in the humanities, architecture, design, and the arts. QCCA is an on-going collaboration between the Queer Cultural Center, California College of the Arts, and U.C. Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design.
QCCA Organizing Committee: Rudy Lemcke and Tina Takemoto (co-chairs), Tirza T. Latimer, Neil Schwartz and Greig Crysler.
