Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone: Julia Chang - Glass Skin: Resurfacing Race and Masculinity

Please join us for the upcoming Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone talk with Julia Chang (Cornell University). 

 

The speaker has recommended that attendees either read Chapter 1, "Her Own Skin," from Anne Cheng's book Second Skin or watch Jenny Livingston's documentary Paris is Burning prior to the event. Both will be referenced in her talk, but attendees may choose which they prefer to engage with before.

 

 

This talk invites a critical engagement with two dominant frameworks of identity formation: Fanon's epidermal schema of race on the one hand, and Bulter's performativity of gender on the other. Taking skin—both architectural (glass) and human (epidermis)—as its primary object of analysis, this presentation unsettles the idea of transparency and by extension, scopic control and racial certitude. The analysis centers two imperial objects: Madrid’s Crystal Palace erected for the 1887 General Exhibition of the Philippines and ethnographic photography from the former colony. Countering familiar narratives about race and gender, this talk asks: What happens when glass emits luster instead of transparency? What if racialized skin fails to be self-evident? Can we sense gender through the materiality skin?

 

Speaker Bio:

Prof. Chang is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at Cornell University and is affiliated with the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and the Southeast Asia Program. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching span nineteenth-century Spanish literature (with a focus on the realist novel), contemporary Spanish non-fiction and visual art (especially works by racialized writers and artists), and Philippine literature in Spanish. Her work also engages with feminist and queer theory, histories of racial formation, disability studies, and game studies. Her first book, Blood Novels: Gender, Caste, and Race in Spanish Realism (University of Toronto Press, 2022), was awarded the inaugural “Harriet S. Turner Beca” by the Asociación Internacional de Galdosistas.