Guest lecture by: Kelly Chung

Assistant Professor of American Studies at Williams College

DATE: Thursday, February 13, 2025

TIME: 1:45pm-2:45pm

LOCATION: ZOOM (Register Here)

As part of Heather Rastovac Akbarzadeh’s graduate seminar Political Approaches to Dance Studies: “practices of refusal as aesthetic and political gesture”.

Talk Description:

This lecture focuses on embodiments of inaction, and more specifically stillness, in public art installations by Los Angeles-based artist Jay Lynn Gomez (b. 1986). In reading stillness, or ongoing endurance, not as an inherent trait of racialized and gendered bodies but as a set of successive, transformative actions within scenes of low-wage, flexible labor, it explores the ways Gomez’s aesthetic practice breaks away from the chasms between apolitical/political, action/inaction, and resistance/compliance. Building on Gomez and Beili Liu’s installation Encirclement (2006), this lecture previews other modes of inaction in my larger book project A Feminism of Inaction.

Biography:

Kelly Chung is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Williams College. Her first book project A Feminism of Inaction traces black and women of color feminist performances of inaction that challenge spectatorial and political demands for labor resistance in and around the U.S. She received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College in Asian American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her writing can be found in liquid blackness, ASAP/Journal, Women & Performance among other venues.