Guest Lecture by: Tahereh Aghdasifar

Assistant Professor and interim chair of Women's Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills

DATE: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2025

TIME: 3:15PM – 4:15PM
LOCATION: ARTS 202

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

TALK DESCRIPTION:
Through a series of anti-representational objects, this talk considers the political potential of refusal and refraction. Arguing that incoherence demands social collectivity through an opacity which takes the material conditions of racialized life seriously, this refusal to cohere is conceptualized as a form of refraction. Like light bending as it passes through a new medium, the framework of refraction insists on unbecoming acts as indispensable to the future of politics. If representation is a form of reflection, reading instead for the angles which produce refraction dispels the illusion of reflection, offering a path to collectivity which bypasses the trap of visibility. In place of “better” representation, queer refractions demonstrate how irreconcilable ways of being offer deeper forms of relationality.

BIOGRAPHY:

Tahereh Aghdasifar is assistant professor and interim chair of Women's Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She earned a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies with a certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University. Her scholarship is published in GLQ, Women & Performance, and A Love Letter to "This Bridge Called my Back," among others, and has been supported by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly The Woodrow Wilson) Mellon Fellowship, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and the American Association of University Women. Her in- progress monograph, On Refraction (and Other Stories of Queer Life) develops a theory of refraction reading anti- representational aesthetics of dispossession and displacement to build a collective materialist politics.