« S.W.E.A.T. » (Sex/uality. Work. Extraction. Art. Theatr/ics): with Dr. Shelley Wong #28
A fifth generation Chinese American from California, Dr. Shelley Wong began her career teaching English at a girls' middle school in Hong Kong where she went to study Cantonese and learn about her cultural roots. She went on to teach English as a Second Language in adult school, high school, community college, university intensive English programs, and teacher education programs in California, Ohio, New York, and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. She has also taught ESL/Bilingual classes for community organizations, churches and trade unions. Her research interests include womanist, Critical Race and interfaith perspectives on justice, peace and reconciliation; dialogic inquiry, socio-cultural approaches to literacy, and critical multiculturalism.
Dr. Wong was President of TESOL International (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) and served on the Executive Committee of TESOL from 2007-2010. She has been involved in collaborative literacy research projects with Reading Recovery, elementary and English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers in elementary schools in Arlington, Prince George County and in Fairfax, Virginia.
Currently an Associate Professor Emerita at George Mason University in the College of Education and Human Development, she previously taught at the University of Maryland, and at the Ohio State University. She earned her BA in Sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz (U.C.S.C.); her California teaching credentials, TESL certificate and MA in Teaching English as a Second Language from UCLA; and her Ed.D. in Applied Linguistics from Columbia Teachers College in New York. Most recently Shelley was a visiting Fulbright Scholar at Birzeit University in the Palestinian Occupied West Bank.
For this special episode, Dr. Wong and I traveled into Washington DC together on the 24th of July, 2024, to attend the demonstration against Isreali Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu's visit to the United States congress. During the protest we talked to other workers about how their jobs dovetail with their activism and their reasons for attending.
We all sweat as we provide care, as we labour, as we perform our work, as we fuck, as we survive and as we sacrifice one choice for the other. How exactly do we define our work and how does that work entangle and circumscribe our sexual identities, our racialized bodies, our creative lives and the ways in which we provide care? How do we perform both tasks and identities within the framework of that which we consider work? These conversations are a means to speak between intersectionalities by anchoring through our (always, already, and ever pervasive) sexualized and racialized bodies, our working bodies, our artistic bodies and our performative bodies. I hope that they contribute to dialogues which normalize sex work as work, and all work as deserving of respect, healthy conditions, and a living wage.
You can find out more https://www.alfabus.us/s-w-e-a-t/
Mad Kate (they/them) is an electronic producer, sound designer, performance artist and writer who began working the Berlin performance and club scene in 2004, expanding their unique identity-queering, genderfcking and sexpositive performative work throughout music, theatre and film. Their explorations of borders between/within bodies, audibility, consent, proximity, and touch as political practice have brought them to theaters, communes, technomansions, prisons, dungeons, squats and galleries around the world.