« S.W.E.A.T. » (Sex/uality. Work. Extraction. Art. Theatr/ics): with Ramzi Fawaz #46

Ramzi Fawaz is an award-winning queer cultural critic, educator, podcaster, and public speaker. He is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and host of the podcast Nerd from the Future. Fawaz is the author of two books including The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016), and Queer Forms (2022), both published by NYU Press. With Darieck Scott he co-edited the award-winning special issue of American Literature, "Queer about Comics" (2018) and with Deborah E. Whaley and Shelley Streeby he co-edited Keywords for Comics Studies, which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022.

Fawaz is a contributing editor to Film Quarterly where he authors the column "Imagination Unbound." In it, he explores how contemporary media and popular culture inspire new and surprising democratic political visions in response to increasingly authoritarian times. Fawaz's popular writing on feminist and queer media, American cultural politics, and superhero comics has also appeared in the LA Review of Books's online channels Avidly and The Philosophical Salon. He recently joined Gayle Wald and Aaron Trammell as the new co-editors of NYU Press's Postmillennial Pop Series, which publishes cutting edge scholarship in contemporary popular culture studies.

You can read more about him here: https://www.ramzifawaz.com/

We talk about teaching as an act of love, psychedelics as tools for loosening rigid thought, and how imagination can help us live with difference instead of fearing it. Ramzi describes entering the classroom as a “radiant light,” grounded, joyful, and fully present with students. At the heart of his pedagogy is attention as care: treating students as people worth listening to, challenging them without shaming, and creating a "cone of trust" where risk, disagreement, and mistakes are part of learning. Ramzi shares insights from his upcoming book, How to Think Like a Multiverse: Psychedelic Pathways to Embracing a Diverse World, arguing that both art and psychedelic experience can soften hardened thinking and help us approach human difference with curiosity rather than fear. Together we ask: How do we practice being with people we don’t agree with? How do we act when theory fails us? How do we cultivate imagination that changes the world rather than escapes it?

Tracks Played: Mad Kate - My Fear of Pretending Maggie Rogers & Sylvan Esso - Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl We mention: Hannah Arendt (enlarged mentality) Linda Zerilli (_Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom_) Judith Butler (performativity and grieveability) Lauren Berlant (cruel optimism) The movie Everything Everywhere All At Once_ The series Heated Rivalry

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.