I’ll be presenting a paper, “Queering Orientalism, Performing Reception: Post Natyam Collective’s ‘the sins of such wonderful flesh,'” at the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) conference as part of a panel titled Queering (Il)legibility: Performing Otherwise Worlds.  Other panel presenters include Heather Rastovac Akbarzadeh, Tahereh Aghdasifar, and Thao P. Nguyen.

Paper Abstract:
We analyze “the sins of such wonderful flesh,” a Post Natyam Collective work combining video and South Asian abhinaya (expression) to queer the gaze, performing erotically charged relationships between women. The piece is inspired by Maud Allan, a white choreographer who toured her “Oriental” dances such as the Vision of Salome in Europe in the early 1900s. We ask: what does it mean for a brown femme spectator to perform desire for Maud Allan-as-Salome? What is the difference between desire and identification (aka self-exotification)? How does this project cross borders of race and nation, queering the archive through transhistorical dialogues?

https://www.nwsa.org/annualconference