How Now BDS? Media, Politics and Queer Activism
A conversation with John Greyson and Judith Butler
Moderated by Jasbir Puar

Friday, March 11, 6 to 8pm
Judson Memorial Church, Basement Gym - 243 Thompson St., just off Washington Square Park

John Greyson and Judith Butler will consider new forms of activism in support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, focusing on both the cultural and academic boycott and the importance of queer BDS activism in Palestine and elsewhere. They will discuss not only the reasons for supporting BDS, but the new forms of anti-Occupation activism in the media, popular culture, the academy, and other domains of public life. "How Now BDS" will center on how BDS is done now, and what must still be done.

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984 on the French Reception of Hegel. Judith Butler is the author of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), Undoing Gender (2004), Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak in 2008) and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009). She is also active in gender and sexual politics and human rights, anti-war politics, and Jewish Voice for Peace. As well she is a founding member of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine and a board member of the Jenin Theatre Foundation. She is presently the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities. She has recently completed a book on Jewish criticisms of Zionism.

Judith Butler’s Letter to NYC LGBT Center, 2/25/11

John Greyson is a Toronto video artist/filmmaker whose features, shorts and installations include Fig Trees (Best Documentary Teddy, Berlin Film Festival, 2009), Proteus (Diversity Award, Barcelona Gay Lesbian Film Festival, 2004), and Lilies (Best Film 'Genie', 1996). An associate professor in Film at York University, he was awarded the 2007 Bell Canada Award in Video Art.

Videos by John Greyson:
VUVUZELA
Hey Elton
John Greyson speaking at last year’s IAW in Toronto

Jasbir Puar, professor of Women's & Gender Studies at Rutgers University, is the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press 2007), which won the 2007 Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Professor Puar has also authored numerous articles that appear in Gender, Place, and Culture; Social Text; Radical History Review; Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography; and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her edited volumes include a special issue of GLQ entitled "Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization" and she co-edited a volume of Society and Space entitled "Sexuality and Space." She is currently working on a new book project focused on queer disability studies and theories of affect and assemblage. Professor Puar is also a contributor to The Guardian, Art India as well as Bully Bloggers and Oh! Industry.

Jasbir Puar's op-eds in The Guardian:
Israel's Gay Propaganda War and To Be Gay and Racist is No Anomaly
Jasbir Puar's articles on Bully Bloggers and on Oh! Industry

Adalah-NY is honored to again participate in this year’s IAW in NYC. This will be the 7th Annual International Israeli Apartheid Week and its 5th year in NYC. With issues heating up around the NYC LGBT Community Center’s decision to cancel an IAW event and ban the organizers from their facility, please join us for this timely discussion.

The complete IAW in NYC schedule of events can be seen here. We encourage our supporters to also attend other events in this series.