Your Keynote
Mireille Miller-Young, Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Mireille Miller-Young, PhD, is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. The former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow researches and teaches about race, gender, and sexuality in US history, popular and film cultures, and the sex industries. Her groundbreaking book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Duke University Press, 2014), was awarded the Sara A. Whaley Prize for Best Book on Women and Labor by the National Women’s Studies Association and the John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book by the American Studies Association. Dr. Miller-Young is co-convener of the New Sexualities Research Initiative as well as the Black Sexuality Studies Collective at UC Santa Barbara, and she is a former convener of the Black Sexual Economies Project at Washington University School of Law. Serving on the editorial boards of journals like Porn Studies and Signs, as well as book series like Screening Sex (Edinburgh University Press) and Feminist Media Studies (University of Illinois Press), Miller-Young has won prizes for her research and teaching, including UCSB’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
She is also the moderator of the Affect & Embodiment panel.
Your Panel Moderators
crystal am nelson
crystal am nelson, phd, is assistantprofessor of African/Diasporic Visual Studies in the Department of Art & Art History at CU Boulder. Prior to joining the faculty at CU Boulder, they were a Just Transformations Postdoctoral Fellow at Pennsylvania State University. They teach about race and representation, Black art histories, and Blackness in the visual field. www.thecrystalamnelson.com.
They co-organized the audacity of pleasure with Boreth J. Ly.
BORETH J. LY
Boreth J. Ly, Associate Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at UC Santa Cruz, is an art historian who writes about the visual cultures of Southeast Asia (including its diaspora and Southeast Asian America). In addition, she is an interdisciplinary scholar, an essayist and a critical pleasure seeker who always find pleasure in her work and in her life.
She asks herself: Do you work to live or live to work?
She co-organized the audacity of pleasure with crystal am nelson.
CATHY T. THOMAS
Cathy Thomas is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at UC Santa Barbara. She is a creative critical scholar working on Caribbean diaspora writing and culture with a focus on the ‘Black Fantastic.’ Her decolonial feminist work is enriched by discovering modes of play and resistance in comic books, through cosplay, while wining up at Carnival, in science, and from on-screen and stage that examine the carnivalesque logic in text, image, experiment, and performance. Her current projects are a monograph, two collaborative books, an installation, and comic books in various states of completion, delay, ecstasy, and exhaustion. She is currently working on an experimental textile+digital+sound art installation called “Echolocating the Caribbean Diaspora” that examines space as a fabrication and fabulation of modernity's cartography.
KRISTIE SOARES
Kristie Soares is Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies and Co-Director of LGBTQ Studies. They are also a performance artist. Both their performance work and their research explore queerness in Caribbean and Latinx communities. They earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a BA in English and Women’s Studies from the University of Florida.
Professor Soares’ book, Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media (University of Illinois Press, 2023), argues that joy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratification to challenge norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Rico and Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, and other areas of culture resist the dominant stories told about Latinx joy. As Soares shows, Latinx creators compose versions of joy central to social and political struggle and at odds with colonialist and imperialist narratives that equate joy with political docility and a lack of intelligence. Soares builds their analysis around chapters that delve into gozando in salsa music, precise joy among the New Young Lords Party, choteo in the comedy ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?, azúcar in the life and death of Celia Cruz, dale as Pitbull’s signature affect, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of silliness to take seriously political violence.
Professor Soares is also currently working on an oral history project that explores the role of Latinx disc jockeys in the development of disco and dance music in 1970s New York. This is part of a larger book project entitled Macho Man: Performances of Latinidad in the Disco Era.