Che Gossett | Tongues Untied – Black Love Without Limit
Friday 23 May 2025, 3pm
Colin Matthew Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building
All are welcome but registration is necessary
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Marlon Riggs’s emancipatory politics were not exclusively agape, but also erotic. Riggs advocated a black radical erotico-political aesthetic, in the vein of Audre Lorde. Across his work Riggs visually theorizes and articulates a capacious version of Black love as a liberating force that has the capacity to hold difference without diremption, and a capacious version of love that is not eschewing of the flesh, but rather, actualized through sensuous desire. Flesh in the sense that Hortense Spillers ascribes to it, as that of the captive versus the free subject — who lays a seemingly unproblematized claim to a body. Riggs’s critical redemption of queer black flesh follows Toni Morrison’s exhortation and vocation – to love that which is hated – the force of this love reverberates outwards. Black love in Riggs’s hands is a “revolutionary” force, one extends beyond the binary of life/death, and materialized through in the maternal, visitation and spirit.
Speaker: Che Gossett (University of Pennsylvania)
Che Gossett is associate director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Trans Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to returning to Penn — where they received an MA in History — they were the Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia Law School from 2021-23, and an Animal Law and Policy fellow at Harvard Law School from 2022-2024. Gossett has published work in anthologies such as Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2018), and is co-editor, with Yale University African American Studies professor Tavia Nyong’o, of a forthcoming Social Text journal special issue on Sylvia Wynter, culture, and technics. They are the recipient of a 2024 Creative Capital Andy Warhol Writers Grant.
Moderator: Avik Sarkar (University of Oxford)
Avik Sarkar studies the aesthetics, erotics, and politics of transsexual life. Avik has presented her research at the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA. She received a research fellowship from the arts organization Visual AIDS for an archival project published in March 2025. Avik’s writing is forthcoming in Lateral, the journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and Rejoinder, the journal of the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women. She graduated with distinction in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Yale; she is now pursuing her master’s as a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford.
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