The Security Archipelago: Rethinking Sexuality Politics in an age of Global Counter-revolution
Thursday, March 26, 2015 - 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Presenter(s): Paul Amar
Location: UA Center for Creative Photography (1030 N. Olive Road)
In this lecture, Paul Amar articulates new approaches to the study of sexuality politics and police states, offering new ways to read and to confront emergent forms of global power by examining the pivotal, trendsetting cases of Brazil and Egypt. Addressing gaps in the study of neoliberalism and biopolitics, Amar describes how coercive security operations and cultural rescue campaigns confronting waves of resistance have appropriated progressive, antimarket discourses around morality, sexuality, and labor. The products of these struggles—including powerful new police practices, religious politics, sexuality identifications, and gender normativities—have traveled across an archipelago, a metaphorical island chain of what the global security industry calls "hot spots." Homing in on Cairo and Rio de Janeiro, Amar reveals the innovative resistances, moral-nationalist logics, and unexpected alliances that have coalesced in new polities emerging from the Arab Spring and South America's Pink Tide. These have generated a shared modern governance model that he terms the "human-security state."
Paul Amar, Associate Professor in the Global & International Studies Program, is a political scientist and anthropologist with affiliate appointments in Feminist Studies, Sociology, Comparative Literature, Middle East Studies, and Latin American & Iberian Studies. Before he began his academic career, he worked as a journalist in Cairo, a police reformer and sexuality rights activist in Rio de Janeiro, and as a conflict-resolution and economic development specialist at the United Nations. His books include: Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006); New Racial Missions of Policing (2010); Global South to the Rescue (2011); Dispatches from the Arab Spring (2013); The Middle East and Brazil (2014), and The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics and the End of Neoliberalism, which was awarded the Charles Taylor Award for "Best Book of the Year" in 2014 by the American Political Science Association.
Now in its fifth year, the Miranda Joseph Endowed Lecture is an annual event of the Institute for LGBT Studies. This year’s lecture will be delivered by Paul Amar. We will also be hosting a “Deep Dish” conversation with Amar. Both events are free and open to the public.