Joshua Chambers-Letson: Queer Didactics and the Art of Talking At

Joshua Chambers-Letson gives a lecture on Vaginal Davis’s text legacy.

In November of 2012 Vaginal Davis sat down for a conversation with the late scholar José Muñoz. Framing their exchange as a ludic riff on James Baldwin and Margaret Mead’s panned dialogue, A Rap on Race, Muñoz declared their mutual admiration for the degree to which the Baldwin/Mead text was “shrouded in a mist of inappropriateness, self-importance, and just a griftery-ness that we very much admire.” Davis and Muñoz’s conversation shifted seamlessly between an illuminating and substantive account of the emergence of Davis’ practice; discussions of queerness, intersex being, and blackness; as well as her reflections on fisting and shrimping in twenty-first century Berlin. On the occasion of Index’s presentation of Vaginal Davis: HOFPFISTEREI and its exploration of the different written modes through which Davis has disseminated discourse and knowledge, this lecture turns to the queer art of the lecture to consider the ludic, inappropriate, and radically serious means through which queers of color have inhabited and fucked with the format of the artist talk and academic lecture:_ talking with_ and, when necessary, talking at audiences as a method of queer of color didactics.

Joshua Chambers-Letson is the Chair of Performance Studies and Professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Completing a book on queer love and loss for NYU Press (forthcoming 2025), JCL is also the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America; co-editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown with Tavia Nyong’o and of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital with Christine Mok.

This event is part of the program of activations for the exhibition Vaginal Davis: HOFPFISTEREI. More information about the exhibition here and about the program here.

This exhibition has been developed in collaboration with Moderna Museet in Stockholm, as part of the exhibition Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product. The museum presents a major retrospective of Vaginal Davis’s work while, in parallel, Index is the locus for research on her text production. Vaginal Davis’s solo exhibition Magnificent Product is initiated by Moderna Museet and extends across several locations in Stockholm: Moderna Museet, Nationalmuseum, Accelerator, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Tensta konsthall and MDT (Moderna Dansteatern). Each institution highlights a different aspect of Vaginal Davis’s expansive practice.