Annual theme “Excess“
Interdisciplinary Lecture Series (WS 2019/20)

10 December 2019

Excess, Gender, Racialization

Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Amber Jamilla Musser

Luiza Prado de O. Martins

Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist and researcher born in Rio de Janeiro in 1985, four hundred and eighty-five years after the Portuguese first invaded the land currently known as Brazil. She holds an MA from the Hochschule für Künste Bremen and a PhD from the Berlin University of the Arts. Her work engages with material and visual culture through the lenses of decolonial and queer theories. In her doctoral dissertation she examined technologies and practices of birth control and their entanglements with colonial hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality. Her current artistic research project, titled A Topography of Excesses, examines the transmission of indigenous and folk knowledges about herbal birth control as decolonising practices of radical care. She is a founding member of the Decolonising Design collective and the research duo A Parede.

Amber Jamilla Musser (featuring artwork by Maureen Catbagan)

Amber Jamilla Musser is an associate professor of American studies at George Washington University. Her research is at the intersection of aesthetics, race, gender, and sexuality studies. Musser has also published widely on race and critical theory, queer femininities and race, race and sexuality, and queer of colour critique. She is the author of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (New York University Press, 2018), which received a 2018 Arts Writer’s Grant from the Warhol Foundation, and Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (New York University Press, 2014). Musser also coedited, along with Kadji Amin and Roy Pérez, Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social, a special issue of asap/Journal (May 2017). Currently, she is beginning a project on noise, ethics, and aesthetics and writes art reviews for Brooklyn Rail.