Tyler Everett Adams,  WGSS Allushuski Fellow and PhD student in Interdisciplinary Arts, will be speaking on "Substance & Scum: Camp, Valerie Solanas, and Radical Feminist Rage."  The talk is this upcoming Friday, March 21 from 12-1:00 in Bentley Annex 162 (the WGSS conference room).   The flyer is attached!  All students and faculty are welcome!

Here is more info on the speaker and the talk:

Tyler Everett Adams is a multi-hyphenate theater maker and doctoral candidate

pursing his PhD in Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University where his scholarly focus

is Theater & Performance Studies, and his creative focus is Directing. His research

investigates camp as a form of vernacular theory in American popular culture

and attempts to recuperate camp’s affective and subversive potential. His general interests

include queer theater and performance art of 20th & 21st centuries, camp and

kitsch aesthetics, drag performance practices, queer theory, and queer hauntology.

Abstract: In her introduction to The S.C.U.M. Manifesto by Valarie Solanas, radical feminist Vivian Gornick writes, “Western culture [has] always made us secure in the knowledge that woman…is a soft, plastic vessel ready to shape any substance poured into this vessel [of] the female mold” (xvi). Solanas’ manifesto, written with an often lyrical yet palpable rage, was and continues to be a controversial work of early radical feminist thought. Decades later, the critical reception of Coralie Fargeat’s rage-filled body horror film The Substance (2024) has also had a somewhat uneven reception, with some singing its praises and others, well…horrified. This leaves us with some critical questions: what does it mean to want to both laugh and scream when engaging with an artistic work? How can art offer a salve for the emotional wounds of a misogynist society? How can we use the tools of satire, parody, and gender performativity to ridicule said society from a feminist perspective?  And perhaps most provocatively: what is “too far” and when have we not gone “far enough”?  Using the queer reading practice of camp to reparatively read radical feminist perspectives, this lecture will consider how abjection, Western beauty standards, and misogyny work on the body and how we can find opportunities to recuperate positive affect in an increasingly hostile world.  Note: given the film to be discussed, there is a content warning that can be found by scanning the QR Code on the poster.