the audacity of pleasure, symposium 2025

On Friday, October 24, 2025, we will gather in the name of pleasure, joy, and desire. The first public forum of its kind focused on this urgent subject, the audacity of pleasure: race, aesthetics, and the politics of desire is a one-day, hybrid symposium that explores the aesthetics and politics of QT/BIPOC pleasure and joy. Join us in conversation with a diverse group of outstanding thinkers and makers who, working across multiple disciplines, challenge us to rethink what it means to live in the margins of society.
the audacity of pleasure: race, aesthetics, and the politics of desire is generously supported by a Research and Innovation Office Arts & Humanities grant, an Arts & Humanities Faculty Research, Creative Work, and Professional Development Award, and the Department of Art & Art History.

Location: Center for British & Irish Studies, Norlin Library

Morning Symposium Schedule


8:30 A.M.-9 A.M.
Sign-In/Breakfast

9 A.M.-9:30 A.M.
Keynote Address, Dr. Mireille Miller-Young, PhD

9:45 A.M.-10:45 A.M.
Panel #1, Eroticism in the Archives

11 A.M.-12 P.M.
Panel #2, Humor & Performance

Afternoon Symposium Schedule


12-1 P.M.
Lunch

1-2:30 PM
Panel #3, The BIPOC Quotidian

2:45-4:15 P.M.
Panel #4, Affect & Embodiment

4:30-5:30 P.M.
Panel #5, Queer of Color Euphoria

Keynote Presentation

Mireille Miller-Young

Mireille Miller-Young


, is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. The former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow researches and teaches about race, gender, and sexuality in US history, popular and film cultures, and the sex industries. Her groundbreaking book,A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography(Duke University Press, 2014), was awarded the Sara A. Whaley Prize for Best Book on Women and Labor by the National Women’s Studies Association and the John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book by the American Studies Association. Dr. Miller-Young is co-convener of the New Sexualities Research Initiative as well as the Black Sexuality Studies Collective at UC Santa Barbara, and she is a former convener of the Black Sexual Economies Project at Washington University School of Law. Serving on the editorial boards of journals like Porn Studies and Signs, as well as book series like Screening Sex (Edinburgh University Press) and Feminist Media Studies (University of Illinois Press), Miller-Young has won prizes for her research and teaching, including UCSB’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

She is also the moderator of the Affect & Embodiment panel.

Symposium Moderators

crystal am nelson

crystal am nelson, phd, is assistantprofessor of African/Diasporic Visual Studies in the Department of Art & Art History at CU Boulder. Prior to joining the faculty at CU Boulder, they were a Just Transformations Postdoctoral Fellow at Pennsylvania State University. They teach about race and representation, Black art histories, and Blackness in the visual field. www.thecrystalamnelson.com.


They co-organized the audacity of pleasure with Boreth J. Ly.

Boreth J. Ly

, Associate Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at UC Santa Cruz, is an art historian who writes about the visual cultures of Southeast Asia (including its diaspora and Southeast Asian America). In addition, she is an interdisciplinary scholar, an essayist and a critical pleasure seeker who always find pleasure in her work and in her life.

She asks herself: Do you work to live or live to work?


She co-organized the audacity of pleasure with crystal am nelson.

Cathy T. Thomas

is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at UC Santa Barbara. She is a creative critical scholar working on Caribbean diaspora writing and culture with a focus on the ‘Black Fantastic.’ Her decolonial feminist work is enriched by discovering modes of play and resistance in comic books, through cosplay, while wining up at Carnival, in science, and from on-screen and stage that examine the carnivalesque logic in text, image, experiment, and performance. Her current projects are a monograph, two collaborative books, an installation, and comic books in various states of completion, delay, ecstasy, and exhaustion. She is currently working on an experimental textile+digital+sound art installation called “Echolocating the Caribbean Diaspora” that examines space as a fabrication and fabulation of modernity's cartography.

Kristie Soares

Kristie Soaresis Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies and Co-Director of LGBTQ Studies. They are also a performance artist. Both their performance work and their research explore queerness in Caribbean and Latinx communities. They earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a BA in English and Women’s Studies from the University of Florida.

Professor Soares’ book,(University of Illinois Press, 2023), argues that joy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratification to challenge norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Rico and Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, and other areas of culture resist the dominant stories told about Latinx joy. As Soares shows, Latinx creators compose versions of joy central to social and political struggle and at odds with colonialist and imperialist narratives that equate joy with political docility and a lack of intelligence.

Symposium Presenters

LIZI ANDERSON-CLEARY

Lizi Anderson-Cleary is a PhD student in the History of Art & Architecture department at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on the intersection of art and politics and decolonial aesthetics in modern Latin America. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history with complementary minors in Spanish and Geography. For her master’s thesis, she examined the avant-garde, humanitarian, and feminist aspects of Mexican-Hungarian photographer Kati Horna’s work during the Spanish Civil War. During graduate school, Anderson-Cleary assisted in the preparation of an anthology of essays written by the professors in the College of Design for publication, interned at Blue Sky, a photography gallery in Portland, and works as a Teaching Assistant.


Panel: Humor & Performance

BERNADETTE MARIE CALAFELL

Bernadette Marie Calafell(PhD, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) is Professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. She is the past editor of theJournal of International and Intercultural Communication, a flagship journal of the National Communication Association. She has been named a Distinguished Scholar by the National Communication Association and the Western States Communication Association respectively. She is also former Film Review Editor ofQED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, for which she is presently editing a special issue on BDSM. Dr. Calafell has co-edited six books, as well as solo authoredLatina/o Communication Studies: Theorizing Performance and Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture.


Panel: Affect & Embodiment

CHAZ A. BARRACKS

Chaz A. Barracks, PhD (he/they) is a mixed-media interdisciplinary scholar, filmmaker, podcast host, and current postdoctoral fellow. He teaches courses on Black popular culture and the politics of Black joy through critical media practice. Dr. Barracks is currently writing a book on the politics of deviance in everyday Black life and wrote and directed Everyday Black Matter, a 2020 film project based in Richmond, Virginia. His research and creative practice are invested in interdisciplinary approaches that center epistemologies of Black joy and refusal, employing storytelling as a method to bridge knowledge gaps relevant to the study of Black queer life in America.


Panel: The Black Quotidian

YASMINE ESPERT

Yasmine Espert is an Assistant Professor of art history at York University, and Editor of Interviews and Profiles at Seen — a journal for Black, Brown and Indigenous voices in film, art and visual culture. ForPublic Books, Dr.Espert recently completed an interview about performance and abolition called “Minimalism Forces You To Imagine: Speaking with Benji Hart and Anna Martine Whitehead.” Similarly, their commissioned essay “On Turtle Island, I learned to be as alive as possible” documents a QTBIPOC artist project for Canada’s National Arts Centre — English Theatre. Dr. Espert recently authored “To risk the sovereignty of our own stories” for The Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art History. Currently, they’re working on a book manuscript about Caribbean diasporic film for Duke University Press. Their research is supported by York University, ACLS, Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, Fulbright, and others. Dr. Espert earned a doctorate in art history from Columbia.


Panel: Eroticism in the Archives

ARACELY GARCIA GONZALEZ

Aracely García-González received her PhD in Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at the EDron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. She is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar; her training is in critical ethnic studies, emphasizing social processes, cultural studies, visual culture, history, and the legacies of US imperialism in the Americas. Her research focuses on the connections between histories of colonialism, global capitalism, gender, and economic vulnerabilities in marginalized communities. Her book-length project, “Flirting with Sexual Economies,” outlines how Latina sexualities and aesthetics reflect US capital accumulation and are integral to how capital moves, particularly in the Americas.


Panel: BIPOC Quotidian

JILLIAN HERNANDEZ

Jillian Hernandez, PhD, is a curator and scholar of contemporary visual art, popular culture, and style. Her bookAesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodimentwas published by Duke University Press and her most recent exhibition,Liberatory Adornment: Pamela Council, Yvette Mayorga, Kenya (Robinson),was on view in 2021 at the Flaten Art Museum. A public-facing scholar, Hernandez has launched Full Set Project, a team of researchers who study and document the impact of nail culture (IG @fullsetproject) and the video podcast FEM STUDY on her YouTube channel. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida.


Panel: BIPOC Quotidian

NIGEL LEZAMA

Professor of Fashion Studies and Inclusion at Toronto Metropolitan University, Nigel Lezama is a leading thinker in the field of critical luxury studies. Nigel’s work focuses on decentring and decolonizing perceptions of and practices in luxury by bringing light to the luxurious experiences that are created in Black popular cultural spaces and through Black style. His research in 19th-century French cultural history also re-situates marginalized players—working class women and enslaved and displaced labourers—to the centre of France’s fashion story to rethink the myth of Paris as a global fashion capital.


Panel: Queer of Color Euphoria

LIZETTE LONDON

Lizette London (she/her) is an Afro-Pinay Black feminist visual artist and second-year doctoral student in African American Studies at Emory University. Working at the nexus of Black Feminist Thought, Black Queer Studies, and Black Visual Cultures, Lizette seeks to complicate notions of the major Black artistic movements of the 20th and 21st centuries by tracing a new set of genealogies within the visual arts canon. Her work explores the artistic, intellectual, and political practices of Black Queer women image-makers and writers through themes such as self/portraiture, visual literacy, literary theory, and cultural production.

Before Emory, Lizette earned an MA in Black Feminist Visual Arts and Culture from the NYU School of Individualized Study, where she was awarded the e. Frances White Award for her artistic and scholarly achievements, and a BA in Comparative Women’s Studies from Spelman College.


Panel: Eroticism in the Archives

JOSHUA K. REASON

Joshua K. Reason (they/them) is a transdisciplinary, multimodal scholar-artist from the Bay Area. Their work details Black : Indigenous performing and visual arts in the Americas as rehearsals for freedom beyond the limitations of modernity. Through ethnography, performance studies, cultural studies, and geography, they write and create towards new grammars for sexuality, intimacy, desire, and erotics. Their work has been published inThe Black Scholar,The Journal of American Culture,The Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships, andbecoming undisciplined: a zine. Joshua is currently producingBrazil After Dark, a documentary about Black: Indigenous LGBTQIAPN+ artists in North-Northeast Brazil.


Panel: Affect & Embodiment

C. ALBA RIO

Cristal Alba is a scholar and practitioner specializing in BDSM and pornography. They are currently studying at UCSD as part of the Ethnic Studies PhD program. As a scholar, their current research focuses on the interwoven dynamics of sexual opacity and excess within melanated visual aesthetics and practices. This interest falls within their larger exploration of the ways that queer embodied practices of sexual alterities transform sociality, relational possibility, and phenomenological inquiry. As a BDSM practitioner and sadist, they pursue the worldly undoing and rebuilding potentials of pain and abjection, tracing the lingering residues of bodily manipulation and transformation.


Panel: Affect & Embodiment

JESSICA KENYATTA WALKER

Jessica Kenyatta Walker is an American Studies scholar exploring food and racialization within everyday cultural landscapes. Her current project explores the cultural mythology of soul food as its articulated through representations of Black women and kitchen spaces. Dr. Walker received her PhD in American Studies from The University of Maryland, College Park and is currently Assistant Professor of American Culture and Afro-American and African Studies at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.


Panel: BIPOC Quotidian

MAX YANG

Yiou (Max) Yang is an MA student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Max’s research investigates how China’s queer communities navigate socio-political landscapes across various media and platforms. Centered on the concept of Ku’er—a phonetic adaptation of “queer”—Max employs queerness both as a critical analytical framework and as a site of resistance against entrenched hetero-patriarchal norms and nationalist ideologies. Building upon a BFA in Photography and an MS in Arts Administration, Max examines emerging queer cultural movements such as Voguing Shanghai (Ballroom culture in China), analyzing how these performative acts reshape identity and community under conditions of censorship. Max’s work emphasizes transnational, intersectional perspectives to preserve and celebrate diverse queer experiences.


Panel: Queer of Color Euphoria

MICHELLE YEE

Michelle Yee is an assistant professor of Art History whose research focuses on contemporary Asian American and Asian Diasporic art. Her research interests include race and representation, transnational connections and collisions, and cosmopolitanisms. Her writing can be found in journals such asAsian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas,Third Text,Panorama, andArt Etc.as well as several exhibition catalogues. At VCU, Yee teaches undergraduate and graduate courses that consider Asian Diasporic and American art and visual culture. She received an MA and PhD in Visual Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, an MA in Art History from the University of Connecticut, and a BA in Art History and English Literature from Georgetown University.


Panel: Humor & Performance