Thinking Gender: Spotlight on Keynote Dr. Kara Keeling

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Kara Keeling

By Lynette Dixon, Thinking Gender Graduate Student Researcher

If you do not read any further, know this: Dr. Kara Keeling will be at UCLA as the keynote speaker for Thinking Gender 2024! If you are familiar with her work, you know this is a big deal. If you are unfamiliar with her work, read this snapshot of her scholarship to learn why you cannot miss her talk on March 1, 2024, at 3:30 pm.

Kara Keeling is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts and of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Keeling is author of two books, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York University Press, 2019), and The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007), in which her interdisciplinary critique and analysis of numerous forms of media including film, music, poetry, and novels advance conversations about queer temporalities and futurity, representation, and politics.

I first encountered Keeling’s work as an MA student at Ohio State University through her article “Looking for M: Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future.” This was one of the first theoretical texts that piqued my interest in cinema, having previously only thought about representation in hop-hop music. In the article, Keeling does an analysis of the documentary The Aggressives[1] through which she outlines the stakes of visibility/invisibility and representation for queer Black subjects. She focuses on M, who enlists in the army to make money for college and then disappears when the US invades Iraq. Keeling urges us not to ask, “where is s/he but when might s/he be.”[2] She urges us to think about what logics and systems we have to expose and dismantle in order to realize a future that would facilitate M’s reappearance and survival. Thinking about the “elsewhen”[3] where a Black femme might be free forces us to confront historical and contemporary barriers to achieving such a future. In this case, we must ask, “When might M be able to live in a world where they did not need to join the army to circumvent the privation Black queer folks experience because of capitalism?” Though Keeling does not use the term utopia in this text, I find that this question is one that might help us conceptualize utopia. This question highlights that the temporality of utopia is one of potentiality, that utopia lies in the potential of that which remains unrealized or submerged by intersecting structures of oppression. As such, this text (and the type of analysis that this question engenders) serves as one of the theoretical and methodological inspirations upon which the theme of Thinking Gender builds.

In her first book, The Witch’s Flight, Keeling assesses how cinema buttresses racism, homophobia, and misogyny. Her analysis foregrounds the image of the Black femme to critique these hegemonic structures and posit alternative social arrangements. What is most interesting to me in this book is the way Keeling engages music to accompany her analysis of the films. The book comes with a soundtrack, with a song corresponding to each chapter of her book. This resonates with me because I often think with music when I cannot find my way into or through academic writing. Keeling’s rationale for having a soundtrack to her book is meant to serve the same purpose for the reader, to fill the gaps where the “common sense(s)” conditioned by hegemonic structures fails us. Instead, the soundtrack to the book performs the very critique of dominant common sense that Keeling puts forth in her book, revealing instead other methods of seeing, hearing, and knowing. Her second book, Queer Times, Black Futures, has been just as influential in building the philosophical/intellectual foundations of the conference theme. In fact, the name of this year’s theme, “Dystopian Realities, Feminist Utopias,” utilizes the structure of her title. In the book, Keeling analyzes an array of cultural texts and critical theories to illuminate the ways in which Black queer subjects disrupt capitalistic notions of time, making possible futures rendered unthinkable by our current calculus of time.

Keeling’s intellectual commitment to race, gender, and sexuality in her work not only resonates with Thinking Gender’s investments, but her work on temporality and futurity precisely aligns with the conference theme. The musical inspirations that inspire this theme echoes the sonic impulses in her work and the way she incorporates music in her methodology. Fortunately, Keeling’s keynote for Thinking Gender 2024 will guide us further into her experiments with sound. Her talk, entitled “Notes on the Vestibular,” will offer a short meditation on Black feminist Hortense Spillers’s use of the phrase “vestibular to culture” in her seminal essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” Specifically, she will focus on how sound functions in relationship to a specific sense of “the vestibular” and what attending to this relationship offers to the Black study of sound. We can count on her talk to beckon poetics from the future,[4] making her the perfect keynote presenter for the theme.

As we get ready for Keeling’s engagement with sound, it’s only right to leave y’all with another playlist. This time it is built from the soundtrack Keeling curates in The Witch’s Flight.

Here’s the track list from the book:

Smiling Faces Sometimes, The Undisputed Truth

Four Women, Nina Simone

Ghetto Heaven, The Family Stand

O-o-h Child, Nina Simone

On and On, Erykah Badu

Wade in The Water (I added two renditions of the spiritual on the playlist)

Bonus Track**: Still Not a Player, Big Pun (mentioned in “Looking for M” in Keeling’s analysis of The Aggressives)

Additionally, check out some of the films Keeling has analyzed in her work:

The Aggressives (2005)

Looking For Langton (1989) 

Brother to Brother

Eves Bayou (1997)

Set It Off (1996)

Sankofa (1993)

Space Is the Place (1974)

The Watermelon Woman (1996)

[1] Aggressives are masculine-presenting women and femmes.

[2] Keeling, 577, emphasis mine

[3] Shane Vogel, Stolen Time, 2018

[4] The epigraph for “Looking for M” is a quote from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks (note that the quote is a revision of a famous quote from Karl Marx) that reads in part: “The social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.”