Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies
College of Letters & Sciences | Department of English
Hometown: Irvine, CA
Ramzi Fawaz is an award-winning queer cultural critic, public speaker, and educator. He is the author of two books including The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016), and Queer Forms (2022). His popular writing on feminist and queer media, American cultural politics, and superhero comics regularly appears in Film Quarterly and the LA Review of Books’s online channels Avidly and The Philosophical Salon. His research and teaching explore the relationship between radical social movements and popular culture, including the imaginative uses of film and visual culture for gender and sexual freedom.
A speaker fee applies.
Talks:
Think Like a Multiverse: Pathways for Embracing a Diverse World
This talk presents a variety of surprising ways to think about difference and diversity beyond the language of oppression and marginalization. I discuss the possibilities for cultivating or developing skills for approaching human diversity with greater curiosity, open-heartedness, and playfulness rather than violence, fear, or distress.
Queer Forms of Life: Gay Liberation and its Legacies
This talk presents a cultural and political history of gay liberation, a political movement that fought for the right of all people to reject gender and sexual conformity in the 1970s and after. I also connect the history of this movement to contemporary LGBTQ social movements and civil rights struggles.
ACT UP, FIGHT AIDS: The Legacies of AIDS Activism
In this talk I present a cultural and political history of AIDS Activism in the 1980s, arguably the most successful medical health movement of the last century. I show how AIDS activism was born out of a surprising coalition of groups including gay men and lesbians, African and Asian Americans, IV drug users, health care professionals, and the homeless, who worked together to force the American healthcare system to take AIDS seriously and provide meaningful health care for those living with the disease.