The Warwick Social Theory Centre and the Centre for Critical Legal Studies are pleased to host Grace Lavery for a reading of her new memoir Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis, followed by discussion with Cath Lambert.
The event will take place on Thursday, March 31st from 2-4pm at the University of Warwick (FAB2.43)
A memoir of gender transition and recovery from addiction, a dance across genres, a ripping-up of the rulebook, Please Miss is unlike anything you’ve ever read before.
Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and a 100 per cent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. How could her story be straightforward when she is anything but? The telling of her tale is kaleidoscopic, wild and audacious: Grace performs in a David Lynch remake of Sunset Boulevard and is reprogrammed as a 1960s femmebot; she is targeted with anonymous letters from a mysterious cabal of clowns; she writes a socialist manifesto disguised as a porn parody of QI (or is it vice versa?).
As Grace fumbles toward a new trans identity, she tries on dozens of different voices, creating a coat of many colours. The result is dazzling, unique and unforgettable. Startlingly funny and ruthlessly smart, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.
Grace Lavery is a writer, editor, and academic living in Brooklyn, NY. As Associate Professor of English, Critical Theory, and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, her research explores the history and theory of aesthetics and interpretation, with particular interests in psychoanalysis, literary realism, and queer and trans cultures.
Cath Lambert is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Cath’s work includes projects and adventures in research, teaching, art, writing, performance, serious play and collaborations of different kinds. She works in the areas of gender and sexuality, critical and participatory pedagogies, queer theory, live sociology and queer kinship. She collaborates with creative practioners including queer live art organisation Fierce Festival and dance theatre company Vincent Dance Theatre. Her book The Live Art of Sociology was published by Routledge in 2018.
I , for one , would never parade publicly in a publicity that is solely self gratification in matters private between two individuals of any sexual oriiatantion!
. Why is the Western world obsssed out with sex!? Is it because they can’t afford it or don’t get enough of it?
To me as an African Black man who lived most his formative years on the African continent- know for sure that the Western world is still learning sexual pressures because they don’t want or need to get sexual pressures from their partners!
Misogyny gone out of control for most of the them and it is the female partners who suffer from the mouses of men who call themselves macho!
Example is the “Me To Movement ” emirating from the Hollywood Industry- the actual promoters of the Western “values ” inconsistent with the Christian values on which the Western values are apparently based!