STROKE BOOK is OUT!!!

SO excited to have Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot finally out in the world. Available everywhere, but please order from Fordham UP to support the press: https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823297665/stroke-book/.

Reviews:

Jonathan Alexander's Stroke Book is a fascinating auto-theoretical essay on illness and queer sexuality through the prism of his own health crisis that occurred after he had a minor stroke, causing visual impairment and anxiety about his own mortality. Alexander''s aphoristic style combines bits and pieces of phenomenological reflection with social and cultural analysis, creating a kaleidoscopic portal into the experience of stroke and its aftermath.---Lisa Diedrich, author of Indirect Action: Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, AIDS and the Course of Health Activism

Jonathan Alexander has given us an unexpected gift: an intimate performance of phenomenological writing that refuses the drive to process and package a life-altering experience of illness, embracing instead the daily imbrication of undependable vision, uncertain prognosis, and robust, resilient desire. Like the survival of its author in the wake of a sudden stroke, this book is a minor miracle.---Patrick Anderson, author of Autobiography of a Disease, and So Much Wasted

QUEER UTOPIAS, a webinar

SAVE THE DATE!

QUEER UTOPIAS

an online symposium

Friday, April 9, 2021

“Queer Utopias” is a one-day celebration of the forms, modes, and styles of happy queer placemaking. In a historical present dominated by contestations over the future of political life, claims and counterclaims to hidden knowledge, and the inflammatory effects of paranoia, this symposium highlights those hopeful experiments of the past and present whose legacies of pleasure, ease, care, and joy might inspire future experimentation and maybe, by doing so, remake the world.

10 am Pacific

Panel: “Horizons of Queer Utopias”

Jayna Brown, Pratt Institute

Jill Richards, Yale University

Alexis Lothian, University of Maryland

Noon Pacific

Film Screening: ONCE A FURY

https://onceafury.com/

1:30 pm Pacific

Post-Screening Discussion with the Director

Jacqueline Rhodes, Michigan State University

2:30 pm Pacific

Roundtable: “Utopias Cruised: Thinking With — and Beyond — Muñoz”

Jules Gill-Peterson, University of Pittsburgh

Timothy Oleksiak, U. of Massachusetts, Boston

Seth E. Davis, Curry College

Sherryl Vint, U. of California, Riverside

Hosted by Rebekah Sheldon, Indiana University,

and Jonathan Alexander, U. of California, Irvine.

Sponsored by UCI School of Humanities;

UCI Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies; IU Department of English.

You are invited to a Zoom webinar.

When: Apr 9, 2021 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Topic: Queer Utopias

Register in advance for this webinar:

https://uci.zoom.us/.../register/WN_PQqlX0s3RKWwrhl-mQWN2w

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STROKE BOOK READING!

Gave my first reading from STROKE BOOK (coming in October from Fordham UP) as part of the UCI Medical Humanities Center’s Works-in-Progress Series: STROKE BOOK: The Queer Story of a Blindspot, by Jonathan Alexander — February 17, 2021 from 4-5 Pacific. Info here.

UCI Medical Humanities Event: Jonathan Alexander reading from STROKE BOOK

Please join us on Wednesday, February 17th, from 4:00-5:00 p.m. PST for our second Work-in-Progress presentation by Jonathan Alexander, Chancellor's Professor of English!

Work-in-Progress Series: The Work-in-Progress series provides faculty and students from around campus the opportunity to showcase their research projects that engage with the intersection of medicine, arts, and the humanities. This year, the center is featuring presentations by previous grant recipients to highlight the current state of their projects, to demonstrate the range of work that the center supports, and to create places of enriching overlap.

STROKE BOOK: The Queer Story of a Blindspot

"STROKE BOOK emerged out of a health crisis in the summer of 2019, and a need to think and feel that crisis through my sexuality, my changing sense of dis/ability, and my experience of time. At a basic level, the book, largely drafted in the immediate aftermath of the crisis (a minor stroke), chronicles a very mortal encounter with time, with my recognition that we are never not beholden to time, even as we often refuse opportunities to confront the feelings and realities of our beholdenness. But it is also a recognition that queer time has its own rhythms, fluctuations, and perversities. I experienced — and continue to experience — my health crisis in very particular ways, ways that I cannot disentangle from my experiences in this culture as a queer person. This book is a refusal to engage in disentanglement." - Jonathan Alexander

Jonathan Alexander is a three-time recipient of the Ellen Nold Award for Best Articles in the field of Computers and Composition Studies. His books have been nominated for various awards, including the Lambda Literary Award. In 2011, he was awarded the Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Computers and Writing Studies. From 2010-2013, Alexander was named a UCI Chancellor's Fellow in recognition of his scholarly achievements. In 2016, he was named a Chancellor's Professor.

Click here to register for this event!

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