CHICAGO — Kirin Wachter-Grene has been named the 2017-2018 Visiting Scholar at the Leather Archives & Museum.
Kirin is a full time Lecturer at New York University and holds a PhD in English from the University of Washington. Her research centers around African American literature (particularly the work of Samuel R. Delany), black feminism, black sexual politics, BDSM, queer theory, black queer studies, and paraliterature (sci fi, street lit, and erotica).
Kirin will use her time at the LA&M to conduct research that will inform her Editor’s Intro for “Race and Kink,” a special issue of The Black Scholar (TBS) that she is guest-editing. The special issue grows out of the enthusiastic reception of “Race, Pornography, and Desire,” a TBS roundtable Kirin co-organized and co-edited in 2016 that brought together four leading black feminist scholars to discuss critical race and gender studies in relation to kink, BDSM, pornography, desire, agency, pleasure, and power. “Race and Kink” will extend the roundtable to engage in greater depth with suppressed or underexplored/unacknowledged histories of black peoples’ involvement with the BDSM, fetish, and leather communities. While at the LA&M, Kirin will utilize collections related to Viola Johnson and Michele Buchanan to inform her Intro’s focus on black women’s historical, manifold involvement in such communities.
via press release
