CURRENTS: Desiree Sterling + Brian Van Wyck

The Dresher Center’s CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now lunchtime series showcases exciting new work in the humanities in a dynamic and inter-disciplinary setting.

Lizzo, ASMR Embodiment, and a Surround Sound Cultural Critique on Body Positivity

Desiree Sterling, Coordinator, Office for Academic and Pre-Professional Advising

As a fat, Black woman, Lizzo engages in cultural work that curates counternarratives to social-normative renderings of her desirability, health, and humanity. In this talk, Desiree Sterling frames Lizzo’s rhetorical choices on social media through sound studies, illustrating how her raw approach to evoking body positivity emits sound waves to a public sphere conditioned to the silencing of marginalized voices. Sterling conceptualizes Lizzo's rhetorical soundwaves as ASMR embodiment and surround sound cultural critique. By crafting intimate, stimulating surface sounds next to enveloping, immersive echoes of subversion, Lizzo's platform intentionally triggers welcomed or unwelcomed sensory experiences for a diverse audience faced with the immediacy of her being and bodies like hers.

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Brian Van Wyck, Assistant Professor, History

For much of the period of labor recruitment that brought more than one million Turkish citizens to West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, the Islamic faith of most of this migrant population was little discussed. Over the course of the 1980s, however, Turkish-origin migrants were increasingly “Muslimized” in policy and popular discourse, with Islam taken to be the central salient factor in an enduring, unassimilable, and racialized Turkishness. This project re-examines the contingency of this shift, doing so through a lens attuned to the role of Turkish agency and the variety of actors and interests involved in the production of a racialized, nationalized “Turkish Islam” against the paradoxical backdrop of homogenizing Western anti-Muslim racism in the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

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