About the Seminar

CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies and the Barnard Center for Research on Women are thrilled to announce the Inaugural Amber Hollibaugh Seminar in the city, a six-week program exploring the transformative legacy of Amber Hollibaugh—a radical lesbian feminist, scholar, artist, and lifelong activist for queer survival economies.

Facilitated by interdisciplinary artist and educator Gili Rappaport, this seminar invites participants to dive into themes of queer survival, care, and community resilience in the face of economic hardship, criminalization, and marginalization. Participants will engage with foundational texts, recorded dialogues, and contributions from local artists and activists while contributing to a living archive honoring queer histories and futures.

The Inaugural Amber Hollibaugh Seminar (2024) relaunches CLAGS’ public education series, Seminars in the City, originally held in July 1998.

The Amber Hollibaugh Seminar is co-sponsored by the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division (@bgsqd) and Barnard Center for Research on Women.

Why Join?

This seminar is more than a class—it’s a space to build community, a book club to reflect on queer survival strategies, and an homage to Amber’s vision of community care and radical solidarity. Participants will explore the intersections of class, desire, and kinship through a rich syllabus of readings, discussions, and creative work.

Whether you’re an organizer, artist, body worker, visionary, builder, or community member, this seminar offers a unique opportunity to learn, share, and contribute to an archive of queer care and resistance.

Schedule

Dates: March 5 – April 9, 2025
Time: Wednesdays, 6–9 PM
Location: Bureau of General Services—Queer Division (208 West 13th Street, NYC)

This is an in-person experience. Unfortunately, we cannot accommodate remote participants at this time.

What to Expect

Each week focuses on a key theme:

• Week 1: Queer Survival Economies — Honoring Amber Hollibaugh’s Legacy
• Week 2: Public Space, Gentrification, and Queer Displacement
• Week 3: Oral Histories and Resilient Queer Spaces
• Week 4: Queer Desire and Class as Radical Resistance
• Week 5: Trans and BIPOC Narratives on Survival and Criminalization
• Week 6: Community-Based Economies and Mutual Aid

Reading list (excerpts provided free of charge, available through the CLAGS archive)

• Amber Hollibaugh, My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home
• Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home
• Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
• Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
• bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place
• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World
• José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
• Vivek Shraya, I’m Afraid of Men
• Gayle Rubin, Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality
• Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
• Tourmaline, Black Trans Feminism is the Future
• Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith (Eds.), Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
• Sylvia Rivera, Queens in Exile, The Forgotten Ones
• Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
• Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism
• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dub: Finding Ceremony

Participation Details

• Open to NYC publics, free of charge
• We encourage applications from first-time students, people from underrepresented communities, and interests that reflect the city’s diversity of cultures, aesthetics, and creative practices. We strive to create an inclusive and accessible space for all participants. If you need any accommodations to fully participate in the seminar, please note this in the application form.
• 20 spots available—apply soon!
• Participants will have the option to contribute to a collaborative publication and CLAGS archive project

Apply Now

Ready to join us? Click below to apply and be part of this exciting program. Applications close February 15, 2025.

Apply Here

About Amber Hollibaugh

Amber Hollibaugh was a legendary radical/lesbian/feminist/scholar/artist. A lifelong political activist and organizer, she was on the founding board of Queers for Economic Justice and served as QEJ’s Executive Director from 2011-2014. She established Queer Survival Economies (QSE), a project at the Barnard Center for Research on Women addressing the intersections of sexuality, poverty, homelessness, labor, and the criminalization of survival. Hollibaugh was the Founding Director of the Lesbian AIDS Project at GMHC, the first effort of its kind to organize with and for lesbians living with HIV. Amber also served as the Director for Aging Initiatives at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. She fought for class and poverty issues to be addressed by an otherwise very bourgeois LGBTQ movement. Amber was a fierce advocate for transnational solidarity and movement building around sexuality, bodily autonomy and pleasure. Her publications included the book My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home, and she directed and co-produced the documentary film The Heart of the Matter. Her works have been translated into several languages, and she worked very closely with activists in China and India.

Image credit: Joaquin Golez @othereros