The Nightshift: Queer Desire, Erotic Labor, & Radical Care After Dark at Tommys Place Wednesday November 12, 2025

Engaging topics from queer nightlife and sex work to community archives and mutual aid, participants will reflect on how embodied practices generate new forms of knowledge—especially in times when we are called to reconsider our relationships to research, institutions, and one another. What forms of erotic, intellectual, and collective labor sustain us through the night? What does it mean to turn the night shift into a site of pleasure, survival, and radical care?

Sponsored by the Creativity, Theory, and Politics Research Cluster as well as RAce GEnder and Sexuality (RAGES) in USC American Studies & Ethnicity, USC Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, USC Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, UC Berkeley Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and BAD ASIANS