Desiree Akhavan, who played Chandra on season four of Lena Dunham’s HBO series “Girls,” will help to kick off the Penn Humanities Forum’s yearlong investigation of Sex at a Sept. 16 program called “What Is Appropriate Behavior?”
The event, which is free and open to the public, starts at 5 p.m. and takes place in the Harrison Auditorium of the Penn Museum, located at 3260 South St.
The evening will begin with a conversation between Akhavan, a bisexual actor and filmmaker, and Patricia White, the author of “Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability.” Afterwards, there will be a screening of Akhavan’s 2014 indie comedy “Appropriate Behavior.”
In an article for Film Quarterly, White described “Appropriate Behavior” as a “chronicle of the cringe-worthy misadventures in romance, sex, housing and underemployment of Shirin, a 20-something Iranian-American college graduate in Brooklyn.”
In the movie, Akhavan plays Shirin, a young bisexual woman reeling from a breakup with her lover Marnie. Her sadness and frustration are compounded by the fact that she doesn’t quite fit in anywhere. Shirin never seems at ease, whether she’s with her family, her coworkers or even when partying with her fellow hipsters.
One of the film’s strengths is its matter-of-fact treatment of gender fluidity. After her breakup, Shirin embarks on a series of random hookups with men, women, even a couple. They’re all a bit messy and certainly less comforting than Shirin hopes they will be. In other words, quite realistic.
Those are some of the qualities that make “Appropriate Behavior” an excellent choice for the forum, said Heather Love, the event’s topic director.
“The film captures so much of the complexity of sex and desire, it just seemed like the perfect opening,” Love said.
Of course, the movie deals with far more than sex. Issues like choosing a career, the immigrant experience in America and sexual identity are present, too. But Akhavan approaches these difficult subjects with a low-key, self-deprecating humor. Love regards that as a shrewd artistic choice on the filmmaker’s part.
Akhavan, she said, “has an incredibly light touch and I think it shows the incredible kind of cultural work that comedy can do at its best.”
“What Is Appropriate Behavior?” is the first of 25 public events on Sex that the Forum will be presenting throughout the coming academic year. Love and her colleagues have put together a series they hope will prompt people to view this oft-studied and publicized topic with fresh eyes.
“One of the things we tried to capture is the tension between sex as something that seems kind of astoundingly obvious, and, by looking at it from different contexts and historically, to show its complexity and how much it varies over time and in different places,” she said.
Many Forum events will be of interest to LGBT audiences. This fall alone, speakers include Teresa de Lauretis, a founding figure in the Queer Studies movement (Nov. 5) and Terry Castle, a prolific author and public intellectual who wrote “The Apparitional Lesbian” (Nov. 18).
Love, the author of “Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History,” is delighted audiences will also get to hear from scholars whose names might be less familiar. They include Afsaneh Najmabadi, a historian who has studied gender variance in the Middle East. Her Oct. 1 talk is called “The Kin Who Count, and Those in the Shadows.” And on Oct. 14, Steven Epstein and Lance Wahlert will discuss “Living in the Era of Sexual Health.”
The Penn Museum is even participating with its exhibit “Sex: A History in 30 Objects.” Opening Oct. 17, the exhibit will display pieces culled from the museum’s enormous collection. These precious artifacts come from cultures as varied as ancient Greece and Tibet and show how other people, in different times and places, regarded sex, gender and sexuality.
The chance to compare and contrast what ancient cultures thought about sex should offer fresh perspective on contemporary attitudes. In fact, the Forum seems to have chosen an auspicious moment to tackle this subject.
“Sex is always important,” Love said, “but I think it’s very timely now with legislative changes.”
Penn also happens to be a good setting. In recent years, Love pointed out, the Ivy League university has distinguished itself as a place where scholars and researchers are doing exciting, interdisciplinary work on gender and sexuality.
To learn more about the Forum’s public events, visit www.phf.upenn.edu/events/upcoming.