Creative Counterpoints 2019 | Trans*: Representing the Transgender Body on Screen
Program - Full program PDF, Trans*: Representing the Transgender Body on Screen
MassArt Tower Auditorium
6:30-8:30pm
This year’s program features a public talk and conversation with Dr. Jack Halberstam, Professor of English and Gender Studies at Columbia University, and author of Trans*A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (2018)
In this talk, Dr. Halberstam examined the new politics of trans* and opposed it to the recent inclusion of transgender bodies: “The category of trans* takes the prefix for transitivity and couples it with the asterisk that indicates a wildcard in internet searches; it is a diacritical mark that poses a question to its prefix and stands in for what exceeds the politics of naming”.
The talk was in three parts and is drawn from my book Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Guide to Gender Variance. In the first part of the talk, Dr. Halberstam addressed where we have been in terms of the history of cinematic representations of gender variant bodies; in the second they addressed the histories of representation drawn from photography archives; and finally, the talk turned to contemporary popular film and TV to see how we might think differently about gender, trans* politics, and popular and unpopular culture. Dr. Halberstam’s talk was followed by a panel of these MassArt students: Zia Amador, Alison Beaudette, and Grant Hamilton, who engaged Dr. Halberstam in a thought-provoking and spirited discussion.
