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2018
Annual Graduates in Women's,
Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Conference at Penn State
Trans__Feminisms
February 24th, Oak Building
What does it mean for feminisms to be trans—? “Trans” within this context suggests a desire to transcend,transgress, transmit, transfer, and transform—a desire to move freely within, across, and beyond any givenspace and/or temporality. This desire to move and transgress, however, is largely limited in a world ofneoliberalism, where resources are privatized and borders are militarized. Specifically, the arrival of the Trumpera seems to diminish hopes for transformative justice, making it a tremendous challenge to imagine a livableworld for people with different cultures, ethnicities, religions, genders, sexualities, and other intersections.What does it mean to harbor a desire to transgress and transform when many possibilities are restricted?
We welcome proposals for individual papers, panels, and artworks that respond to the theme of trans____ feminisms. We invite you to think within and among the US, but we also encourage you to look beyond the US to Asia, Africa, Oceania, Europe, and the rest of the Americas. Trans____ feminisms will enable us to reimagine geographies, power relations, and human/nonhuman boundaries. Potential trans____ feminisms include but are not limited to the transcultural, transnational, transgender, transhistorical, transdisciplinary, transhemispheric, trans-Indigenous, transpacific, transatlantic, transhumanist, and trans-species.
CONFERENCE REGISTRATION IS FREE. CLICK HERE TO REGISTER.
Registration includes morning coffee/snacks, full lunch, and afternoon coffee/snacks on the 24th as well as dinner with the speakers on the 23th.
Pre-conference Talk on Campus
February 23th
Date: Friday, February 23th, 3:30-5:00
Location: 108 Chambers Building
3:30PM Talk by Dr. KJ Cerankowski (Oberlin College and Conservatory)
"What can Asexuality Teach Us About Trans______ Feminisms?
5:30PM Dinner with Dr. Cerankwoski and Dr. Malatino (RSVP)
Feb. 23
Pre-Conference Sp
Dr. KJ Cerankowski
KJ Cerankowski is an Assistant Professor of Comparative American Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies in Oberlin College and Conservatory.
KJ Cerankowski teaches in comparative American studies; and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Oberlin. Their research interests include asexuality, trauma studies, queer theory, and transgender studies. Cerankowski is the co-editor of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge 2014) and has published essays in the journals Feminist Studies, WSQ (Women's Studies Quarterly), and The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought. Professor Cerankowski teaches a range of courses on histories of sexuality, queer and trans cultural studies, and American identity and politics.
What Can Asexuality Teach Us About Trans______Feminisms?
Abstract
The predominant understanding of asexuality as an orientation describing people who do not experience sexual attraction lends itself to many debates about the nature of asexuality. What constitutes attraction vs. desire; is asexuality an identity, practice, or some combination of both; what is the temporality of asexuality—is it lifelong or can one move in and out of asexual practice and identity; what does asexuality have to do with aromanticism, or how do we imagine asexual intimacies; and what does asexuality have to do with trauma, or illness, or disability? In this talk, I urge us to move beyond this oversimplified definition of asexuality to think more expansively about asexualities that can open up theoretical and methodological approaches to thinking transhistorically and transnationally about sexuality and its apparent “absences,” to transform how we conceive of intimacies and relationality, and to transgress the boundaries of “health” and the attendant pathologizing of trans bodies, disabled bodies, bodies in pain, and traumatized bodies. In other words, I will explore how asexuality reveals additional workings of normative ideologies, and further pushes our intersectional analyses to understand how systems and institutions work on bodies in sexualized, racialized, and gendered ways. When we adopt asexuality as a critical lens, we also adopt a queer and feminist approach to analyzing technologies of sexuality across time, space, land, and borders to be transgressed and transformed.
Feb. 24
Conference Keynote Speaker
Dr. Hilary Malatino
Dr. Hilary Malatino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, affiliate faculty in the Department of Philosophy, and a research associate with the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University.Prior to moving to State College, they were the Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender, Race, and Science in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University Bloomington and Assistant Director and Lecturer in the Women’s Studies Program at East Tennessee State University. Dr. Malatino is also the current LGBTQ Caucus Chair for the Southeastern Women’s Studies Association.
Their research interests include queer theory, trans and intersex studies, science and technology studies, feminist bioethics, continental philosophy, and decolonial thought. Their first book, Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience, is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press as part of the series Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Conceptualizing Trans Studies
Abstract
This talk proposes two key concepts for use in thinking through the phenomenon of gender transition and the embodied, lived experiences of trans, intersex, gender non-conforming (T/I/GNC) subjects: becoming and protocol. Becoming, developed in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and productively taken up by feminist thinkers like Elizabeth Grosz (2011), Rosi Braidotti (2002) and, more recently, Jasbir Puar (2017), offers a materialist means of thinking embodiment that isn’t undergirded by the intertwined logics of sexual dimorphism and dyadic understandings of gendered authenticity, and can account for the assemblages of objects, relations, knowledges, and practices that compose forms of gendered (il)legibility as well as efforts to exceed or undo such assemblages. Protocol has been theorized by Michelle Murphy (2012) as “a procedural script that strategically assembles technologies, exchange, epistemologies, subjects, and so on,” a script “that establishes ‘how to’ do something, how to compose technologies, subjects, exchanges, affects, processes, and so on that make up a moment of health care practice” (2012, 25-26).
One of the challenges for scholars in trans studies, as well as trans rights advocates, has been how to develop sufficiently complex accounts of gendered embodiment while simultaneously contesting and reworking the protocols of medicalized transition, which tend to rely on conservative understandings of gendered subjectivity. Much work in trans studies shuttles between the pragmatics of institutional and administrative reform efforts that enable T/I/GNC subjects to access technologies of transition and primary health care – questions of protocol – and analysis of the radical reworking of embodiment, subjectivity, and relationality that T/I/GNC experiences engender – questions of becoming. This talk explores the potential of these concepts for assembling knowledges and practices in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of trans studies, and theorizes how to do so in a way that centers multiply marginalized subjects.
Feb. 24
Conference Schedule
Panels and Presenters
1. African/Decolonial Feminisms in Arts and Literatures
Moderator: Dr. Alicia Decker
Holly Hilgemeier, “Methodologies of Movement and the Work of Tushabe wa Tushabe”
Rana Ali Ghuloom, “Art, Imaginative Activism and Creative Decolonization of the Look: A Study of Wangechi Mutu’s Feminist Subversive Art”
Alexander Fyfe, “FEMRITE and the Value of Women’s Literature in Uganda”
2. The Aesthetics of Transgressing Gender and Sexuality
Moderator: Lars Stoltzfus-Brown
Camila Gutiérrez, “Manga Visuals in Latin America: Gender Diversity beyond the Panel”
Morgan Martino, “Bottom of the Bell”
Elizabeth Schoppelrei, “„O wär ich kein „Mann“!: Validation (?) of Poetic Personal Experience through the Medical Lens”
Irenae Aigbedion, “ ‘You Look Like a Boy!’: Type 4 Hair and Transgressing Femininity”
3. Transnational Feminisms; Or, Rewriting Feminist Histories
Moderator: Dr. Gabeba Baderoon
Mallory Huard, “Hawaiian Feminisms and Transnational Solidarities”
Hye Su KUK, "Transaction between Genuine Apology and Economic Exchange on the Issue of Wartime Sexual Slavery: South Korea-Japan Agreement on 'Comfort Women'"
4. Methodology, Pedagogy, and Praxis
Moderator: Dr. Cristin Hall
Sarah Bostic, “Transgressing the Boundaries of Higher Education: How Anti-Intellectualism is Learned through Classed Notions of Masculinity”
Rebecca Bertuccio, “Girls Go to College to Get More Knowledge: Indicators of Academic Motivation in First-Year Female Students”
Eden Kinkaid, “Queer geographies beyond gender and sexuality”
Colleen Unroe, “Transdisciplinary Principles of Feminist Methodologies”
Thank You to our GENEROUS SPONSORS!
Adult Education. African Studies.
Art History. Comparative Literature. English.
George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center.
Philosophy. Plant Sciences. Political Science.
Psychology. Labor & Employment Relations
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
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