4/26 Scholarly/Activist Talk: Judith/Jack Halberstam
6:30 to 8pm
FREE!
Room 125
Nolte Center for Continuing Education
Minneapolis Campus
Halberstam examines the narrative and visual transbiological leaps that we have made in our understandings of terms like heterosexuality and homosexuality, male and female, and individual and community in an age of artificial insemination, transsexuality, and cloning. Halberstam proposes that popular culture has already imagined multiple alternatives to male and female, masculine and feminine, family and individuality, and that contemporary popular culture, specifically horror film and animation, can provide rich archives for an alternative politics of embodiment, reproduction, and non-reproduction. It is important to imagine such alternatives if only because the "transbiological" is all too often absorbed into new formulations of the same old notions of kinship, relationality and love. In other words, while it is true that reproduction and kinship relations become more and more obviously artificial, the concept of the "human" tends to absorb the critique that inevitably follows of the natural and it does so because we reinvest so vigorously and so frequently in the scaffolding that props up our flailing humanity. Judith/Jack Halberstam is Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California.
This talk is sponsored by the Global Sexualities Research Collaborative of the Institute for Advanced Study and the Transgender Commission
Contact:
Institute for Advanced Study, 612-626-5054
ias@umn.edu
