Jack Halberstam
For my activist event I attended the talk by Judith/Jack Halberstam. This event took place at 6:30 on April 26th in room 125 of the Nolte Center for Continuing Education. This talk was sponsored by the Global Sexualities Research Collaborative of the Institute for Advanced Study and the Transgender Commission.
Going to this event I didn’t really know what to expect my first thought was that it would just be a boring lecture. At first it was a little slow with the other people introducing Jack. However once Jack took the podium it was very interesting. He discussed how the how movies and more specifically animated movies portray sexuality. She also explained what she meant by animation. Since her first example was The March of The Penguins would not typically be thought of as an animation.
The way The March of the Penguins becomes an animation is through the narration of the story. The Penguins go about doing whatever penguins do while the narrator suggest what the Penguins are doing. In this sense he is guiding you to think of the penguins actions in a certain way. He talks about the male penguins courting the females however without the narration the penguins may not have been seen as either male of female since the all look very similar. Jack talks a lot about penguins and even suggest that there are a lot of lesbian penguins. This is because even penguins have a hard time distinguishing between male and female penguins. There are also more females penguins so if there are not as many male penguins then the other penguins are female.
Penguins also have to work as a collaborative whole to keep the eggs from dying. Even the penguins who are not breeding that year still have to help keep the babies warm.
The other movie Jack talked about was The Seed of Chucky. In this clip the possessed doll Chucky and his wife have a child. Their child has been working in a freak show and now it is searching for and has found its parents. When the doll finds its parents it revives them. Once the parents are alive again they are shocked at how ugly their child is. They can’t seem to tell whether they have a son or a daughter. They make his drop its pants to find out. They still can’t agree on the sex since the doll is not parts. The mother wants a daughter and the father wants a son. Then they go on to kill people.
The talk was very interesting and brought up a lot of things I probably would never have thought about or considered. I never realized how our society shapes things to conform to such stereotyped roles of gender. People just assume that penguins and other animals behave in a heterosexual way similar to the majority of humans. However they don’t even consider that these may not be the norms for these animals.
At the end of the talk there was Jack answered questions from the audience. Some of them brought up some good points and one talked about another show she had seen about penguins where they were not gendered in the same way as they were in The March of the Penguins. I think this talk was really interesting and informative. It was easy to understand even though Jack did use some jargon that was tricky at times. When I went to the talk I didn’t really know what to expect. There were a lot of interesting people who were there a lot of them looked like older people and not like students. The talk ended up being really interesting.