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Description: |
Trans studies is an interdisciplinary field that addresses questions of gender, sexuality, and embodiment through the lens of transgender experiences. How does this field change both the ways we look at objects and their forms, and how we consider subjectivity —the ways in which we are overdetermined by not only our individual and interpersonal experiences, but the many frameworks (race, class, etc.) that tell us who we are? In other words, how do we understand a field that is about “who” we are but also about change and transition to fundamentally alter the concept of subjectivity? Further: how can we understand the process of transition as a question inside not only subjectivity, but also form? What terms—from “becoming” to “the body,” from “capacity” to “visibility”—lend trans aesthetics a specific usefulness to thinking about form, and make it an urgent set of methods and methodological challenges for the present? Objects from film and television to contemporary art and media will be the main focus, along with texts by Susan Stryker, Eliza Steinbock, Marquis Bey, Kay Gabriel, Paul Preciado and others; a background or some prior readings in queer theory or queer studies is recommended. |