*This event has been postponed
Professor Laura Horak (Carleton University) is the author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressing Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 (Rutgers UP, 2016) and a co-editor of Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana UP, 2014) and Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019). She is also the director of the Transgender Media Lab and the Transgender Media Portal.
On Monday, November 14, 10-11:30am, Prof. Horak will give a talk titled “Representing Ourselves into Existence: Tracing the History of Trans Filmmaking in the United States and Canada,” in 142 Wilson Hall. She describes the talk as a “whirlwind tour of the 100-year history of trans filmmaking” that “responds to two common misconceptions: 1) That trans people in the media are a new phenomenon that dates back to the ‘tipping point’ declared by Time magazine in 2014 or maybe to the 2000s; and 2) That trans people’s relationship to media is solely as spectacularized representations, that is, as people in front of—not behind—the camera. Neither of these assumptions are true.” This event is sponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures, the Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures, the IHGC Lab on Global Histories and Transgender Studies in the Humanities, and the Department of Art.
