Thinking Gender
32nd Annual Graduate Student Research Conference
“Transgender Studies at the Intersections”
April 6-8, 2022
Free, Public Keynote Address on Wednesday, April 6, 2022
REGISTER FOR KEYNOTE
Thinking Gender 2022 will focus on work in transgender studies that engages substantively with race, Indigeneity, Blackness, settler colonialism, and/or empire.
Abstract submissions are now closed.
For Thinking Gender 2022, graduate student presentations will be held in private workshops on April 6-8. Only the April 6 keynote panel will be open to the public.
KEYNOTE PANEL
Join the UCLA Center for the Study of Women on Wednesday, April 6, 2022 for a special Thinking Gender 2022 webinar featuring a keynote address by Jules Gill-Peterson and a conversation with Mel Y. Chen.
This webinar will be livestreamed, and a recording will be posted on our YouTube channel. Closed captioning is available.
DATE: Wednesday, April 6, 2022
TIME: 12:00 PM-1:30 PM (PST)
LOCATION: Zoom Webinar (registration required)
Keynote Speaker
JULES GILL-PETERSON
“Street Queens and the Promise of Intersectional Trans Studies”
Trans studies recruits exemplary subjects to guarantee the promises of its political desires. This talk turns to the street queen, a fixture of mid twentieth century American queer and trans cities, to ask critical questions of the propensity to idealize subjects marginalized by race and gender. Who is the Black and brown street queen, what kind of life did she lead, and what does she know outside of the projection of contemporary desires for resilience and resistance onto her?
Jules Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (Minnesota, 2018), winner of a Lambda Literary Award and the Children’s Literature Association book prize. Jules also serves as General Co-Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.
Discussant
MEL Y. CHEN
Mel Y. Chen is an associate professor of gender & women’s studies and Director for the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at UC Berkeley. Since Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2012), their second book concerns intoxication’s involvement in archival histories of the interanimation of time, race, and disability. Chen coedits a Duke book series entitled “Anima” and is part of a queer/trans of color arts collective in the San Francisco Bay Area.
WORKSHOP
Tooth and Nail: A Trans Critique of the University
A workshop with Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson in conversation with members of Just Research? Trans Futures in Health and Scientific Knowledge. This virtual event is part of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women’s annual graduate student research conference Thinking Gender 2022: “Transgender Studies at the Intersections.”
DATE: Friday, April 8, 2022
TIME: 12:00 PM-1:30 PM (PST)
LOCATION: Zoom (registration required)
Trans inclusion has been framed as the latest chapter of ongoing struggle to make the university a more representative and equitable institution. But the university is also where many of the most degrading and devastating negations and limitations on trans people’s lives have been invented, credentialed, and funded. How can trans studies—and trans people in academia—confront that painful reality and history in their effects on us? What does it look like to be trans and do trans work from a critical perspective on the university as an institution?
How can thinking through UCLA’s history, in particular, inform how we imagine a more ethical and justice-centered vision for the public university’s relationship to transgender people? Join this conversation with Thinking Gender 2022 keynote speaker, Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), the first book to shatter the widespread myth that transgender children are a brand-new generation in the twenty-first century. The conversation will include a roundtable discussion with members of a statewide community-university initiative, Just Research? Trans Futures in Health and Scientific Knowledge, including Dr. Christoph Hanssmann (San Francisco State University), and UCLA PhD students Sid Jordan and Vanessa Warri.
Recommended advance reading:
Adair, C., C. Awkward-Rich, and A. Marvin. “Before Trans Studies.” Transgender Studies Quarterly, 7, no.3 (2020), 306–320.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article/7/3/306/166952/Before-Trans-Studies