View source for Postposttranssexual: Transgender Studies and Feminism: April 7-10, 2011

Postposttranssexual: Transgender Studies and Feminism, April 7-10, 2011, Indiana University-Bloomington


This multi-day event focuses on the past, present, and future of transgender
studies by celebrating the 20thanniversary of the influential essay that
arguably launched the field: Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back: A
‘Posttranssexual’ Manifesto,” first published in 1991. It will serve as an
opportunity to assess and discuss the relationship between transgender studies,
women’s/gender/feminist studies, and LGBT/Queer studies, and to showcase ways in
which transgender studies has reframed, intervened in, and extended lines of
inquiry in these fields.


Like the title of Stone’s essay, which gestured simultaneously in the directions
of history and futurity, the conference will be both retrospective and
prospective. Stone looked back to the heyday of cultural feminism in the 1970s
and 80s, and directly challenged the feminist disparagement of trans people
exemplified in Janice Raymond’sTranssexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male.
Consequently, some work presented at the conference will focus on the
still-contentious topics which that version of second-wave feminism lumped
together with transgender issues: pornography, prostitution or sex trafficking,
BDSM sexuality, and the sexualization of children. It will suggest ways in which
transgender studies, over the past two decades, has offered the prospect of new
feminist perspectives on these issues.


Stone’s essay, in explicitly staking a “post-” position, also opened the
question of what is to come next. To a significant degree, the questions pursed
under the rubric of “transgender studies” have been motivated by the
rearticulations of (post)identity politics that Stone initially proposed; she
productively disrupted the containment of critical and broadly relevant issues
of embodiment, identity, and technology within the stigmatized, marginalized,
minoritized, and highly policed medico-juridical category of transsexuality.
Consequently, some work at the conference will explore the future directions in
which trans communities, trans social justice struggles, and transgender studies
as a field of academic inquiry, might now move. Two decades after Stone’s
influential intervention, we are in a position to ask what a post-postranssexual
framework might look like.


The conference will be held in the new, state-of-the-art IU Cinema and other
locations on campus. It will include film screenings and cultural events,
conversations between founding figures of transgender studies, and plenary panel
discussions with leading scholars in the field. We also anticipate limited
opportunities for some attendees to deliver short papers.  Confirmed presenters
currently include Sandy Stone, Kate Bornstein, and Viennese filmmaker Hans
Scheirl. Further details, including additional confirmed speakers, will be
forthcoming in the very near future.


To submit an abstract for consideration, or for more information, please contact
conference organizer Susan Stryker, Associate Professor of Gender Studies,
Indiana University: stryksus@indiana.edu.


(Postposttranssexual is funded in part by Indiana University Gender Studies,
Indiana University College Arts and Humanities Institute, and the Indiana
University Cinema. Additional cosponsors are welcome).


Susan Stryker, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Gender Studies Department
Indiana University
Memorial Hall East 130
1021 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47405 USA


Email: stryksus@indiana.edu
Office: Memorial Hall West Mezzanine 11
Office Phone: (812) 856-5647
Department Phone: (812) 855-0101
Fax: (812) 855-4869
Facebook  http://www.facebook.com/susan.stryker