I will chairing an Upcoming Session at College Art Association, in NYC Feb 15th!
"Trans Representations: Intersectional Gender Identities in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture" brings together work made by trans and gender-nonconforming artists and visual culture producers across a variety of media and approaches. Mainstream representations of trans people may shift over time, but they primarily demonstrate which trans constituencies are impermissible, narrowly present acceptable ways of being trans, and sideline the majority of actual trans experiences. In North American and European contexts, for instance, mainstream culture regularly forward trans representations that reflect dominant cultural ideals embracing cis-normative, heteropatriarchal, and white-supremacist ideologies. Because of this reductive trend in mainstream culture trans, and gender-nonconforming self-representations play a vital role in the negotiation of identity formations. Trans representations as a field confound how we have come to think of gender binary and fixed), representations (fixed stand-ins for the person imaged) and identity constituencies (essentialized and static). When trans and gender-nonconforming people self-represent new ways to conceptualize identity, gender and representation emerge. Drawing together a diversity of scholarly and artistic methods to explore in depth nuanced practices interrogating trans and gender-nonconforming experiences this panel considers the complexity of trans and gender-nonconforming representation today. This panel reveals that there are a plethora of ways of being trans and gender-nonconforming, that gender is a malleable matrix, intersecting with racialization, class and various other identity categories. Bringing together a diversity of representations and approaches, this panel seeks to engage the shared commonalities and various specificities of trans and gender-nonconforming self-images and politics across media geography, gender, class, and racialization.