"Global Female Masculinities"

Lecture by Judith Halberstam
(Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Gender Studies
University of Southern California, College of Letters, Arts & Sciences)

Chair: Akiko Shimizu (University of Tokyo)

"This talk is divided into three sections. In the first, I survey the work of Judith Butler, and in particular her theories of transgender identification, to consider the parochial nature of discussions of gender variance in North America and in Europe. My aim in this first section is to show how contradictory the politics of performativity can be and how much confusion there is in a US/European context in relation to thinking about gender stability and gender flexibility and their relations to gender normativity. Having localized a set of debates about gender variance in a US/European context, I turn to a global context and trace the way that these very local debates about gender variance become stabilized and universalized when they form the basis for studies of gender variance elsewhere. In the final section, I survey some recent films that take the diversity of global transgenderism seriously." - J.H.

Language: English; Admission Free; No Registration Required