Film Studies Assistant Professor Laura Horak will present a paper at Trans*Studies: An International Transdisciplinary Conference on Gender, Embodiment, and Sexuality, hosted in Tucson at the University of Arizona.
Horak’s paper, “Investigating the History of Trans-Made Film,” is part of the panel “Trans-Produced, Then and Now: The Practices and Politics of Media/Historiography.”
The panel brings together scholars from the United States, Europe, and Canada. The presenters challenge what is presumed to be already inside the historical and aesthetic archives of transgender representation through attention to how trans* is practiced and produced across and within temporal fields. Close attention is given to how the construction of history mediates our access to transgender cultural producers, and how media themselves can be theorized to enact trans* practices against normative conceptualizations of past and future. In short, each panelist asks, “Who represents whom, how and when?”
Horak’s presentation will outline the history of trans and gender variant people making films and videos as it is currently known, ranging from feature films to home movies, experimental films, documentaries, and shorts, including a case study of trans-made films at San Francisco’s Frameline Festival in the 1980s and TrannyFest in the 1990s.
