Oct. 1 | JurisTalk with Dr. Trish Salah

• In-person event
• 2104, Canal Building, Carleton University
• 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

• Contact
• Prof. Stacy Douglas, stacy.douglas@carleton.ca

“Phantasies of Identity and Trans Literary Aesthetics”

A JurisTalk seminar with Dr. Trish Salah (Queen’s University).

In a moment of unprecedented transgender visibility, dominant representations of transsexuals remains haunted by narratives of pathology and images of criminality and violence. The lived experience of transsexuals remain similarly constrained by the normative force of the clinic, and simultaneous pressures to enrol as rights-bearing subjects while contending with the criminalization of various aspects of our lives.

In this talk, Dr. Trish Salah contends that contemporary understandings of (trans) sexuation and of gender identity, are substantially enriched by turning our psychoanalytic imaginations to the creative writing of trans authors.  Such texts offer rich if ambivalent resources for representing the relationship of sexuality, psychoanalysis, the clinic and the law. What’s more, trans literary texts provide analytic and imaginative resources not only for depathologizing accounts of trans sexuation, but for disclosing the function of juridical and clinical accounts of desire and identity in forming national and racial normativities.

About the Speaker

Dr. Trish Salah works in the area of transnational studies in gender, sexuality, race and minority cultural production. Her current program of research, Towards a Trans Minor Literature, is an inquiry into the aesthetic and political projects of trans, transsexual, genderqueer and two-spirit writers. That program develops critical contexts for reading and interpreting trans literature through collective and open ended, trans centred dialogues, interviews and conferences such as the recent Writing Trans Genres: Emergent Literatures and Criticism and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres.

Her first book of poetry, Wanting in Arabic, investigates the inscription of diasporic trans and queer subjectivities and the social, rhetorical and desiring labour of minority community formation. Her second book, Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, employs the lyric as a lens to read transgender fantasies encoded in feminist, autobiographical, anthropological, sexological and psychoanalytic archives.

This event is co-sponsored by Sexuality Studies – Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Canada Research Chair in Rhetoric and Ethics.