Sterile Bodies: Re-signifying Sexuality through Trans and Disabled Erotic Performance
Please join us for the final Disability Studies brown bag seminar of Winter quarter!
Kai Kohlsdorf, PhD student in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies will give a presentation entitled "Sterile Bodies: Re-signifying Sexuality through Trans and Disabled Erotic Performance."
When: Fri, March 6, 2015, 12:00-1:00pm
Where: D Center (MGH 024), University of Washington
Accessibility information:
We will have ASL interpretation and CART captioning for this event.
Please be fragrance free! For the health and safety of community members with chemical sensitivity, please abstain from using scented cosmetics, lotions, or hair products and please do not wear clothes that have recently been smoked in. For more info: http://eastbaymeditation.org/accessibility/PDF/How-to-Be-Fragrance-Free-.pdf
To request disability accommodation, contact the Disability Services Office at: 206.543.6450 (voice), 206.543.6452 (TTY), 206.685.7264 (fax), or email at dso@uw.edu.
Presentation abstract:
I investigate how trans lived experiences hold the weight of medicalization’s forced asexualization narratives of impossible sexual bodies. I argue forced asexualization operates as an enacted disability, on “wrong” bodies, and utilize work within crip theory and disability studies to argue against the easy response that trans people are simply not disabled. I answer the question of how the impossible sexual bodies of trans people and people with disabilities come together through forced asexualization. In utilizing this connection, we open a possibility to shift away from medicalization instead of away from disability. I investigate the realities of disabled sexual practices, including trans sexual practices, that demedicalize sexuality through their embodiments and work to produce new forms of re-signifying sexuality. I argue these sexual practices and their ensuing re-signification work together to produce new forms of collectivity. I take as my object of study trans-centric pornographies created intentionally for trans communities, produced by trans identified individuals as well as performance art by people with disabilities created for people with disabilities, specifically work from T-Wood Pictures, Handbasket Productions, and Sins Invalid. The practices and positionalities enacted by the performers and producers of these performances uncouple sexuality from broken identities as circumscribed by medicalization and open up possibilities to understand sexuality and sexual embodiments of disabled experiences, including trans experiences, as forms of erotic care. This talk is part of the broader dissertation that seeks to thread together queer theory, trans studies, crip theory, and disability studies in investigating new significations of sexuality.
Please also note: Kai will be teaching a new DIS ST 430 class in Spring 2015: Queering Disability Studies, on Tues/Th 11:30-1:20.
http://depts.washington.edu/disstud/kohlsdorf-brownbag_Mar6-2015