Transgender / Arts: A Roundtable on the Future of Transgender Cultural Production

To coincide with a special issue of the scholarly journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on transgender art, film, literature, new media, and performance, this roundtable features practitioners and scholars discussing the current state and future prospects for transgender cultural production. This open forum will explore the thriving field of transgender arts and their recent histories. It includes the editors of the special issue forthcoming in 2014—Julian Carter, David Getsy, and Trish Salah—with new media artist Micha Cárdenas and filmmaker Jules Rosskam. Panelists: Micha Cárdenas is a performance and new media artist who works at the intersection of movement, technology, and politics. They are a member of the art collective Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, and they recently co-authored Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012). Cárdenas is currently a Provost Fellow in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California. Julian Carter is a critical historian and trans* theorist whose work focuses on the embodied aspects of normative social relationality. He is Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. His first book was The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1890-1940 (2007), and he is currently writing a book on contemporary dance performance. David Getsy is the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His books examine the history of the sculptural body since the nineteenth century, and his study of gender assignments in American sculpture of the 1960s is forthcoming in 2014 from Yale University Press. Jules Rosskam is an artist, educator, and activist committed to creating work that pushes the boundaries of genre and that sheds light on lesser known aspects of queer and trans* people's lives. His films include transparent (2005), against a trans narrative (2009), and the newly-released Thick Relations (2013). He is currently an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn and Visiting Assistant Professor of Film and Video at Hampshire College. Trish Salah is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg. Her first book of poetry, Wanting in Arabic, was published in 2002, and in 2014 her new book, Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, will be released.