trans_forming politics

Lab: Politicizing Trans/Trans_forming Politics

Time: May 23 – May 29, 2012
Location: Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
All information at: http://transformingpolitics.blogsport.de/

Applications should be sent to transformingpolitics@googlemail.com

MAXIMUM NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS for afternoon workshops: 15-20

ORGANIZED BY

Lann Hornscheidt, Tamás Jules Fuetty, Ja’n Sammla, Rüzgår Gökçe Buşki and Stephanie Urgast.
Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
in collaboration with InterGender (Swedish-International Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies), Linköping University, Sweden.

CONCEPT

This seven-day lab, consisting of workshops, a lecture series, an artistic exhibition and a party is meant to initiate and develop an intensive exchange of different people coming from various fields of knowledge production theorizing and organizing trans politics and different positionings within power relations. Leading questions are: how can trans be politicized and how can politics be trans_formed in favor of radical social change? It is basic to the lab’s understanding that the interdependency of multiple discriminations and violence play a central role for all topics, events and approaches in this lab.
It is the aim to start discussions and to come to know different perspectives of politics and organizing which are connected to different daily living realities, necessities and struggles embedded in various social positionings of trans and politics of locations. The whole event is meant to engage in new forms of communication, exchange academic, political and artistic perspectives, and by that hope to enhance and deepen critical knowledge productions and politics about trans. In addition to that, the workshops are meant to enhance creative ways to connect different activists, organizations and institutions which want to work against discrimination.
The lab will focus intersectional approaches of current issues of trans (politics) from different perspectives and areas of knowledge productions. There will be four connected blocks of open presentations and discussions in the mornings (10-12 am) and three smaller intensive workshops for 15 to 20 people each in the afternoons (2-5 pm) which highlight various aspects of marginalized knowledge productions on trans theorizing and activism. In this regard there will also be an informational event on trans- sex work and organizing against current and ongoing police violence in Istanbul.
As a further part of the lab, there will be a multimedia art exhibition with different artistic contributions to the production and perception of of dyke_trans politics and positionings as well as a party with performances. By bringing together different forms of negotiating (dyke_)trans, different forms of knowledge productions are contextualized, reflected and challenged in an interactive ongoing process. The exhibition is meant to open up spaces for meeting different dyke_trans images and perceptions and forms of verbalizations and to put them into interactions with each other and with the people engaging with the exhibition. It is an important starting point for the exhibition to offer different feminist perspectives on a questioning of two-gender-norms and, as a further consequence on this, a questioning of cis-gender-, reprogender- and heterogender-norms and how they are interconnected with each other on different levels of production and perception.
The exhibition will take place at Galerie Funke, Willibald-Alexis-Str. 13/14, 10965 Berlin, from May 23 to May 29.

The lectures and discussions in the mornings are open to all people interested. The workshops in the afternoons have a limited number of participants (15-20). There are a limited number of travel scholarships for international graduates.

PROGRAMME

Wednesday, 23 May 2012: Opening of the exhibition:

to dyke trans | dis_visualizing re_locating de_silencing |

Participating Artists:

Zanele Muholi, Claude Cahun, Elisha Lim, Coco Riot, Goodyn Green, Anja Weber (requested), Layla Zami, Lann Hornscheidt

Where: Galerie Funke, Willibald-Alexis-Str. 13/14, 10965 Berlin

Thursday, 24 May 2012
10-12 AM Open lecture and discussion
Trystan Cotten: Middle Passages: Race, Space, and Migration in the African Diaspora

In this lecture Trystan Cotten will present preliminary findings from his ethnographic study of trans-identified men in the African Diaspora and engage in intersections of gender (particularly masculinity), race, space, nationalism, movement, and migration. The attempt is to theorize transsectionalities and transgender migrations by using ethnographic data of trans-identified men in the African diaspora whose gender transitions entail a number of different (simultaneous) migrations (gender, geographical, racial, and ethnic) and border-crossings.
Part one of this paper discusses the multiple layers of this shifting reality of transmen in the African Diaspora in the United States. The transitional trajectories of Black and brown bodies transitioning from female to male are confronted with a radically different social, economic, and political reality in the United States than most white trans masculinities, as Black masculinities been stereotyped as hypersexual, violent, and incorrigible menaces to society.

Trystan Cotten is Associate Professor of Gender and Ethnic Studies at California State University, Stanislaus where he teaches and conducts research on gender, sexuality, race, and global political economy. He has published several books in Gender and Ethnic Studies with his most recent being Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition (Routledge, 2011). He is founder and CEO of Transgress Press, a new social entrepreneurial model of publishing that promotes transgressive thinking. His next collection is Hung Jury: Testimonies of Genital Surgery by Transsexual Men (Forthcoming: Transgress Press, June 2012)

Where? Humboldt-University Berlin; Auditorium, Jacob-und-Wilhelm- Grimm-Zentrum, Geschwister-Scholl-Str. 1/3, 10117 Berlin

1-4 PM Workshop
Trystan Cotten: Transgender Migrations

The second part will focus on findings of transition journeys involving an intersection of multiple movements across gender, geographical (regional), racial, and ethnic borders—what Cotton calls transgender migrations. Gender technologies (like hormones, surgery, hair replacement, etc.) and geographical relocation have converged to change how some racial and ethnic identities are (mis)read and consequently, how they experience and navigate race relations in the United States. Some subjects are not only viewed and treated as Black men, but, depending on the context, they are also engaged as Latino, Chicano, and Muslim. This leads to questions how to navigate in new social terrains, ideologies or mythologies, and scripts of racialized masculinities within power relations.
The workshop is open to 15-20 people. If you want to participate in the workshop you have to write a short motivation letter to transformingpolitics@googlemail.com, subject line: “workshop cotten”.

Where? Lesbenberatung Berlin e.V., Kulmer Str. 20a, 10783 Berlin

Friday, 25 May 2012
10-12 AM Open lecture and discussion
Elana Dykewomon: Making a Way Where No Words for the Way Exist

The lecture will investigate critical writing practices with a feminist focus on dyke_transgressive locations and relationships. It engages the possibilities/problems of language disruption in sexist/racist society and within dyke communities. How can linguistic practices be used, appropriated, re_assigned, re_signified and how can utopian linguistic spaces be created? Elana Dykewomon will examine how theoretical positions work out in practical application and the problems of how current states of destabilization (economic, political, emotional) create difficult climates for radical re_invention.

Elana Dykewomon has been a cultural worker and social justice activist for over forty years. She has published numerous critical essays and seven creative books foregrounding lesbian life, including the award winning Beyond the Pale (Sarahs Töchter). Elana Dykewomon was an editor of the international lesbian journal of arts & politics, Sinister Wisdom, for seven years and now offers private writing classes and editing through www.dykewomon.org.

Where? Humboldt-University Berlin; Auditorium, Jacob-und-Wilhelm- Grimm-Zentrum, Geschwister-Scholl-Str. 1/3, 10117 Berlin

2-5 PM Workshop
Elana Dykewomon: Dyke_transgressive Locations and Linguistic Practices

The workshop will focus critical writing practices with a feminist focus on dyke_transgressive locations and is based on the lecture in the morning. Participants will be asked to generate creative pieces for discussion from prompts, in
order to investigate how we might open up new linguistic geographies. A willingness to engage in a supportive process of friction is essential.

ATTENTION: Unfortunately this location is not wheelchair accessible.

The workshop is open to 15-20 people. If you want to participate in the workshop you have to write a short motivation letter to transformingpolitics@googlemail.com, subject line: “workshop dykewomon”.

Where? GLADT e.V., Kluckstr. 11, 10785 Berlin

Saturday, 26 May 2012
10-12 AM Open lecture and discussion
Dean Spade: Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law

Groups facing violence and marginalization are often encouraged to seek redress through law. Critical legal scholarship and social movements have questioned this strategy, exposing the limitations and pitfalls of rights frameworks. How should trans politics engage with this dilemma? How are legal reform strategies, like hate crime laws and anti-discrimination laws, being used by trans activists? What other approaches to law reforms are possible for trans politics? How can our resistance address the significant violence that trans people face in legal systems such as policing, prisons, and immigration enforcement? This presentation will address these questions and offer ideas and models for critical engagement with law reform as a part of trans resistance, especially focusing on how commitments to racial and economic justice can inform such engagement.

Dean Spade is an Assistant Professor at Seattle University School of Law and teaches Administrative Law, Poverty Law, Law and Social Movements and Critical Perspectives on Transgender Law. In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. While working at SRLP, Dean also taught classes focusing on sexual orientation, gender identity and law at Columbia and Harvard Law Schools. www.deanspade.net

Where? Humboldt-University Berlin; Auditorium, Jacob-und-Wilhelm- Grimm-Zentrum, Geschwister-Scholl-Str. 1/3, 10117 Berlin

2-5 PM Workshop
Dean Spade: Intersectional Approaches to Trans Scholarship and Resistance

Why is an intersectional approach to trans politics necessary? What specific harms do trans people of color, trans people with disabilities, trans migrants and other criminalized trans people face in contemporary legal systems? What legal reform strategies are trans resistance movements centered in racial and economic justice challenging? Why? Which strategies are they developing? Why? What obstacles are confronting us as we develop this work? This workshop will address these questions, looking at specific strategies being used by activists aimed at helping highly vulnerable trans people survive current conditions, dismantling institutions of state violence, and building alternative methods for meeting our needs. We will also talk about how these strategies inform our scholarship and what intersectional questions and methods in trans studies require our attention.

Where? Lesbenberatung Berlin e.V., Kulmer Str. 20a, 10783 Berlin

Sunday, 27 May 2012
4-7 PM Presentation and Discussion: Trans-Sexwork and police repression in Istanbul by Şevval Kılıç

On interconnected forms of violence against trans people regarding the situation of trans-sexworkers in Istanbul and their organizing against current and ongoing police repression.
Şevval Kılıç is an activist of Istanbul LGBT Associations and Kadın Kapısı, additionally she is one of the main organizers of the Trans Pride in Istanbul.

There is no previous registration required.

Where? Südblock; Admiralstr. 1-2, 10999 Berlin, Kottbusser Tor

9 PM soli party for Istanbul LGBT Association and the 3rd Trans Pride with spoken word performances. dj-sets by DJ AmIrani and DJ Ipek

Where? Südblock; Admiralstr. 1-2, 10999 Berlin, Kottbusser Tor

INFO ON ADMISSION AND GRANTS:

The afternoon workshops have a limited number of participants (15-20). There are a limited number of travel scholarships for international doctoral students.