| 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.
This seven-day lab, consisting of workshops, a lecture series, an artistic exhibition and a party is meant to initiate an exchange of different people coming from various fields of knowledge production theorizing and organizing trans politics and different positionings within power relations.
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 interdependency of multiple discriminations and violence play a central role for all topics, events and approaches in this lab.
The whole event is meant to engage in new forms of communication, to connect different activists, organizations and institutions which want to work against discrimination, to exchange academic, political and artistic perspectives, and by that hope to enhance and deepen critical knowledge productions and politics about trans*_.
Lectures
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
Trans-Sexwork and police repression in Istanbul
Turkey has a very high rate of trans murders (25 have been reported since 2008). Although homo/transsexuality is not technically criminalized by law, systematic violence against LGBT people is widespread. Police officials get extra credit when they fine trans ipeople; the law/criminal justice system doesn’t work for but against trans people by making them targets instead of taking the violence and murders of trans people seriously. Nevertheless, LGBT movement in Turkey gains power and visibility against oppression each year. As police and state repression increases in tandem with conservative neo-liberal goverment, the trans movement also grows and gets stronger.
This presentation interconnects forms of violence against trans people, focusing on the situation of trans-sexworkers in İstanbul and the ways they organize against current and ongoing police repression.
Şevval Kılıç is an activist of İstanbul LGBT Association and one of the main organizers of İstanbul Trans Pride.
Elana Dykewomon – Open Lecture
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
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)
http://transformingpolitics.blogsport.de
