Offered in conjunction with a lecture and seminar series this semester hosted by the IHGC workgroup on Global Histories and Transgender Studies in the Humanities, Prof. Horak describes this talk as a “whirlwind tour of the 100-year history of trans filmmaking” that “responds to two common misconceptions: 1) That trans people in the media are a new phenomenon that dates back to the ‘tipping point’ declared by Time magazine in 2014 or maybe to the 2000s; and 2) That trans people’s relationship to media is solely as spectacularized representations, that is, as people in front of—not behind—the camera. Neither of these assumptions are true.”

Prof. Laura Horak is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University and director of the Transgender Media Lab and Transgender Media Portal. She is the author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressing Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 (Rutgers UP, 2016) and a co-editor of Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana UP, 2014), Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019), a special issue of Somatechnics on trans/cinematic/bodies, and a special section of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies on “Transing Cinema and Media Studies.” The 4-disc DVD set she co-produced, Cinema’s First Nasty Women, is available for pre-order from Kino Lorber.

This event is sponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures, the Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures, the IHGC workgroup on Global Histories and Transgender Studies in the Humanities, the Department of Art, and the Department of Drama. It is also part of lecture and seminar series hosted by

Register in advance for the webinar here.