Gender Identity is Just the Beginning:
Exploring the Creative Potential of Trans Perspectives and Experiences
Wednesday, April, 3 2024
8:30 – 10:00 PM (EST)
Description: Trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people tend to spend a lot of time in and out of therapy figuring out our gender identities, how to live them, and how to defend ourselves against external and internalized challenges to living as who we are. This essential work can be so consuming that we and therapists who accompany us on our journeys may not consider the creative potential of trans experiences and perspectives beyond and between binary gender categories and the assumptions, ways of life, and worldviews based upon them – potential I have explored in many of my eleven collections of poetry. This talk will use a selection of those poems to demonstrate different ways to express trans experience and use the perspectives it opens to reimagine not just my personal gender identity but what it means, and what it can mean, to be human.
Joy Ladin, Ph.D., has long worked at the tangled intersection of literature and transgender identity, publishing a memoir of gender transition, National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life; a groundbreaking book-length work of trans theology, Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist, The Soul of the Stranger; and ten books of poetry, including Lambda Literary finalist Transmigration and Impersonation and National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna. Two new books, Once Out of Nature, essays on how gender is changing, and her eleventh collection of poems, Family, are forthcoming from Persea in 2024. Her writing has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, and a Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research Fellowship, among other honors. Her writing is available at joyladin.wordpress.com
For inquiries regarding The LGBTQ Study Group please contact co-chairs:
Esin Egit: e.egit@wawhite.org
Willa France: poetadmiral@earthlink.net