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| View News Home UC Regents' Lecturer Susan Stryker Presents Lecture and Colloquia January 22, 2009  Dr. Susan Stryker has won international recognition as a scholar and filmmaker whose historical research, political activism, and theoretical insights have helped shape the emerging field of transgender studies. As part of a three-week residency at UCSC as Regents Lecturer, Dr. Stryker presented a Regents Lecture and will present two colloquia. The public lecture, entitled "Christine in the Cutting Room: The Cinematics of Christine Jorgensen's Transsexual Embodiment" took place on Wednesday, January 21, at 5:00pm in the Colleges 9/10 Multipurpose Room. In her lecture, Dr. Stryker discussed a most interesting figure: most people who have heard of Christine Jorgensen know her as a transsexual celebrity from the 1950s; fewer are aware that she was also a photographer, filmmaker, and editor. This talk revolved around a remark Jorgensen made to journalist Mike Wallace--that she "used to work on one side of the camera because she didn't know how to appear on the other side"--to explore her movement from one kind of "cutting room" to another. In doing so, Dr. Stryker situates the emergence of transsexuality at the intersection of two distinct "technologies of gender," one having to do with somatic transformation, and the other with the production and circulation of visual images. This lecture is available for download as a MPEG4 Video file here. It will be available shortly on UCSC's iTunes University channel. Check back for updates. The colloquia provided an opportunity for faculty and graduate students to engage with her book-in-progress—Sex Change City: The Somatechnics of Urban Trans/Formation in San Francisco, which uses the history of transgender practices, subjectivities, and communities in the San Francisco Bay Area to theorize the mutually constituitive relationships between embodiment and environment, and to begin thinking of embodiment itself as a “built space.” “Bohemia Victrix: Cross-Dressing and the Wednesday, January 28, 2009 This colloquium explored theatrical cross-dressing among members of the elite, all-male Bohemian Club in San Francisco around the turn of the last century, to suggest the interrelatedness of new practices of embodied subjectivity based on sexology, scientific racism, and eugenics; new organizations of urban space; and the expansion of the U.S. Pacific empire. Seminar Reading: “The War Machine of Transgender Liberation, 1966-1991” Wednesday, February 4, 2009 This colloquium, which included a screening and discussion of Stryker’s film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, relates the emergence of a transsexual politics to social conditions in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood; it explores the relationship between space and event, and imagines identity as a movement that attempts to trace a creative line of flight from the apparatus of the state. Seminar Reading:
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