Come hear about new research at the intersections of trans studies and cinema studies! Light refreshments will be provided.

Dan Vena, Bodies Without A Face: Reading Transsexuality into Medical Horror Cinema
Inspired by Susan Stryker’s provocative reclamation of the Frankenstein Monster for transsexual subjects, this lecture meditates on the visual and discursive connections between the monstrous bodies of medical horror cinema and trans identities. Reading the surgically-modified bodies that serve as the central spectacle of medical horror as representational short-hand for the fears associated with transsexuality and alternatively-sexed morphologies, this lecture considers how genre cinema offers a wealth of important images for trans scholars despite the lack of actual trans-identified characters. Following in Stryker’s footsteps, this lecture names the monsters of medical horror cinema as markedly trans and similarly seeks to reclaim these images as powerfully frightening.

Dan Vena is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Carleton University, and holds a doctorate in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University, where he teaches in the Film & Media Department. He locates his academic interests within the spheres of visual and popular cultures, merging together trans, queer, and feminist approaches to an array of topics including: monsters and horror cinema; Classical Hollywood Cinema; comic book superheroes; and histories of medicine.

Cáel Keegan, Sensing Transgender: The Matrix
In this talk, Cáel M. Keegan explores the The Matrix (1999) as the world’s most influential example of trans-authored media—a millennial text that narrates the historical emergence of transgender identification while simultaneously rearranging the public sensorium through its groundbreaking digital effects. The Matrix, Keegan argues, instructs popular audiences in how to “sense transgender”: How to sense for transgender identity, but also (and more importantly) how to sense as transgender through its sensorial transitions across bodies and cinematic realities.

Cáel Keegan is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Liberal Studies at Grand Valley State University. He has been interviewed on LGBTQ art and cinema by NPR, The Advocate, NBC, Vice, and Slashfilm. Keegan also appears in the VICE Guide to Film episode “New Trans Cinema.” His writing has appeared in Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, Spectator, MedieKultur, and the Journal of Homosexuality, and he is the author of Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender (University of Illinois Press, 2018).

SP 412 is a barrier-free room accessed by an elevator. Service animals are welcome. Please contact laura.horak@carleton.ca by January 28 should you require ASL interpretation services or any other accommodation for this event.