Ottawa Writers Festival – Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender with Cáel M. Keegan

Ottawa Writers Festival – Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender with Cáel M. Keegan

Categories: Lectures and Seminars, Panel Discussions | Intended for

Saturday, February 09, 2019

7:30 PM - 9:30 PM | Add to calendar

Location Details

The Alan and Roula Rossy Pavilion National Art Centre 1 Elgin St. Ottawa, ON

Contact Information

Laura Horak, 6135204010, laura.horak@carleton.ca

Registration

No registration required.

Cost

Free

About this Event

Host Organization: School for Studies in Art and Culture - Film Studies
More Information: Please click here for additional details.

Join Carleton professor Aubrey Anable for a conversation with Cáel M. Keegan, author of Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender.

Lana and Lilly Wachowski have redefined the technically and topically possible while joyfully defying audience expectations. Visionary films like The Matrix trilogy and Cloud Atlas have made them the world’s most influential transgender media producers, and their coming out retroactively put trans* aesthetics at the very center of popular American culture.

Cáel M. Keegan views the Wachowski’s films as an approach to trans* experience that maps a transgender journey and the promise we might learn “to sense beyond the limits of the given world.” Keegan reveals how the filmmakers take up the relationship between identity and coding (be it computers or genes), inheritance and belonging, and how transgender becoming connects to a utopian vision of a post-racial order. Along the way, he theorizes a trans* aesthetic that explores the plasticity of cinema to create new social worlds, new temporalities, and new sensory inputs and outputs. Film comes to disrupt, rearrange, and evolve the cinematic exchange with the senses in the same manner that trans* disrupts, rearranges, and evolves discrete genders and sexes.

“This book is a revelation! With this book on Lana and Lilly Wachowski, we have in our hands the first book to consider the transgender content of the Wachowskis’ massively influential cinematic practice. Keegan gives a masterful account of the Wachowskis’ world and drops his readers down the rabbit hole of a trans* altered reality. Bon voyage.” – Jack Halberstam, author of Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal

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.”

Aubrey Anable is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University. Her book, Playing with Feelings, was recently named “Best First Book” by the Society of Cinema and Media Studies.

Sponsored by Carleton University’s School for Studies in Art and Culture, English Department, Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture, and Pauline Jewett Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies, as well as the University of Ottawa/Carleton University Joint Chair in Women’s Studies.

The venue is accessible via elevator. For more info, see: https://nac-cna.ca/en/visit/accessibility. Please contact Laura Horak (laura.horak@carleton.ca) about any other accessibility requirements.