Featuring:

How to Bottom in Yiddish by Zohar Weiman-Kelman

Anne Tanenbaum Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Jewish Studies and Adjunct Professor, Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto

"Scrambling SCUM" by Moynan King

PhD Candidate, Theatre, Faculty of Fine Arts, York University

The Confessional Science of Transition by Evan Vipond

Recent graduate, MA in Women and Gender Studies and Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto

Reception to follow. All are welcome!

Thursday February 26, 2015 5-7 pm

Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies

University College, room 240

ABSTRACTS and BIOGRAPHIES:

Zohar Weiman-Kelman: How to Bottom in Yiddish

My talk will present my ongoing project of generating an erotic Yiddish archive. This archive, anchored in the potential of non-normative and non-reproductive sexualities, queerly celebrates Yiddish in the bedroom. I will focus on Yiddish sado-masochistic expression, which has been passed down to us in the form of traces in both literature and scientific writing. I will consider bottoming, the desire for submission and the celebration of weakness, through the work of Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin. I will use Dropkin and the archive of Yiddish sexuality more broadly to think about how we might negotiate the weakness of the current state of Yiddish and the threat of Yiddishs ultimate failure to survive, to be passed down through the generations. Moreover, through the idea of sado-masochistic power play and invoking the queer art of failure, I will ask how we might embrace this weakness and take pleasure in it.

Zohar Weiman-Kelman holds the Anne Tanenbaum Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for Jewish Studies and teaches in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She was born and raised in West Jerusalem, where she received her B.A. in Hebrew and Yiddish literature. She completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at UC Berkeley in 2012. Her research has led her to learn Yiddish, German and Polish, and she is deeply engaged in queer and feminist communities in Berlin, Warsaw and Israel/Palestine. Zohar is currently completing her first book manuscript, What to Expect When Youre Not Expecting: Jewish Womens Poetry 1880-1990. This work brings together queer theorys questioning of futurity with the challenge posed by Yiddish to reproductive heteronormative cultural transmission, to tell a new story of the Jewish past. She has also begun a new project, Philology, Sexology, and the Future of Yiddish, looking at the intersections of Yiddish language and sexuality.

Moynan King: Scrambling SCUM

Taking Christina Zeidlers Endurance Performance for the SCUM Manifesto in C Minor as its starting point this paper investigates the way post-millennial queer performance scrambles the codes of historical feminism by trying-on personas but not letting them stick.

Moynan King is a Toronto-based writer, director, performer, curator and scholar. As an actor she has over 40 professional theatre and film credits. She is the author of six plays and creator of many performance installation works including The Beauty Salon and Mothering. As a performance curator her credits are many, and she was the co-founder and director of Hysteria, a multi-disciplinary festival of work by women 2004 - 2009. Recent critical writing has been published in Canadian Literature, Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre, NMP, Compulsions: The Theatre of Sky Gilbert ed. David Batemen and The Theatre of Affect ed. Erin Hurley. She was the editor of Canadian Theatre Review, issue 149, Queer Performance: Women and Trans Artists. Moynan is currently touring with a new performance installation created with Tristan Whiston. She is a PhD candidate at York University, and is a director on the board of the Toronto Arts Council.

Evan Vipond: The Confessional Science of Transition

Over the past decade trans characters have gained visibility and become increasingly normalized in popular culture. These representations usually feature medical narratives that legitimize transition by framing trans characters as suffering from a psychological disordergender dysphoriawhich can be cured through treatment. However, in order to receive treatment, trans persons must confess their true gender identity to medical professionals and cisgender experts, who have authority to allow or deny trans persons the right to transition. The narrative of Adam Torres, a female-to-male transgender teenager on the television show Degrassi, leverages these medical discourses in framing Adams gender identity and transition. Drawing from Foucaults theorization of confessional science 1978, I problematize the way in which cisgender professionals and even lay people must witness and validate Adams claim that he was born in the wrong body so that he can receive the diagnosis of gender dysphoria and undergo transition. Adams confessions act as straightening devices Ahmed 2006 in that they align him with medical discourses of transsexuality that follow a pre-determined normative path: diagnosis, treatment, cure. Ultimately, the medical narratives that Adam relies on allow him to transition from one sex to another while reaffirming that sex and gender are congruent binaries. While this representation allows Adam access to middle-class heteronormative society based on neoliberal discourses of individual rightswhich grants protection based on biological factorsnonnormative trans persons who are unable or do not wish to align with the medical model of transsexuality, are consequently further marginalized.

Evan Vipond obtained a Masters in Women and Gender Studies in collaboration with Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto in 2014 and was the recipient of the Sexual Diversity Studies Best Graduate Student Prize. Evans work draws on transgender and queer theory, sexuality studies and cultural studies to examine the medicalization, regulation and normalization of trans persons. Evan has participated in several academic conferences, symposiums and panels in Toronto and the USA. Evans paper, Resisting Transnormativity: challenging the medicalization and regulation of trans bodies, will be published in Theory in Action in April 2015.

The Sex Salon is a speaker series at the University of Toronto, presented by the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. The Salon provides a forum for faculty and graduate students at the University of Toronto, Fellows, and friends of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, to exchange ideas and share research pertaining to queer, GLBTQI2 and critical sexuality studies.