Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Visit from Susan Stryker (April 22-24)

This year's Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor is Susan Stryker, Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Arizona. As a build-up to her arrival, on Wed, Apr 18, at 5pm, Gender Studies will screen Stryker's Emmy-winning documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria in Kresge 2-359, followed by a short discussion of the film.

On Mon, Apr 23, at 12pm, Stryker will host a lunchtime screening and discussion of clips from her film in progress entitled Christine in the Cutting Room, an experimental depiction of the case of famous 50s-era transsexual Christine Jorgensen as a convergence of discourses around gendered embodiment and the filmmaking process. Lunch will be provided at this event, which will take place in Kresge 2-359.

Finally, on Mon, Apr 23, at 5pm, Stryker will offer the annual Edith Kreeger Wolf lecture in Gender Studies, titled "Cross Dressing for Empire: Transgender Performance at San Francisco's Bohemian Club, 1870s-1920s." Here is a capsule version of the subject matter for this talk:

San Francisco's elite, all-male Bohemian Club holds a lavish annual gathering at its rural retreat in the redwood forests of Northern California that is attended by some of the world's most powerful men. Since the late 19th century, that gathering has been the scene of amateur theatrical productions staged by club members, which involve performances that cross boundaries of gender, race, and class. The modes of identification and embodiment produced through these performances constructed white heteronormative masculine identities for club members, and were integral to the expansion of an American Pacific empire—an empire largely built and administered by the club's membership around the turn of the century.

This lecture will be offered in Kresge 2-380, with a reception to follow.

Click here for more background on the Edith Kreeger Wolf Endowment that has generously made possible Stryker's visit to Northwestern, as it has for such previous Distinguished Visiting Professors as Maxine Hong Kingston, Hazel Carby, Judith Butler, Ann Fausto Sterling, Holly Hughes, and the recently deceased and deeply missed Adrienne Rich.