NYC Event!

For anyone in NYC on December 1st I recommend checking out the Queer CUNY VIII conference which is taking place at Hunter College. The conference title is "The Twilight of Queerness?" and the keynote speaker is Lisa Duggan

brief description of the conference:
"Too much contemporary Queer/LGBT political activism and scholarship is bogged down by bitterly dichotomous academic disputes. The marriage/anti-marriage and relational/anti-relational debates, for instance, wildly miss a larger political and intellectual potential for queer studies to be a project that breaks apart and surpasses ideological binaries.

Queer CUNY VIII: The Twilight of Queerness? is a student conference that seeks to end reductionist political discourse. The organizers contend that the original possibilities of queer theory, while inspiring, have not been fully realized, and aim to provide more than just space in which to consider this quandary. Instead, the conference will encourage queer students, activists, teachers, community members, and others to imagine life and scholarship beyond the limits of ongoing dichotomy and division"



I plan on attending the conference all day, and my research titled "Modern Freak Shows: Transgender Representations on Oprah 2003-2005) has been accepted, and I will be presenting my findings in one of the panels (I don't have a time for the panel yet). I completed this research as an undergraduate- it grew out of a final project for a "Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality in the Media" course, and developed into a much larger undertaking which I had the honor of presenting at the Lewis and Clark Gender Studies Symposium last year. In case folks are interested in the work that I'm doing, I have included the abstract for this research here :)

Modern Freak Shows:
Transgender Representations on Oprah 2003-2005

My research is focused on the ways in which the transgender community is depicted within the talk show genera, specifically on the Oprah show. The talk show format embodies an important role in television, though powerful it is a genre, which is frequently dismissed as "trash." Acting as modern freak show talk shows educate the general public on human oddities, expanding the public's knowledge base on the queerness of human experience. Those who transgress gender norms, transgender people, transsexuals, drag kings, drag queens, cross dressers and the like are frequent guests in all areas of the talk show world. The Oprah Show, with its cultural acceptability and wide viewing audience across race, class, and gender lines, has had its share of transgender guests. Between the years 2003 and 2005 there were five shows, which focused on issues of gender variance from "the husband who became a woman" (5-6-03) to "when your identical twin has a sex change" (9-16-05).

Talk shows are THE area in mainstream media where gender variant people are given voice and allowed to share their story. As Larry Gross says in Up From Invisibility "transgendered people arouse endless fascination and evoke mixed emotional responses. TV talk shows have been obsessed with topics concerning transsexualism since the early 1980's…there is probably no topic more alluring to programmers." (Gross 187). These shows serve as cultural education, providing the masses with what is for many their first interaction with a trans person.

All five of the Oprah shows dealing with transsexuality between 2003 and 2005, were grounded in relationships to families, and the affect the transition of a family member has. This limited portrayal of trans experience is problematic particularly as it is coupled with a lack of discussion of other issues, which affect trans lives such as access to appropriate health care, police brutality and hate crimes. If this limited construction were altered, there would be an opportunity to increase the public knowledge base about the real lives of transgender people. Oprah is the most widely watched talk show in the United States; that alone makes it a powerful cultural entity. Combining that with a topic such as transgenderism, which is widely misunderstood, two options are presented: Either guests are chosen who reinforce existing cultural stereotypes, as the majority of the guests on the Oprah show have done; or a diverse range of trans people could be selected, and given the opportunity to talk about what it means to live outside of the binary, potentially causing a change in public opinion, policy and understanding as has begun to occur with some more recent guests.

The talk show genre is so important because it is literally the only mainstream media outlet where trans people play themselves. Other forms of media, such as film, fail to cast trans people as trans characters. Talk shows are for many their first introduction to topics of gender diversity, and when that introduction is happening on a show like Oprah, which has gained respect not only in the media but also in millions of homes, it is especially powerful. For many this is their only known exposure to those who transgress gender norms. Thus I argue that by giving transgender people a voice; the Oprah show has
the potential to work as a catalyst for social change.