flyer QFT 2013 Conference Undisciplining Science flyer
Please join the QFT Research Cluster for:
Queer, Feminist, and Trans Studies and the Undisciplining of Science
May 16, 17 2013
Student Community Center
This year’s conference interrogates the intersections between the scientific, political and cultural constructions of gender and sexuality from an interdisciplinary and trans-historical perspective. We seek to re-examine the gendering and sexualization of the material practices, objects of knowledge, and methods of enquiry that have constituted certain domains (and not others) as recognizably “scientific” and have divided the sciences into certain distinct fields of specialization and expertise. In turn, we will examine how the proliferation of science and technology studies shape contemporary theorizations of queer, feminist, and trans aesthetics, social worlds, and activism.
In addition to keynote addresses by faculty working in queer, feminist and trans studies, this conference highlights graduate work in the field and provides professionalization workshops for graduate and undergraduate students. For more information on the conference, including a detailed schedule, please see the attached flyer and our website: http://qftcluster.ucdavis.edu If you have any questions please contact QFT co-chairs Isabel Porras (icporras@ucdavis.edu) and Emily Kuffner (efkuffner@ucdavis.edu).
Keynote Abstracts:
Reexamining the Pelvic: The Pelvic Instruction Controversy of the 1970s
Dr. Wendy Kline, University of Cincinnati
Thurs, May 16 | Room D
In this talk, I examine the late 20th-century controversy regarding pelvic examination instruction in American medical schools. In the 1970s, medical educators expressed concern over how best to prepare medical students for routine gynecological care. In response, schools experimented with a variety of approaches, including the use of plastic models, anesthetized patients, volunteers, and “simulated” patients (including prostitutes, graduate students, and nurses). By the late 1970s, new outsiders entered the debate, as female medical students, consumer rights advocates, and health feminists criticized some of these tactics as demeaning and destructive to women. Approached by female students at Harvard Medical School disappointed by their gynecological training, the Women’s Community Health Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts initiated an innovative “pelvic teaching program.” Laywomen acted as instructors and patient models for Harvard Medical students during a required introductory clinical medicine course. But after two years, the partnership disintegrated, with feminists feeling like no more than “talking pelvises” and medical educators disturbed by feminist politics, personal crusades, and “inappropriate patient model choices.” Drawing on the unpublished papers of the Women’s Community Health Center, medical journals, memoirs, and oral histories, I argue that this initial attempt to overhaul the traditional power relations between doctor and female patient, although unsuccessful, marks a crucial development in the negotiations between feminist health clinics, medical students, and organized medicine. Ultimately, this controversy helped to transform routine gynecological care by challenging many of the assumptions about how to understand and examine the female body.
Other Transitions: Hormonal Balance Beyond the Category of Transgender Dr. Toby Beauchamp, Oklahoma State University
Fri, May 17 | 4pm | Room D
This talk uses the critical lens of transgender studies to examine recent narratives of hormonal “deficiency” that, on the surface, may appear unrelated to the category of transgender. While public health anxieties often position hormonal imbalance as a modern threat to public health, I suggest that this “new” threat is animated by longer histories of hormones as substances used to both identify and correct unruly bodies. The talk takes up two major examples: first, the central role of hormones in metabolic syndrome, repeatedly referenced in medical studies as “the main threat for public health in the 21st century,” and second, the use of synthetic testosterone both by active duty military personnel and by physicians exploring new treatments for Gulf War Syndrome. The talk proposes that transgender studies has something to offer and something to gain from looking closely at the discursive and material use of hormones in these metabolic and military contexts, even if transgender as a category is not overtly named there.
Cosponsored by: The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans* Resource Center; The Cultural Studies Graduate Group; The Critical Theory Program; The Gender and Militarization Research Cluster; The Asian American Cultural Politics Research Group (Medical Humanities); The Women and Gender Studies Program; The Department of English; Science and Technology Studies.
Queer, Feminist, and Trans Studies and the Undisciplining of Science
May 16-17
UC Davis
Student Community Center
Thursday, May 16
12-1 pm: Brown Bag: Graduate work in Queer, Feminist and Trans studies
Light refreshments served Room A
1:10 pm-2: Panel 1: “Medical Discourses of Eugenics and Reproduction” Room A
- William Schlesinger: “Essentializing Reproduction and Reproducing Essentialism: Gender and Sexual Identity in the Discourse of Reproductive Biology”
- Krysten Lobisch: “Imperfect Vessels: Science, Technocracy and the Creation of the Pregnant Body”
2:10-3:00: Panel 2: “Surveiling Sexuality” Room A
- Gelare Khoshgozaran: “Sex Tape: A Document(ation)”
- Alex Fine: “From Symptom to Syndrome: Perversion and the Queer Politics of Rehabilitation”
3:10-4: Panel 3: “The Unclassifiable Body in Medical Discourse” Room A
- Jessica Lewis-Turner: “Cul-de-Sac: Case Narratives of Hermaphroditism and the Birth of Queer Modernism”
- Xan Chacko: “Ambiguous Bodies and their Role in the Anatomy of Gender”
5:00: Keynote by Wendy Kline Room D
“Re-examining the Pelvic: The Pelvic Instruction Controversy of the 1970s”
Friday, May 17
9-10:15 am: Workshop: “Professionalization and the Job Search in Queer, Feminist and Trans Studies” presented by Toby Beauchamp Room E
10:30-11:45: Panel 4: “Born this Way: Queering Birth Narratives of Sexual Identity” Room B
- Jim Sydnor: “Disidentify this way: (Sexual) Identity and the Metaphysics of Birth”
- Natalie Turrin: “Got it From my Mama! Epigenetics and the Evolutionary “Mystery” of Homosexuality”
12:30-2: Panel 5: “Trans-scending Medicalization: Queer Approaches to Trans Health” Room B
- Taylor Cruz: “Revisiting Normativity, Queerness and Biomedical Participation: A Qualitative Exploration of Transgender, Gender Non-conforming, and Queer Experiences in Relation to Medical Discourse”
- Cristoph Hanssman: “Neutral Desires: Transgender Classification and the Search for the “Neutral” Diagnosis”
- Alex Niculescu: “Fixing Gender: The Specter of Eugenics and the Production of Transsexual Bodies”
2:15-3:45: Panel 6: “Undisciplining the Early Modern”, Room B
- Karolyn Reddy: “Disciplining Science: Epistemology, Violence and Susanna Centlivre’s
“Philosophical Girl””
- Emily Kuffner: “Pox and Paradox: The Early Modern Prostitute as Disease and Cure”
- Winfried Schleiner: “Reflections on 35 Years of Study in Early Modern Same Sex Relations”
4 pm: Keynote: Toby Beauchamp Room D
“Other Transitions: Hormonal Balance Beyond the Category of Transgender”
Last year’s conference, entitled “Queer (In)security”, was held in collaboration with the Militarization and Gender Research Cluster on May 3-4, 2012 at the University of California.
Here’s our flyer with conference schedule– QueerInSecurity flier
