Part Two | Gendering, Disgendering, Transgendering

The works in this program address forms of gendering, disgendering, and transgendering from the hyper-coded cinematographic image, to subjective experience, radical imagination, and public space.

Endocrine disruptors polluting our environment are altering reproduction and the sexual morphology of organisms, challenging heteronormative understandings of sexed biologies, and attesting to the fact that bodies are constituted in symbiosis with the environment through processes, relations, adaptations, metabolisms. This metamorphosis threatening fertility is triggering cultural nerves and anxieties about heteronormative essentialisms, again. One way queer theory has dealt with these essentialisms has been through dismantling the hermeneutics surrounding gender, sexuality, and identity, towards illegibility and the blurring or resignification of sexuality and binary roles. Trans theory, on the other hand, has sought to give back the specificity and difference of the gender/sex binary beyond the sovereign hierarchies of being commanded by God and prescribed by nature (McKenzie Wark). If queer theory is about contesting oppressive heteronormativity by creating peripheral forms of being, sexuality, and identities beyond the socially accepted norms, trans theory is about becomings, potential, desire, and transformation beyond the dominant metaphysical order. Queer and trans people have long been perceived as harbingers of civilizational collapse, while simultaneously pointing the way out of, or through it. However, as current junctions in theory and experience suggest, the two positions may be pursuing, or in need of pursuing, different paths. Will they meet at the exit?

This program is the second part of Me, You, and Everyone We Know: Interrelationality, Alterity, Globalization, an online series of films and discussions programmed by Irmgard Emmelhainz for e-flux Video & Film. The series will run in four thematic parts from June 23 through August 18, 2021. Each part will include a two-week group screening, and a live discussion.