New York, NY 10002 United States
In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery—a process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a serialized national newspaper column. Her memoir Trans, just out this autumn from Verso, tells of her life to the present moment: a story of growing up, of defining yourself, and of the rapidly changing world of gender politics. Through art, film, music, politics, and soccer, Jacques starts to become the person she had only imagined, and begins the process of transition.
To celebrate the publication of Trans, we'll be talking about transitions of many kinds, personal, and political, formal and critical. What is the role of the confessional in criticism? Does theory have a place in writing about the self? How can memoir and criticism work together?
Author Juliet Jacques is in conversation with media theorist TL Cowan, discussing her new publication TRANS (Verso, 2015), a moving memoir and insightful examination of transgender politics, the cruxes of writing and identity, and LGBTQ* film and art.
T.L. Cowan is the FemTechNet Chair of Experimental Pedagogies in the School of Media Studies at The New School and Lecturer of Culture & Media at Eugene Lang College. T.L.'s work focuses on the cultural and intellectual economies and social lives of trans- feminist and queer community-based performance, especially cabaret, and on the shifting practices of self-expression across digital and analog media.
