ENGENDERING RESISTANCE: An Art Installation & Dialogue on Gender Identity in Childhood
Department: Gender and Sexuality Studies
Date and Time: November 12, 2019 | 3:30 PM-6:00 PMEvent Location: Humanities Gateway 1010 & 1030
Event Details
ENGENDERING RESISTANCE:
An Art Installation & Dialogue on Gender Identity in Childhood
3:30-6:00 Humanities Gateway 1010: ART INSTALLATION by Sé Sullivan
(Ab) NORMAL & (Un) NATURAL: Performing Identity & Engendering Resistance
The story of one child’s experience at UCLA’s Gender Research Clinic and their resistance to the enforced practices of conversion therapy. Dr. Sé Sullivan began this project as an autoethnographic exploration that developed into a Ph.D. thesis in the Social and Cultural Anthropology. During their research they made a ground-breaking discovery: In the restricted boxes of the Robert Stoller Papers at UCLA was the 1970 file that included a transcribed 68-page oral interrogation of Sé as an eight-year-old being seen at the school’s Gender Identity Research Clinic (1963-1994). “This file, file number 24,” Sé writes, “is a historical document and record of my body as a site of data collection.”
4:30-5:30 Humanities Gateway 1030: CRITICAL DIALOGUE: THE MAKING & UNMAKING OF GENDER IDENTITY IN CHILDHOOD
This dialogue will bring together Sé Sullivan, Ph.D. and Karl Bryant, Ph.D. for the first time in a formal setting to discuss the relationship between their respective experiences as childhood research subjects in the UCLA Gender Identity Research Clinic and their subsequent interventions as adult scholars who turn the lens of analysis on the doctors and researchers who studied them as children.
SÉ SULLIVAN is an independent scholar, journeyperson carpenter, and performance artist—with a Ph.D. from California Institute of Integral Studies. A self identified Gender Fluid Queer, they are a survivor of the UCLA Gender Identity Research Clinic (1963-1994) who now hopes to shape conversations about the medicalized construction of gender.
KARL BRYANT is an associate professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz and was a research subject for 15+ years while growing up as part of the UCLA “Feminine Boy Project.”
Moderated by Dr. Jeanne Scheper, associate professor of gender & sexuality studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Art, School of Humanities, UCI Humanities Center: Borders & Belonging, School of Social Sciences, Womxn's Hub
For further information or to request reasonable accommodations for a disability, please email jscheper@uci.edu.