Transgressing Disciplines: 3rd annual Black trans studies speaker series
troizel xx presents how to do things with big black d*cks: political/theological vignettes of pre-op black trans femininity, fetishism, labor, + performance
If you have any accessibility needs or requested accommodations, please email sexual.diversity@utoronto.ca. Live transcription will be available.
Abstract:
In the building of Performance Study, the performative utterance and its wedding to vocality/orality, the words that can do, is the cornerstone. If words can do things, then what other things have the capacity to do and what questions become more important and interesting when we decide not to hide our proclivities, especially what we learn when we’re “doing” it, so to speak? More nearly, the questions we begin with in this experimental performance lecture are: what that mouf do, or, what is a mouf study and what does it have to do with the elementary schism between the arts and the sciences? How are black dicks like words that are (re)arranged and given to (ful)fill and punctuate abundant, syntactic horrors and in what ways do black dicks uncover and recover the erotic (and purloined) thrust of the letters’ availability? How would one describe or write or speak this problematic? And, most importantly, what does thinking through the dissimulation of enfleshment, fantasy, and adornment that is transgenderism’s excitation, often reduced to the terms “trans/femme/woman,” do for us in this matter? Does it even matter?
About the speaker series curated by Dr. Qui Alexander:
As Trans studies continues to emerge within a colonial, capitalist and carceral academic landscape, Transgressing Disciplines seeks to offer a collective intervention to interrupt, agitate and transform how we engage with Trans studies. This series invites conversations and collaborations with emerging Black trans thinkers, artists and cultural workers whose crafts transcend traditional modes of inquiry. Inspired by bell hooks’ mandate to transgress—to go beyond a limit or boundary— traditional modes of teaching and learning, this series aims to push scholars to reconsider not just what Trans studies is, but what Trans studies does. In doing so, we disrupt extractive academic norms to create scholarship that nourishes Black trans people and communities. Embracing both interdisciplinary and anti-carceral approaches to Trans studies, Transgressing Disciplines recognizes Black trans life as a site of knowledge production. Together, we work to deepen our collective consciousness of how entanglements of race, class and gender shape our intellectual, artistic and cultural work.
See past Transgressing Disciplines events here.
About the speaker:
@troizel(she/her//princess/babygirl/we) is black + trans + alive and that means more than these words can express.
she studied theater, trans/gender/ism, sexuality, performance, and some thing called blackness at universities called Emory and New York. she received her PhD in Performance Studies at one of them, with a dissertation entitled black performance studies: queer/trans experiments, which brings the study methods of Black queer and trans artists and theorists to bear on Black Studies, Performance Studies, and their historical intermingling called black performance studies. she does this as a way to provide models for how we can perform together to turn out and transform our social assumptions.
formerly: studio resident at Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ / teaching artist fellow at New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City / inaugural Museum Institute Scholar at Studio Museum in Harlem / alumna of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics’ New York Emerging Performers Program (EMERGENYC) / managing editor of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory / Visiting Assistant Professor in Visual Studies at Haverford College in Ardmore, PA / co-president of NYU’s Black Alumni Network
For more than 10 years, troizel has worked in the form of theater, performance, creative writing, critical essay, and video to investigate the body, the desires for its re-presentations, and its endurance capacities. Her work unfolds where there is a fault line between what we think and what there is. In their performance and video works, they stage their body as a material question called hottentot pluto, as an embodied confrontation with our social scripts, whether out in public, gallery, or academic spaces.
Presently, troizel is working on three creative projects: the e.g.g.: Eve/(trans)Gender/God(dess), a collection consisting of a one-act play, scholarly essays, poetry and a sermon that mines Biblical narrative, black trans documentation, and performance theories of race, gender, and sexuality; a film work titled swamp of things lost & cunt, an experimental time-lapse using assemblage for stagecraft, puppetry, divination, and performance for video to slow and distill the anti-black/trans violence of the past and present to fast-forward into imagined futures, queering notions of historicity and futurity; and an ongoing zine and book binding series, a colored trans girl’s notes on oblivion, outfitted with a collage of post-it notes, poetry, and polaroids.
otherwise, you can catch her watching reality television, pulling tarot, sucking d*ck, contemplating law and divinity dual degree programs, writing about Eve, Zora Neale Hurston, big black dicks, or trans/sexual/labor, OR teaching at the new school, cooper union, online or in a museum, OR being herself as her sister Rosed Serrano, or in a park with collaborator Isa Hui Saldaña and life sized paper mache eggs or climbing on scaffolding in Pleaser boots with Buffy Sierra or with Experimental School for Black Imagination, an “anti-disciplinary black art school” conceived with comrade and fellow artist Zellá Vanié.