Fri, 04/21/2023 - 12:30pm Georgia Museum of Art , M. Smith Griffith Auditorium Andrea Carson Coley Lectures Framing Agnes: A Multi-Media Approach to Tracing Trans History Presented by Dr. Kristen Schilt, Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies, Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, University of Chicago. Kristen Schilt is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Since 2017, she has served as the faculty director for the interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality. Her research centers around finding ways to make visible the cultural practices that reproduce long-standing inequalities for minoritarian subjects. She is the author of Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Reproduction of Gender Inequality (University of Chicago Press) and the co-editor of Other, Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology (University of California Press). Schilt also has a collaborative multi-media practice, working on alternate reality games and film. Most recently, she was the co-director of the short film, “Framing Agnes” (2019) and the director of research for the feature of the same name (2022). This talk focuses on the first sociological case study of a person who might today identify as transgender. The case is based on interviews with a young woman pseudonymized as Agnes who came to the UCLA clinic for “sex disorders” in the late 1950s. Published in 1967 by Harold Garfinkel, the analysis of Agnes’s life captured the imagination of scholars. Rather than a new reinterpretation, however, this talk is based on the original case materials that Dr. Schilt located while archiving Harold Garfinkel’s papers. Working collaboratively with filmmaker Chase Joynt, she has brought these case studies to life through an experimental documentary film. Dr. Schilt will screen the short film in her talk and discuss the importance of multi-media and transdisciplinary approaches in gender and sexuality studies. Lecture made possible by an endowment from the Coley Family and co-sponsored by the Georgia Museum of Art. Lecture will be preceded by a reception at 11:30 a.m.
