EventsThe New Social Environment#189

Isabel Sandoval and Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky with McKenzie Wark

Monday, December 7, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Isabel Sandoval and Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky will join McKenzie Wark for a conversation about the art and everyday cultures of trans women, past and present. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from Drew Pham.

In this Talk

A conversation about the art and everyday cultures of trans women, past and present. How do we communicate with each other? How do we pass on what we learn to sisters to come? What are the arts of femininity that we borrow and invent? How does something like the trans feminine exist in different cultures and times and how those connections be understood without erasing differences? One day we might have comprehensive histories and theories about the art of the trans woman (broadly defined). This conversation brings together three scholars, artists and writers to share what they know, what we can learn and how to navigate some of the complexities of thinking and living the aesthetic dimension of our lives.

This event is sponsored by Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College.

Isabel Sandoval

Courtesy of Isabel Sandoval

Isabel Sandoval is a New York-based Filipina filmmaker. She is the first transgender director to compete at the Venice and BFI London film festivals with the New York-set trans immigrant drama Lingua Franca. Her noir-inflected debut feature Señorita had its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival. This was followed by the Marcos-era nun drama Apparition, considered a contemporary Philippine film classic, which won awards at the Deauville and Hawaii film festivals after premiering in Busan. Her feature film Lingua Franca premiered on Netflix in the United States in 2020.

Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky

Courtesy of Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky

Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky is a cultural worker and organizer based at Brooklyn’s Glitter House. Writing on trans and queer politics has appeared through Visual AIDS, HowlRound, Eyshet Chayil, and in the Lammy-winning anthology Glitter and Grit. Current projects include: Real Life Experience, recovering trans women’s political and cultural writings 1974-2000; Critical Reperformance, re-bodying classic and neglected performance scores as an analytic practice and to keep them a living repertoire and Koyt Far Dayn Fardakht, a Yiddish anarchist punk band. Founding member of Survived & Punished NY (abolitionist organizing to free criminalized survivors of gendered violence), and other organizing projects.

McKenzie Wark

Photo credit: Z. Walsh

McKenzie Wark is the author of Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte), among other things. Her book Raving was published in 2023 by Duke University Press.

mckenziewark3000

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

https://www.daostrom.com/

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨