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Gender ExplosionMaster ClassIn-Person

Wednesday, Feb 08, 2023

9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Fascinating, fraught, intimate to everyone: gender increasingly has our attention as something newly morphing, even exploding. Given its intimacy to your own life, would you say you know—and how would you say—what gender is? This class enters into gender’s import—its bewitching pleasures and falsifications, its concerning history, its enduring puzzles as a wily system—by meeting the moment of where we are. Nodding to the many genders now in play, we’ll cut a path through the when, why, and what of the thing called “gender.” We’ll engage how gender is actually strange for everyone, even when it is played quite straight—and how race and money are two key ingredients that perhaps undermine the notion of “two sexes.”

Kathryn Bond Stockton

Kathryn Bond Stockton is a Distinguished Professor of English, former associate vice president for Equity and Diversity, and inaugural dean of the School for Cultural & Social Transformation at the University of Utah, where she teaches queer theory, theories of race and racialized gender, and twentieth-century literature and film. Two of her books—Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” and The Queer Child—were finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. In addition, her recent book Making Out was a 2020 national finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award for memoir, and her newest book is entitled Gender(s). Stockton has taught at Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory and, along with her university’s top teaching award, she has received the Equality Utah Allies Award for LGBT activism, the NOW Lifetime Achievement Award, the YWCA Outstanding Achievement Award in Arts and Communication, the Crompton Noll Prize for Best Essay in Gay and Lesbian Studies from the Modern Language Association, and the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence, the highest honor granted by the University of Utah.