Communication Studies Symposium

Join us for the Spring 2025 Symposium on April 10th!

Glitter & Razorblades: Conjuring Trans Joy under Duress  

Featuring keynote speaker Lore/tta LeMaster

Lore/tta LeMaster 

A rhetorical performance autoethnography, Glitter & Razorblades tells the story of trans femme monsters breaking and making worlds across time and space. The figure of the monster has long haunted trans and gender expansive people – as both rhetorical inspiration for a life lived monstrously and as a stated accusation rhetorically parading as a fact about transgender life in monstrous terms. Glitter & Razorblades draws on lived experience, archived media, and criticism to engage and theorize both monstrous dimensions of trans life (as source of empowerment and as cultural site of rhetorized oppression) and to grapple with the promise and prospect of conjuring trans joy under duress where few resources exist for mapping trans worlds on our own monstrous terms.

Content warning: This performance features mentions of anti-trans violence, death by suicide and suicidal ideation, self-medication including illicit drug use, and death by overdose. It also features a scene in which the performer plunges a syringe into their thigh and injects themself with estradiol as part of their hormone replacement therapy.

 

Details

  • Date: April 10, 2025
  • Time: 11 a.m.
  • Location: University Union Ballrooms 324

Symposium Schedule

  • 11 a.m.: Welcome and Keynote Speech 

  • 12:30 p.m.: Concurrent Workshops

    • Chris Truong (UU323)

      This workshop will highlight the applicability and approachability of Dungeons & Dragons as an innovative way to foster identity exploration, practice skills, and build affirming connection for trans, non-binary, and gender expansive communities. While this talk will focus primarily on how this has been applied to a group therapy setting, concepts regarding strategies for building safe and supportive spaces can also be applied to other environments and contexts. Attendees will also be further immersed in the topic through ambience elements similarly utilized in these D&D groups, such as background music, alternative lighting, and access to regulation aids.

    • E.C. Kaufman (UU324)

      Crafting Queer Space-Times

This workshop will begin with theories of time produced from the margins: queer and trans time, crip time, and the “time of recovery” from racist encounters (Chen 2023), before extending into the ways those with Othered identities and experiences “produce space otherwise” (Gieseking 2020: 3). We will explore both the idea of queer, trans, and crip spaces and queer, crip, and trans as verbs; for instance, what does trans-ing space look like—and feel like? What does it do? One way indigenous, BIPOC, queer, crip and trans scholars have conceptualized this doing in space—and its inherent relationality—is through the metaphor of constellations, which Jack Gieseking calls “a navigational practice and conceptual diagramming” and a “way of seeing and acting in response to gender and sexual injustice” (2020: 3).

Using paper, pens, scissors, glue and colored pencils, participants will create their own constellations of stars and lines that make up their lives. Viewing our constellations together will illuminate how they differ and overlap. Participants will come away with a new methodology they may use in their own research or teaching as well as a deeper understanding of the ways that: 1) they may queer, crip, or trans space; 2) their gender, like everyone’s, influences their spatiality; 3) space and gender (or any aspect of identity) constitute each other; 4) their own and other’s meaningful places are connected.

Co-facilitator: Jenni Connel

  • 2 p.m.: COMM233 Undergrad Performances (UU324)

No registration is required for this event. If you have any questions or need assistance prior to the event, please email .