Back to All Events

Unbecoming: Exploring Filipinx Trans Identity Through Literary Fiction

Sponsors: Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Program; The Department of Comparative Literature; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; The Asian & Asian American Center (A3C)

Lecture Series: Gatty Lecture Series

Description:

Trans and Filipinx identities have the common quality of existing in liminal and contested spaces as they encompass wildly divergent understandings of gender, sexuality, nationality, race, and origin. Talusan explores the collision of these forces in her recent fiction, which she will read and unpack in this talk, to illustrate how her background as a comparative literature scholar working on Southeast Asian literature has given her an array of tools for telling nuanced and compelling stories.

Speaker:

Meredith Talusan (she/they) is the author of the critically-acclaimed memoir Fairest from Viking/Penguin Random House, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. She has also contributed to numerous books and her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Nation, WIRED, SELF, and Condé Nast Traveler, among other publications. Her fiction is also published or forthcoming in Guernica, Boston Review, The Rumpus, Grand, and BLR. She has received awards from GLAAD, The Society of Professional Journalists, and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. She is on the creative writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and is also the founding executive editor of them, Condé Nast’s LGBTQ+ digital platform, where she is currently contributing editor.

Click here to register.

Earlier Event: September 28
Discourses of Development