Ties that bind: kinship, adjacency, and the trans camera

Public lecture

Event Information and Booking

17th June, 2024
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
In person - Birkbeck, University of London, Room B35, Torrington Square main entrance, WC1E 7HX
Jennifer Evans, Carleton University
Inclusion/Exclusion, Intersectionality, Jewish Identities, Refugee
Argentina, Brazil, Europe, genoa, Italy, Sao Paulo, South America
20th century
Authoritarianism, Drag artists, Dzi Croquettes, Gender identities, Immigrants, Kinship, Performance, Photography, Portraiture, Queer theory, Sex workers, Solidarity, Transformista, Transgender communities, Witnessing
Clementina de Jesus, Lisette Carmi, Madalena Schwartz

In this talk, Professor Evans explores the photography of two middle-aged Jewish women and former refugees, Lisetta Carmi and Madalena Schwarz, who fostered relationships of trust and kinship with the trans communities they photographed in Genoa, Italy and São Paulo, Brazil. It examines how their own experience of violence, as child victims of the Nazis and as women living through neo-fascism and dictatorship in the postwar period, shaped their choice to humanize their photographic subjects, well before the social movements of the era. 

Jennifer Evans is Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She has written books and articles on the history of sexuality, photography, social media, and memory. Recent books include: The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism (Duke University Press, 2023); an edited volume with Shelley Rose, Gender in Germany and Beyond: Exploring the Legacy of Jean Quataert (Berghahn Books, 2023); and Holocaust Memory and the Digital Mediascape (Bloomsbury, 2023), a co-written monograph with Erica Fagen and Meghan Lundrigan. Professor Evans is currently overseeing a multi-year, multi-platform big data project on the weaponization of history and hate in social media, and writing a book entitled A New History of the Sexual Revolution.

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