Faculty member Carlos Motta launches his web-based project "Gender Talents."

Join Carlos Motta to celebrate the launch of “Gender Talents,” a web-based project by Motta that engages movements and discourses for gender self-determination within trans and intersex communities internationally. The event will feature a screening of selected video portraits drawn from the project as well as a conversation with Motta, legendary author Kate Bornstein, intersex activist and sex therapist Tiger Devore, queer studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o, artist Tara Mateik, and Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, New Museum.

“Gender Talents” features an online archive of video portraits of trans and intersex activists who thoughtfully perform gender as a personal, social, and political opportunity rather than as a social condemnation. Using in-depth interviews conducted with jogappa and trans communities in India, sex workers in Colombia and Guatemala, and intersex activists in the United States, “Gender Talents” documents the ways in which society conditions and regulates bodies and how gender activists build politics of resistance and action. Of specific concern is how individuals and organizations fight for state recognition, access to work and health benefits, and the right to self-determine their identities and self-govern their bodies, among other pressing issues.

“Gender Talents” is also an ongoing platform for physical events that reflect on alternative ways to think about the rigid nature of the gender binary as it is enforced in society.