CENTER FOR SEX AND CULTURE

Saturday, July 23, 2011 2pm
At CSC, new address at 1349 Mission between 9th and 10th
$5-20 sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds

A research presentation and discussion with Ingrid Olson, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia's Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education

Sexuality and gender identities hold subversive potential. Contemporary work on sex and gender has targeted issues such as gender inequity, sexual objectification, and reproductive health. However, the creation and recognition of non-normative sex and gender personas has been largely overlooked by the academic community. Alternative sexuality and gender identities can be regarded as seditious as they problematize traditional, binary categorizations and sexual relations based on expectations of symmetry and gentleness. The practices and relationships within the sadomasochistic (S/m) community represent a paradigm for investigating alternative sex/gender hybridizations and identities. Members of the leather community negotiate consensual sexuality and/or gender roles within the framework of power exchange relations that often traverse classifications of ability, age, class, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. This intellectual work expands the hermeneutics of sexuality and gender, exceeding historic binary imaginations, and promoting a template for autonomous actualization of transgressive sexualities. Unique sex/gender conceptions that are intelligible to others open opportunities for unforeseen sexual connections across diverse erotic fields.

Ingrid Olson is a doctoral student in the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She holds an Honours B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto, and an M.A. in Philosophy from Wilfrid Laurier University. Ingrid also has an M.A. in Cultural Analysis & Social Theory from Wilfrid Laurier University. Both M.A. theses have examined issues of sexual subjectivity, identity, embodiment, and ethics. The goal of her doctoral research is to advance knowledge concerning the significance in historical shifts in the manner in which subjectivity, power, and sexuality have been discursively produced in specific historical and cultural contexts. This research engages critical theory to analyze representations of the “conduct of the self” that figure centrally in Foucauldian arguments concerning the political significance of particular configurations of sexuality and gender as these frame the hermeneutics and intelligibility of theoretical models of subjectivity and identity. Ingrid has presented her previous work on sexual subjectivity at several academic conferences on sexuality and gender, most recently at the 1st Global Conference on Queer Sexualities in Warsaw, Poland.

Ingrid Olson identifies as a butch, trans (M2F), leatherdyke Daddy, flags hunter green on the left, and is easily distracted by femme dykes. Ingrid has been publicly involved in S/m since 1999, and has previously served as an Officer for The Exiles in San Francisco, as a co-director of By Invitation Only (BIO) in Vancouver, and is a member of Mama’s Family. Ingrid has presented various S/m workshops in Vancouver, San Francisco, Toronto, Ottawa, and Berlin.