Please join Women's and Gender Studies in the School of Social Work for the virtual book launch of
Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice by Merrick Daniel Pilling
Sunday, June 12, 2022
3:00 pm EST
Free Registration via Zoom Webinar
Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice urges those invested in social justice for 2SLGBTQ people to interrogate the biomedical model of mental illness beyond the diagnoses that specifically target gender and sexual dissidence. In this first comprehensive application of Mad Studies to queer and trans experiences of mental distress, Pilling advances a broad critique of the biomedical model of mental illness as it pertains to 2SLGBTQ people, arguing that Mad Studies is especially amenable to making sense of queer and trans madness. Based on empirical data from two qualitative research studies, this book includes analyses of inpatient chart documentation from a psychiatric hospital and interviews with those who have experienced distress. Using an intersectional lens, Pilling critically examines what constitutes mental health treatment and the impacts of medical strategies on mad queer and trans people. Ultimately, Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice explores the emancipatory promise of queer and trans madness, advocating for more resources to respond to crisis and distress in ways that are non-coercive, non-carceral, and honour autonomy as well as interdependence within 2SLGBTQ communities.
Modertated by Cat Fitzpatrick.
Guest speakers include:
Read each speaker's biography by clicking on their name or see all bios using this link.
Accessibility information: Free, online, and open to the public with auto-generated captions.
Biographies:
Cat Fitzpatrick is the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Rutgers University- Newark and the Editrix at LittlePuss Press. She wrote the book of poems Glamourpuss (Topside Press) and co-edited the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction & Fantasy from Transgender Writers, which won the ALA Stonewall award for Literature. Her verse novel The Call-Out is forthcoming from Seven Stories Press in November 2022
Bren LeFrançois is a University Research Professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland. Their teaching and activist scholarship focuses on anti-sanist praxis from mad studies, anarchist and critical childhood studies perspectives. They have published widely on these and related topics, including co-editing the volume Mad Matters with Robert Menzies and Geoffrey Reaume, which is currently in its second edition with Idil Abdillahi.
Dr. Jem Tosh (they/she) is a Doctor of Psychology and Founding Director of Psygentra, an organisation that specialises in the psychology of gender and trauma. Jem has published several books, including: Perverse Psychology (2014), Psychology and Gender Dysphoria: Feminist and Transgender Perspectives (2016), and The Body and Consent in Psychology, Psychiatry, and Medicine: A Therapeutic Rape Culture (2020).
Trish Salah is the author of the Lambda Award-winning poetry collection, Wanting in Arabic and of Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, and is co-editor of special issues of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, on cultural production, and Arc Poetry Magazine, featuring trans, non-binary and Two Spirit writers. An associate professor and Graduate Chair of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, she also edits the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry.
Jules Gill-Peterson is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (2018), winner of a Lambda Literary Award. She is an associate professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.
Sybil Lamb is the author of the illustrated YA novel The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason that She Could Fly. Her writing and art have appeared in books, magazines, comix, alleys and tattoos. Her novel I've Got a Time Bomb was published by Topside Press. She is adopted (and her adoptive mom is a survivor or alcoholism and abuse) and spent 5 years Homeless and frontal and left temporal Traumatic brain injury from getting her skull opened by some asshole with a metal rod. She lives in SandwichTown ON, where 40% of commercial goods traded between CAN and USA pass by her house.