Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

promote a false gender binary and control how trans*masculine individuals move through legal and medical
systems.
Rillark Bolton
Trans masculinity and testosterone: More than a gender changing tool?
Testosterone is a highly socially and culturally loaded object, particularly in the US, UK and Australia where
testosterone is intimately entwined with our understandings of appropriate forms of masculinity. For trans
masculine people (e.g. trans man, FtMs, genderqueers using testosterone) navigating testosterone (or T) use
is shaped by these entwingings as well as histories of medicalisation of trans bodies and experiences. While
not all trans masculine people use testosterone, testosterone remains in many ways fundamental to trans
masculine people’s engagement with the gendered body, socialities and identity construction. How then is
testosterone conceived by these individuals beyond merely as a tool to use for gendered bodily
modification? How does testosterone use, or the expectation of its use, impact trans masculine people’s
experience of their bodies and genders, their identities and communities? And how does testosterone
become a specific kind of object through encounters with trans masculine lives?
J.R. Latham
Constituting trans singularity in medicine
Despite revisions to treatment guidelines and diagnostic descriptions, transgender medicine continues to
operate through a much critiqued paradigmatic narrative of “being born in the wrong body”. In so doing,
trans medicine produces gender and “gender dysphoria” as static, predetermined and independent of
medical encounters, replicating limited notions of gender and sexuality that hinge on gender/genital
“alignment”. This paper illuminates how doing trans medicine in this way constitutes what being trans is,
disavowing (and often literally disallowing) many more trans ontologies from being recognised, valued, or
even imagined. By outlining four axioms that shape the treatment of “gender dysphoria”, I argue that these
medical practices insufficiently account for, and so limit, the necessarily complex and diverse ways that trans
people experience gender, including sexually.
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Sonic practices and identities (Chair, Meri Kytö)
Katsushi Nakagawa
Possible direction of sound art in Japan in the 1980s: Case of SEKINE Hideki
This presentation examines the works of Hideki Sekine – a Japanese practitioner and specialist in the history
of primitive technology, ethnic musical instruments, and cultural history of materials, in the context of sound
art in Japan in 1980s. Sekine created his own musical instruments and also helped some artists of “Sound
Garden” in making their sound instruments. The case will focus on “Sound Garden” exhibitions that were
held six times in Tokyo from 1987–1994 (research in collaboration with Tomotaro Kaneko). As well as
explore possible contexts relevant to these exhibitions such as the prevalence of ethnomusicological thinking
after Fumio Koizumi.
Yang Yeung
Process and Passage in artistic sonic practice – Tetsuya Umeda as case study
This presentation asks: “What would be the equivalent of “process” in visual art in the artistic practice of
sound and listening, “process” that marks the shift of attention from the art object in understanding art?”
This paper then discusses Japanese artist Tetsuya Umeda’s recent works in Hong Kong, Manila (The
Philippines), and Tango-Kyoto (Japan), to think through the relevance and limits of the idea of process in
understanding artistic sonic practices. It proposes the idea of “passage” as in “rite of passage” that informs
us not only about what artists do with sound and listening, but also how art in general works.
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