Of Doubtful Nature: Archive of an Amphibious Childhood in the Nuclear Age

media release: Elvehjem Building, Room L160, 800 University Avenue

Free and open to all.

This Focus on the Humanities lecture is presented in partnership with the UW-Madison Art Department Colloquium and the Visiting Artist/Critic Program.

What is the archive of a child who both did and did not exist? Archival assembly necessarily grapples with what is and is not there as we gather matter from the past in hopes of evidence, stories, and connection across distances. For many trans children, however, the material nature of subjectivity and what is real must be continually interrogated. In this Focus on the Humanities talk oriented around artistic process, Finn Enke reads from With Finn and Wing: Archive of an Amphibious Childhood in Nuclear Age, a graphic memoir that plays with taxonomic instability and existential precarity to materialize the experience of growing up transgender in a family faced with environmental crises and the construction of a twin reactor nuclear power plant a quarter mile from home.

Finn Enke is professor of gender and women’s studies, history, and LGBTQ+ studies at UW-Madison. A recent recipient of the Emily Meade Baldwin Award in the Creative Arts, Enke’s work as historian of gender and social movements is increasingly animated by medium-bending narrative inquiry and expression. Their current work in progress includes the graphic memoir With Finn and Wing: Archive of an Amphibious Life in a Nuclear Age, and a comics and essay collection, Pedagogies of the Impossible: From the Trans on Campus Corpus. Enke is author of Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space and Feminist Activism (2007) and the award-winning Transfeminist Perspectives Within and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (2012).

About the Art Department Colloquium and the Visiting Artist/Critic Program: Formed in 1966, the Visiting Artist/Critic Program is the first and oldest continuously running program of its kind in the nation. For over 40 years, it has attracted some the nation’s most prominent artists, critics, and gallery and museum directors. The program plays a vital role in the department by exposing young artists to the latest developments in fine art, craft and design. Over its history, our Visiting Artist Program has proven to have a wide appeal, reaching out to and drawing attention from the broader University community and the City of Madison as a whole. During their visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, these artists, critics and curators conduct seminars, workshops, in-class presentations, or individual and group critiques in addition to a public lecture. More information is available here, including previous guest artists and critics.