Tell Me The Truth
Toronto-based multi-media artist Chase Joynt, and Kristen Schilt (University of Chicago, Department of Sociology), explore the construction of public narratives about institutional and individual identities in a year-long project entitled Tell Me The Truth. Throughout 2013-14, Joynt & Schilt will curate a series of screenings, readings, and multi-media installations that highlight queer artistic collaboration in an attempt to deploy and disrupt positions of scholarly, artistic and experiential authority.
Chase Joynt
Fellow
Kristen Schilt
Fellow
Chase Joynt
Chase Joynt is a multi-media artist and writer who strategically employs personal narrative as a means to trouble understandings of gender and violence. Recently awarded the EP Canada/Canada Film Capital Award for Emerging Canadian Artist and the Jury Award at the Regent Park Film Festival, Chase's film Akin is currently being exhibited at festivals in Canada, the US and internationally. His last film, Everyday to Stay was awarded Best Short Film while on tour with Madrid's International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and the Jury Award for Best Documentary in Bangalore, India. Chase’s latest media installation project Resisterectomy was curated by The Feminist Art Gallery in Toronto, and presented as a solo exhibition in collaboration with Mary Bryson at Access Gallery in Vancouver, BC.
With creative non-fiction writing published in FUSE, Shameless Magazine, Original Plumbing and the anthology Letters For My Brothers, Chase continues to create work that is being distributed to both national and international audiences and venues. With live performance work showcased by the National Queer Arts Festival, RADAR Productions and CounterPulse in San Francisco, Chase recently starred as Mars Brito, the lead character in John Greyson’s Murder in Passing. Launched in January of 2013, Murder in Passing is widely regarded as the most ambitious transmedia public narrative project available on public screens worldwide. Chase holds a BA from the UCLA School of Theater Film and Television, and is a PhD candidate in Film at York University in Toronto.
Kristen Schilt
Kristen Schilt is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006. Her research interests center on sociology of gender and sexualities, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of work and occupations. A central focus of her work is finding new ways to make visible the taken-for-granted cultural assumptions about gender, sexuality, and biology that serve to naturalize and reproduce social inequality. In 2010, she published the monograph, Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality (University of Chicago Press). In this book, she illustrates how the workplace experiences of transgender men can help to illuminate the organizational and interactional processes that contribute to the persistence of gender, race, and sexuality-based inequalities in the workplace.
Her second book project in the works is entitled, The ‘Before and After’ of Major Life Transformations: Biological Authenticity and the Reproduction of Inequality. She examines how commonsense ideas about the biological origins of social differences ease or heighten inequalities for marginalized groups through an analysis of four case studies of individuals making major life transformations in identities commonly understood to be both stable and shaped by biology: weight, gender, sexual orientation, and Jewish identity. Schilt examines how biological frames are used to authenticate or invalidate the legitimacy of these transformations, drawing on participant observation of support groups, in-depth interviews with life changers, people who knew them “before and after,” and the gatekeepers who facilitated these transitions (such as doctors and rabbis). The project intersects with sociological questions about the role of science in the popular imagination, as well as how biological frames for social difference relate to inclusion, identity validation, and civil liberties.