Celine Parreñas Shimizu as Keynote Facilitator at TG23

By Zizi Li, 2023 Thinking Gender Coordinator

In lieu of a keynote address, this year’s Thinking Gender Conference will feature interactive presentations and workshops throughout the day with Celine Parreñas Shimizu, T.L. Cowan, and Jas Rault.

Celine Parreñas Shimizu, film scholar and filmmaker, is dean of the Division of Arts and distinguished professor of film and digital media at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She wrote The Proximity of Other Skins (2020), Straitjacket Sexualities (2012), and The Hypersexuality of Race (2007) and co-edited The Feminist Porn Book (2013) and The Unwatchability of Whiteness (2018). Her recent films The Celine Archive (2020) and 80 Years Later: On Japanese American Racial Inheritance (2022) have won several festival awards.

I was first introduced to Shimizu’s scholarship through a feminist and cultural theory class where we read The Feminist Porn Book (2013) co-edited by Shimizu and colleagues. From there, I discovered her 2007 book The Hypersexuality of Race, a nuanced investigation of the sexualized depictions of Asian/American women that combines textual analysis, theoretical inquiry, and ethnographic research with performers in film, video, and theatrical productions. Later, as I was doing research on labor films, I came across and fell in love with Shimizu’s experimental narrative film Super Flip (1997), which centered interviews with Filipino American low-wage workers in San Francisco regarding work and love. All these encounters lead to my excitement toward Shimizu’s participation in Thinking Gender 2023.

The theme for this year’s conference is “Transforming Research: Feminist Methods for Times of Crisis and Possibility.” I came into the conference planning as a graduate student and a junior film and media scholar who is deeply invested in unpacking power relations concerning race, ethnicity, gender, and forms of colonialism and settler colonialism. I look forward to converse with conference participants regarding the possibilities of transformative research methods and formats. One avenue includes considering art/creation as methods (beyond simply an object of research or a platform for research dissemination) and investigating how creative making and critical writing can mutually inform each other. Shimizu’s groundbreaking work in gender, race, and sexuality, as well as her bridging of theory and practice through film production make her an ideal interlocutor for the kind of dialogue we look forward to having at Thinking Gender 2023.

At Thinking Gender 2023, Shimizu will present “Creativity in the Face of Devastation: Methodologies of Research and Practice Across Inequality.” We will also screen her film, The Celine Archive (2020), with a Q&A afterward.

Please visit our website to register to attend the conference and for more information on these events.