Event Description
The choreography of reproductive health care is, among other things, cisnormative. It is presumed that the person accessing care will be cisgender, and the knowledge, policies, practices, technologies, branding/framing, administrative processes and all other elements of the care are choreographically designed around this presumption. Trans people, then, are framed as rare, exceptional, unanticipated disruptions – they interrupt the normative choreography, and are left to improvise. This presentation will share evidence of the cisnormative choreography, by documenting various manifestations of both informational and institutional erasure in reproductive health research, education and clinical care. It will also, importantly, document the improvisatorially resistance of trans people – the myriad of ways that trans people suture together these seemingly disparate elements in new ways, the extensive labour trans people perform in order to reimage and rework reproductive health care spaces and services, in pursuit of care that safe, competent and affirming.
Speaker Bio
Dr. A.J. Lowik is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Sexual Health Equity, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia. Dr. Lowik uses qualitative, arts-based and mixed methods approaches to better understand the reproductive health care needs of trans people, and they have written extensively on the topics of menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, lactation and sterilization. They are the co-editor of The Liminal Chrysalis: Imagining Reproduction and Parenting Futures Beyond the Binary (Demeter Press) and the author of The Trans-Inclusive Abortion Services Manual, which is available in English, French and Spanish and which has been adapted to train abortion providers in Canada, the United States and Argentina. They have a forthcoming book with Lexington Books, entitled “Dancing Outside the Lines: Trans People and the Choreography of Reproductive Health Care,” to be released in late 2023.
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