The Department of Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) is thrilled to welcome the inaugural Visiting Carlson Scholar this semester, P. Carl. This position is funded from an endowment established by Eleanor M. Carlson in 1995. GWS created the Carlson Visiting Scholar position to bring in scholars each year who can contribute to the curricular, research, and outreach goals of the department. This inaugural position for the fall 2021 semester is focused on strengthening the culture of education, awareness, and support for URI’s transgender community. Dr. Rosaria Pisa, head of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, says our first Visiting Carlson Scholar, “will facilitate the complex, difficult, and honest conversation we need to have about ensuring all students, faculty, and staff feel fully included and affirmed as members of the URI community.”
Carl was inspired to become engaged in the URI community after a faculty member published anti-transgender perspectives. Carl describes himself as a transgender man who wears many hats. Depending on when you ask him, he will identify himself as a writer, scholar, activist, human being, or just a short guy who loves to ride his motorcycle. His recent memoir, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition, earned him praise from the New York Times, the lead creative mind behind Amazon’s Transparent, as well as various high-profile writers including Claudia Rankine, Michael Cunningham, and Elizabeth Kolbert. This semester at URI, Carl will engage with students in GWS classes, as well as the broader URI community, to provide trans-awareness programming.
“Coming into oneself as a trans or nonbinary person in a college setting is a vulnerable and fragile experience and acts of erasure can be life threatening,” Carl said. He describes his approach as focusing on “how to create environments where people feel seen in all of their complexity and where pedagogy and storytelling pull us away from reducing one another to the exterior surfaces of a body toward finding points of connection and a deeper understanding of our differences.” Carl will take a variety of approaches to carry out his goals this semester, some of which include visitations to various GWS classes, hosting a campus-wide reading and discussion of his book, and teaching a writing workshop focused on queer storytelling and engaging trans-awareness work happening on campus.
Most of these events will be open to everyone, and students, faculty, staff, and other community members are encouraged to join the larger campus conversation surrounding trans awareness and inclusion. As far as impact, Carl recognizes that, “It’s hard to quantify what it means to try and make some kind of difference. I am only one person and I don’t represent all trans people or all trans experiences.” Nevertheless, he says his hope in light of anti-trans rhetoric is that “students who felt erased get the opportunity to feel seen and heard, and that my presence is one example of the possibility of a future for trans people as young trans people have so few opportunities to see themselves reflected in the broader culture.”
Read more about P. Carl here: https://pcarl.com/
~Written by Sabrinna Fogarty