Laura Horak
Biographic Data
| ID | 6364260 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura Horak |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura |
| FAMILY NAME | Horak |
| SIGNATURE | HORAK L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Carleton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5158-3216 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Feminist World-Making with Cinema’s First Nasty Women
Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a ninety-nine-film DVD/Blu-ray set that highlights silent-era comediennes and cross-dressed women. Cocurators Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak organized two live Zoom roundtables with members of the team who had created, taught, or contributed to the project, moderated by FMH editor Jennifer Bean. One included cocurator and film historian Laura Horak, Kino producer Bret Wood, cocurator and silent film archivist Elif …
“We’d like to see trans people at the very top”
Queer film scholar Laura Horak interviews Ann Thomas, founder and president of Transgender Talent, one of the first management companies devoted to managing openly trans performers. Thomas discusses how the various parts of Hollywood that work in the background—from managers and agents to casting directors and breakdown writers—are changing or resisting change. She states her vision for trans people in Hollywood, an industry admittedly devoted to…
Can We Be Visible in This Culture without Becoming a Commodity?”
In this interview, Disclosure director Sam Feder discusses the ambivalence of representation for trans people, their determination to hire as many trans people as possible on set, and how Disclosure evolved into the form it takes today
Gender and the Nasty Women of history
For the past two years, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi have been curating Cinema’s First Nasty Women: a 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set that features 99 archival silent films and will be released by Kino Lorber in August 2022 (see https://wfpp.columbia.edu/cinemas-first-nasty-women/). In this co-written archive piece, they put theory into action and share tantalizing snippets from the collection. Women combust out of the chimney, …
Curating Trans Erotic Imaginaries
This article considers the archival, political, and ethical questions raised by curating a public exhibit of archival trans erotic material through a case study of the author's 2019 exhibit Trans Porn Imaginaries: A Half-Century of Transvestite Lawmen and Gendertrash from Hell, which presented materials from the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies' Sexual Representation Collection and the ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives at the Universi…
Trans Studies
The first academic investigations of trans cinema and media arose from feminist and queer scholarship. However, this scholarship often conceived of trans as an imagined position unconnected to the experiences of actually existing people. This ranged from theorizations of (cis) spectators’ ambivalent identifications with gendered viewing positions to analyzing trans representations as embodiments of queer and postmodern theory. In the last two dec…
Cinematic/Trans*/Bodies Now (and Then, and to Come)
Trans on YouTube
For the first time, media created by trans people is being produced, distributed, and consumed on a mass scale. This article argues that trans YouTube videos succeed because their formal strategies exploit the platform's penchant for the personal and the spectacular. Trans “talking head” videos expand the tradition of the feminist consciousness-raising documentary to establish trans youth as experts and create a sense of intimacy between vloggers…
Would you like to sin with Elinor Glyn?” Film as a Vehicle of Sensual Education
Laura Horak is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently writing a dissertation titled “Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-dressed Women in US Silent and Early Sound Film.”
Trans on YouTube
For the first time, media created by trans people is being produced, distributed, and consumed on a mass scale. This article argues that trans YouTube videos succeed because their formal strategies exploit the platform's penchant for the personal and the spectacular. Trans “talking head” videos expand the tradition of the feminist consciousness-raising documentary to establish trans youth as experts and create a sense of intimacy between vloggers…
Would you like to sin with Elinor Glyn?” Film as a Vehicle of Sensual Education
Laura Horak is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently writing a dissertation titled “Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-dressed Women in US Silent and Early Sound Film.”
Cinematic/Trans*/Bodies Now (and Then, and to Come)
Would you like to sin with Elinor Glyn?” Film as a Vehicle of Sensual Education
Laura Horak is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently writing a dissertation titled “Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-dressed Women in US Silent and Early Sound Film.”
Trans on YouTube
For the first time, media created by trans people is being produced, distributed, and consumed on a mass scale. This article argues that trans YouTube videos succeed because their formal strategies exploit the platform's penchant for the personal and the spectacular. Trans “talking head” videos expand the tradition of the feminist consciousness-raising documentary to establish trans youth as experts and create a sense of intimacy between vloggers…
Trans Studies
The first academic investigations of trans cinema and media arose from feminist and queer scholarship. However, this scholarship often conceived of trans as an imagined position unconnected to the experiences of actually existing people. This ranged from theorizations of (cis) spectators’ ambivalent identifications with gendered viewing positions to analyzing trans representations as embodiments of queer and postmodern theory. In the last two dec…
Cinematic/Trans*/Bodies Now (and Then, and to Come)
Curating Trans Erotic Imaginaries
This article considers the archival, political, and ethical questions raised by curating a public exhibit of archival trans erotic material through a case study of the author's 2019 exhibit Trans Porn Imaginaries: A Half-Century of Transvestite Lawmen and Gendertrash from Hell, which presented materials from the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies' Sexual Representation Collection and the ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives at the Universi…
“We’d like to see trans people at the very top”
Queer film scholar Laura Horak interviews Ann Thomas, founder and president of Transgender Talent, one of the first management companies devoted to managing openly trans performers. Thomas discusses how the various parts of Hollywood that work in the background—from managers and agents to casting directors and breakdown writers—are changing or resisting change. She states her vision for trans people in Hollywood, an industry admittedly devoted to…
Can We Be Visible in This Culture without Becoming a Commodity?”
In this interview, Disclosure director Sam Feder discusses the ambivalence of representation for trans people, their determination to hire as many trans people as possible on set, and how Disclosure evolved into the form it takes today
Gender and the Nasty Women of history
For the past two years, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi have been curating Cinema’s First Nasty Women: a 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set that features 99 archival silent films and will be released by Kino Lorber in August 2022 (see https://wfpp.columbia.edu/cinemas-first-nasty-women/). In this co-written archive piece, they put theory into action and share tantalizing snippets from the collection. Women combust out of the chimney, …
Feminist World-Making with Cinema’s First Nasty Women
Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a ninety-nine-film DVD/Blu-ray set that highlights silent-era comediennes and cross-dressed women. Cocurators Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak organized two live Zoom roundtables with members of the team who had created, taught, or contributed to the project, moderated by FMH editor Jennifer Bean. One included cocurator and film historian Laura Horak, Kino producer Bret Wood, cocurator and silent film archivist Elif …
Art (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (6 works) · Gender Studies (5 works) · Media studies (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Art history (4 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Law (3 works) · Movie theater (3 works)