T.L. Cowan (she/they) is an Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Arts Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Her creative-research practice moves between page, stage, and screen, including the work of her alter-egos, Mrs. Trixie Cane and the Aging Supermodel, as well as the “GLITTERfesto: An Open Call in Trinity Formation for a Revolutionary Movement of Activist Performance Based on the Premise That Social Justice is Fabulous,” which is featured in the exhibition GLITTER, at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (28 February to 12 October 2025).
Authors | T.L. Cowan
Articles on Amodern by T.L. Cowan
TECHNOLOGIES OF FABULOUS, TRANSMEDIAL DRAG & MINOR DIGITIZATION
Trans- Feminist and Queer Cross-Platform Cabaret Methods-of-Scale
This performance-essay begins with a crip-biographical narrative that accounts sickness, lateness, and disorder and swerves away from a productive-only sense of scholarly value. Building significantly on the work of artist Wendy Coburn and her posthumous retrospective exhibition “Fables for Tomorrow,” it identifies and offers an account for “technologies of fabulous”: applied knowledges that are practiced within, and emerge from, the small-world possibilities created by, and small-scale methods at work in, cabaret and other minor Trans-Feminist and Queer (TFQ) spaces; the methods we use to re-access these site-specific and translocal knowledges once an event has passed; and the techniques of knowledge production that make possible the performance or production.