5:00pm - 7:00pm | Silver Center for Arts and Science, Room 207 | 31 Washington Pl
Organized by Emma Heaney (Clinical Assistant Professor and Faculty Advisor, Experimental Writing, XE, NYU), Alexander Stoffel (Lecturer in International Politics, Queen Mary University of London), and Ida Birkvad (Fellow, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics), this event gathers scholars whose work attests to the diversity of sex/gender systems across time and space in order to put into conversation work produced in the field of trans studies with work in international relations, history, Indigenous Studies, sociology, and anthropology that reveal non-cis social structures of identity and sociality. Whereas trans life has been central to theoretical formulations of sex and gender in the academy, this centrality has generally either zoomed in on individual trans experience or zoomed way out to install transness as an abstract figure that exemplifies concepts about sex and gender. This event seeks to identify cisness as an historically minor sex-gender system and therefore to link racialized, non-bourgeois, and non-conforming genders. The goal is not to flatten differences across time, space, and community. Rather, we view the scope of the diversity of sex/gender systems as revealing the particularity of the idea that assigning sex based on a set of biological credentials into two mutually exclusive types of people has an ideological influence well beyond its real relevance to the lives of people and communities.
Panelists will include Emma Heaney (Clinical Assistant Professor and Faculty Advisor, Experimental Writing, XE, NYU), Durba Mitra (Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Harvard U), Asli Zengin (Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers-New Brunswick U), and Howard Chiang (Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara). The event will take place in person at the Silver Center, but can also be streamed via Zoom here.
