Just as same-sex marriage is becoming increasingly legalized and accepted in more and more societies, transgender people’s bodies have been emerging as the new frontier of the gender wars not only in public discourse, but also in feminist theory. These new gender wars—embedded as they are in a more general climate of the rise of ethnonationalist populisms—have also brought to the fore with new force the unresolved hegemonic whiteness of much of academic feminist theory. 

Of course, a single seminar session cannot resolve or even comprehensively map out the many intersecting histories, quandaries, and investments haunting feminism at this particular intersection. However, we will aim to explore some inroads along three vectors: 

1. If gender as all embodiment is relational, trans and cis as the new gender binary may be overstated. If that is the case, what would it mean, if the “trouble” with transgender people is not that they are so different, but that they are very much like cisgender people? What might the epistemic and methodological consequences for feminist theory be, if its object of knowledge and its commitment to bodily liberation compel forms of embodied, entangled, visceral, and intimate inquiry? 
2.  How can thinking through the new gender formations and gender as a perpetually relational process help us understand how gender becomes the medium for how antiblackness, classism, and ableism bear on bodies and lives?
3. How are we to understand the heightened moral investments and discursive moves (callout and cancel culture) in feminist politics at this time? How do these practices relate to anti-racist, anti-carceral feminist commitments?

Texts:

• Bettcher, Talia and Pelagia Goulimari. “Theorizing Closeness.” Angelaki 22:1 (2017): 49-60.

• Dimen, Muriel. “Sexuality and Suffering, Or the Ew! Factor.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 6:1 (2005): 1-18

• Krell, Elías Cosenza. “Is Transmisogyny Killing Trans Women of Color? Black Trans Feminisms and the Exigencies of White Femininity.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 4:2 (2017): 226-242.

• Shotwell, Alexis. “Practicing Freedom: Disability and Gender Transformation.” In Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2014. 139-163. 

Yannik Thiem is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Columbia University and also Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. Thiem specializes in feminist theory, queer theory, religion and politics, critical theory and political philosophy. Major publications include Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility (Fordham UP, 2008), with a new project entitled Queer Nuisances: Race, Religion, Sex and Other Monsters drawing on queer theory, transfeminism, religious studies, critical race theory, and whiteness studies underway. Most of Thiem’s work to date was published under Thiem’s previous name, Annika Thiem, which remains Yannik’s official double as far as the government of Yannik’s country of origin, Germany, is concerned.

Places in this master class are limited so please register early via Eventbrite here.

This masterclass would not be possible without the support of the College of Arts and Social Science, and the School of Philosophy, ANU