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What Transpires Now: Transgender History and the Future we need

Queer Theory Lecture
Thursday, February 08, 2018
5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Susan Stryker
The Annual Queer Theory Lecture

History is a story we tell in the present that links what we know of the past to a future we envision. In this talk, drawn from her forthcoming book of the same title, gender theorist and historian Susan Stryker examines the trans-temporal dimensions of what gets labelled "transgender" today, but which can be thought of as a more general capacity for life to exceed whatever current configurations it might have. At stake, Stryker contends, in vexing contemporary conflicts over pronouns and public toilets, is a deeper ontological struggle over which fantasies of past and futurity have the ability to ground themselves in materiality and come to count as real.

Susan Stryker is an award-winning scholar and filmmaker whose historical research, theoretical writing, and creative works have helped shape the cultural conversation on transgender topics since the early 1990s. Dr. Stryker earned her Ph.D. in United States History at the University of California-Berkeley in 1992, later held a Ford Foundation/Social Science Research Council post-doctoral fellowship in sexuality studies at Stanford University.

She is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books and anthologies, including Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area (Chronicle 1996), Queer Pulp: Perverse Passions in the Golden Age of the Paperback (Chronicle 2000), The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge 2006).

Contact: Julie Wynmor