Trans Liminality: Histories from Weimar and Nazi Germany

Focusing on trans women's subjectivities, this talk explores the micro and macro registers of how everyday trans life was experienced, policed, and cut short across the Weimar and Nazi regimes, sometimes in surprising-but always in uneven-ways.

Zavier Nunn is the postdoctoral associate on the theme 'Histories of the Transgender Present' in the Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies Department at Duke University. His PhD dissertation provides an everyday history of trans feminine life in Weimar and Nazi Germany, which de-idealizes the European medico-legal codification of trans identity. Across his research, he uses micro-historical methods to unpick how macro systems and institutions are stitched together, and how affects circulate on a personal and collective level. His work is published in Past & Present and forthcoming in Gender & History and German History.