Queer, Trans, and Feminist STS Research

PIs: Diana Cage (PhD Student)

Faculty Participants
Elizabeth Freeman
Christoph Hanssmann
Joe Dumit
Maxe Crandall (Stanford University)

Graduate Student Participants
Seon-Hye Moon
Willa Smart
Cavar

The Queer, Trans, Feminist STS Research Cluster is an interdisciplinary working group of scholars across UC Davis. This cluster is designed as a lab and collaboratory and seeks to unify faculty and students across the university who are interested in thinking science and technology studies through the lens of queer, trans, and feminist studies. We design our collaborations as incubators for co-authored articles, books, conference papers, and edited collections.

The Research Cluster will intervene in challenges that come with working in transgender studies, queer/crip studies, and other fields where no formal university support system exists. We are committed to studying transfeminist and queer performance, media, and art as sites of knowledge production and scientific inquiry.

We are dedicated to centering transgender studies, trans health, and body sovereignity in our conversations and and events. Guiding questions include: How can we use strategies from trans and queer studies, medical anthropology, performance studies, and STS to innovate social change? How is science a cultural practice? How can students mobilize and organize to do interdisciplinary work where formal support systems do not always exist?

The cluster holds open meetings each quarter to share ideas, work, and write together. We also curate events, workshops, writing retreats, and guest speakers. Events are open to everyone and we encourage interested students and faculty to get involved.

Upcoming Events

Winter 2023

March 2 - Kay Gabriel in Conversation with Maxe Crandall

In celebration of Gabriel’s second poetry collection A Queen in Buck’s Country (Nightboat 2022), we host a conversation between two trans writers working in lyric, experimental, and ever-expanding forms.

In A Queen in Bucks County, Gabriel’s protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men “buy him things,” lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.

Trish Salah describes Queen as “a hot mess of the best sort, lolling about and luxuriating in the fruits of the hustle, hungry for the next, marinating in and musing on friendship, ruins, The Valley of the Dolls, Jack Spicer, and gossiping with Gabriel’s loves about what distracts, amuses or revolts, or could. Shiv Kotecha writes, “Kay Gabriel’s writing makes radical altruism seem possible.”

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. With Andrea Abi-Karam, she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. She’s the author of Kissing Other People or the House of Fame and A Queen in Bucks County.

Maxe Crandall is a poet, playwright, and director. His performance novel about AIDS archives and intergenerational memory The Nancy Reagan Collection made the NYPL’s Best 10 Poetry Books of 2020, LitHub’s 65 Favorite Books of 2020, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. He is the author of the chapbooks Emoji for Cher Heart and Together Men Make Paradigms, and is the founder of the theater company Beautiful Moments in Popular Culture. Maxe is Associate Director of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Stanford University.

June 6th, 4:00pm, Zoom
 
A conversation with Dr. Marquis Bey to exchange thoughts, ideas, and provocations from their latest book, Cistem Failure.
 
In Cistem Failure Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks, What does it mean to have a gender that “matches” one’s sex---that is, to be cisgender---when decades of feminist theory have destroyed the belief that there is some natural way to be a sex? Moving from The Powerpuff Girls to the greeting “How ya mama’n’em?” to their own gender identity, Bey finds that cisgender is too flat as a category to hold the myriad ways that people who may or may not have undergone gender-affirmative interventions depart from gender alignment. At the same time, blackness, they contend, strikes at the heart of cisgender’s invariable coding as white: just as transness names a non-cis space, blackness implies a non-cis space. By showing how blackness opens up a way to subvert the hegemonic power of the gender binary, Bey makes a case for an antiracist gender abolition project that rejects cisgender as a regulatory apparatus.
 
Dr. Marquis Bey is currently Assistant Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Their work concerns black feminist theorizing, trans and nonbinary studies, abolition, and philosophy. Most recently, they authored Black Trans Feminism and Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, both published with Duke University Press in 2022.
 

Spring 2023

TBA

McKenzie Wark discusses her new book, Raving (Duke 2023)

What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world? In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York’s thriving underground queer and trans rave scene. Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures. Raving to techno is an art and a technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them. Extending the rave’s sensations, situations, fog, lasers, drugs, and pounding sound systems onto the page, Wark invokes a trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital.

McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born, New York based writer, whose recent books include Capital is Dead (Verso), Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte) and Philosophy for Spiders: on the low theory of Kathy Acker (Duke). Her correspondence with Kathy Acker was published as I'm Very Into You (Semiotexte). Her next book, Raving, will be published in the Duke Practice series in April 2023.