New Directions in Trans of Color Scholarship
Presented by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and the Department of Art & Public Policy.
Trans of color scholars, activists, and artists are radically transforming the terrain of gender and sexuality studies today. This roundtable showcases new work in trans of color scholarship, activism, and cultural production. Jian Neo Chen (Ohio State University), madison moore (Virginia Commonwealth University), and Dora Santana (John Jay College, CUNY) speak about their recently published books and works-in-progress that chart exciting new directions in the field—from theorizing trans futures, to Afro diasporic technologies, to queer fabulousness. Moderated by Hentyle Yapp (NYU Department of Art and Public Policy).
Jian Neo Chen (they/he) is associate professor of Queer Studies in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. Their research, teaching, and cultural work focus on transgender and queer aesthetics and embodied practices in literature, visual culture, and contemporary theory and their reimagining of social relations and movements. Their published works include Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement (Duke University Press, 2019) and a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly on “Trans Futures,” co-edited with micha cárdenas, published in November 2019.
madison moore is an artist-scholar, DJ and assistant professor of Queer Studies in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. He is creative director and resident DJ at OPULENCE, a queer techno party and art-collective based in London. madison is the author of Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (Yale University Press, 2018), a cultural analysis of fabulousness. With vigor, grace and humor, in Fabulous madison describes the ways marginalized people stride through their annihilation, turning pain and struggle into opulence. He has been a featured artist at the Yale School of Drama, the Perth Festival, The School of Life Melbourne, American Realness, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and most recently he was in conversation with Billy Porter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. madison is currently at work on a new book project for Yale University Press about queer nightlife titled Dance Mania: A Manifesto for Queer Nightlife. He received his PhD in American Studies at Yale University.
Dr. Dora Santana is a black Brazilian trans woman warrior, scholar, activist, artist, storyteller of experiences embodied in language and flesh. She is an assistant professor of Gender Studies at John Jay College-CUNY and holds a PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies by the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been published in the Transgender Studies Quarterly – TSQ – The Issue of Blackness under the title “Transitionings and Returnings: Experiments with the Poetics of Transatlantic Water,” and the TSQ Issue Trans in Las Americas, whose title is “Mais Viva! Reassembling transness, blackness, and feminism.” She is currently working on her book Trans* Stellar Knot-works: Afro Diasporic technologies, Transtopias and Accessible Futures, where she centers the knowledge production by and on black trans women in the black diaspora, through a range of digital and embodied media, especially in Brazil, the US and in African countries such as Angola.
Dr. Hentyle Yapp is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Public Policy at NYU. He is also affiliated faculty with Performance Studies, Comparative Literature, the Disability Council, and Asian/Pacific/American Institute. Before joining NYU, Yapp was an Assistant Professor and Mellon-Chau Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Women's Studies at Pomona College and lectured at San Francisco State University. His research broadly engages the theoretical and methodological implications of queer, feminist, disability, and critical race studies for questions regarding the state. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Quarterly, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asia, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, and Journal of Visual Culture, amongst other venues. He is also part of the Social Text editorial collective.
No registration required.