Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Zentrum für Transdisziplinäre Geschlechterstudien

Veranstaltet von

Zentrum für transdisziplinäre Geschlechterstudien der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Programm

Most examinations of sex and gender in the academy take bourgeois national histories of North America and Western Europe as their frame of reference. In the histories of Germany, the UK, France, and the United States, doctors and state bureaucracies incorporated sexual and gendered social practices into a taxonomy of identities (or even species, as Foucault puts it,) beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. However, in many sex-gender systems, including those of the proletarian neighborhoods of these nations' metropoles, the assumptions that formed expert orderings did not apply. This lecture surveys the non-cis vernacular categories that ordered these sex-gender systems. The relation between race/class and cisness means that there is no absolute geography to this story. Drawing on source material from Indigenous Americas to the South Asian subcontinent and from the working-class neighborhoods of Kansas City to the courts of Nigerian nobility, the talk will be attuned to a range of sex-gender systems that do not accord with the categories produced by the Euro- American bourgeois in order to, as the title suggests, reveal the provincial status of cisness.

Emma Heaney is Clinical Assistant Professor Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement at New York University. She is a scholar of comparative literature, feminist studies, and trans studies. Her current research derives a theory of the transformation of queer and trans identities from works of literature spanning the long twentieth century. In her book The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (2017) she traces the medicalization of trans femininity and the uptake of the resulting diagnostic in works of literature and theory. Her edited collection, Feminism Against Cisness (2024), gathers essays by trans studies scholars that demonstrate the potential of feminist critique freed of the ideology that assigned sex determines sexed experience.

Referent*innen

Emma Heaney (New York University)

Moderation: Luce deLire

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Semester: Sommersemester 2025

ZtG-Veranstaltungskategorie: Ringvorlesungen/Gastvorträge des ZtG