Transgender Storytelling: Accounts of Oppositional Being and Becoming
Description
What is the difference between being and becoming? Considering concepts like Jose Munoz’s queer futurity, we can determine that transgender history and the impact of this ever-present, growing, thriving-against-all-odds community both is and is yet to be. Preciado claims that through “radical otherness” trans people have “announce[d] another order of knowledge, and the possibility of another ontology and another politics” via dis/identification with the cisgender enforcement of normative social realities. Trans storytelling is an artform which exemplifies how transness creates being through disidentifying, by exploding known boundaries and binary distinctions. Trans storytelling has worked across modes, genres, cultures, and time to reconstruct each of these categories, becoming a political and social force which rearranges the fabric of our global existence. Trans destruction, subversion, and reworking of boundaries opens up the past, present, and future to infinite possibility.
Ideal submissions consider the impact and potential of writing and media created by transgender people, especially in relation to the theme of being and becoming. Examples of such works can include anything from fictionalized accounts and retellings of becoming such as Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi and Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body by Megan Milks to memoir and auto-theoretical works like Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis by Grace Lavery, A Life in Trans Activism by A. Revathi, and Testo Junkie by Paul Preciado. Additionally, the organizers encourage abstracts that consider contributions of film and television from trans creators such as The Matrix, I Saw The TV Glow, and Orlando: My Political Biography. While many of our example texts are of Western origin, submissions from a variety of perspectives, cultures, and nationalities are welcome. Investigations on any literature or media created by trans people which explore the ways in which transness rethinks being and becoming or reflects on boundaries and borders, are invited.
Below is a list of central questions we hope to address through this seminar:
How are transgender people de/reconstructing themselves in film and literature? What is the boundary between trans auto-theory and memoir? How do trans communities address the difference between being and becoming? How does the meaning of gender change when it is “trans”? Are fictionalized accounts of transness still “real”? How does trans storytelling reveal evidence of, as Amin puts it, “divergence as a means of managing categorical instability” in the context of formulations of ‘gender-sexuality’? Alternatively, how does Bey’s understanding of “transness” as an “unfixation [that] destabilizes destinational desires” reveal itself through trans narratives? And how can we define a “trans narrative” or “trans story”?
…And others we have yet to ask.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Christine Prevas (they/them) is a lecturer in writing at Columbia University. They received their PhD in English and Comparative Literature, with a focus in gender and sexuality studies, from Columbia in 2025. Their dissertation, "Architectures of Gender and the American Haunted House," explored the relationship between domestic architecture and the construction of gendered subjectivity in contemporary American horror media.
Speaker Bio
Tim Welch is a queer-trans scholar in film and new media studies. They examine how trans and queer creators enact being and becoming through storytelling, performance, and digital media. Their current work explores queer and trans witchcraft, analyzing how digital spaces, ritual, and aesthetic experimentation conjure trans futurity and challenge normative structures of identity.
Speaker Bio
Dr. M. Eliatamby-O’Brien is an Associate Professor and the Director of the WGSS Program at CWU. Their work examines autographics by refugees and LGBTQ + individuals. They co-direct TransRural Lives, a digital storytelling project focused on rural transgender older adults throughout the Pacific Northwest. Their recent publications can be found in Journal of Intercultural Studies, The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.
Speaker Bio
Yuhan Huang is an assistant professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she researches cultural discourses surrounding gender-based violence in contemporary China. She is currently writing a book manuscript titled Gender-based Violence in Contemporary Chinese Youth Narratives: Reverse Victimhood and Polyphonic Resistance. She is also a gender justice activist and actively involved in trans-feminist activism in Sinophone communities in Toronto.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Míša Stekl is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Their current project, “Accursed Races: Anti-Blackness and Queer/Trans Modernity,” explores how modern regimes of gender and sexuality are parasitic upon anti-Black hierarchies of race. Their work appears in Diacritics, GLQ, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, and South Atlantic Review. Míša holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford.
Speaker Bio
Tp Coughlin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis. Their dissertation traces the "pre-history" of nonbinary identity.
Speaker Bio
Daniel Everhart is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, IL, and is ABD at the University of Illinois Chicago in Hispanic Literary and Cultural Studies. As a queer cultural historian, his research focuses on contemporary peninsular visual and literary cultures in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a particular emphasis on film, narrative, visual art, and performance.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Roshaya Rodness is a Sessional Lecturer in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her research has appeared in Canadian Literature, Chiasma: A Site for Thought, World Picture, New Centennial Review, Criticism, the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, and will soon appear in Angelaki on topics that include queer theory, cinema, dreams, post-continental philosophy, queer literature, and stuttering. Her writing can also be found in Salon.com and The Conversation.
Speaker Bio
Ezekiel Greenwood is a student in the Literature, Media, and Culture program at Florida State University. He received his BA in History and International Affairs with a concentration in Anthropology also at FSU. He is interested in intersections of trans/queer theory and Marxism, stemming from a dissatisfaction in popular and academic definitions and applications of each. He is currently the Art Editor for Southeast Review and the Organizing Chair for FSU's chapter of Graduate Assistants United.
Speaker Bio
Liam Kusmierek (they, them, their) is an English Literature Ph.D. candidate at the University of Rochester. They explore liminality, queer and trans* theory, and Black Studies. They are fascinated by the compulsory consumption of liminal public spaces, aiming to elevate a queer time/space as it is coded within the quotidian at the intersection of quantum theory, sexuality, women's, and gender studies. They aim to (re)imagine existence by dismantling the ongoing global colonial experiment.
Speaker Bio
Teddy Shusterman is a first year History PhD student at UC Berkeley, studying the relationship between clinical texts and trans narrative(s) in the United States during the latter half of the 20th century. They received their B.A. in the departments of Sociology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. Their research is informed by their work in gender-affirming healthcare and emergency medicine.