Susan Stryker is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. She is a historian, writer, educator, artist, documentary filmmaker, and human rights activist. Her work lies at the intersection of Queer Theory and Transgender Studies. She is the Director of the Institute for LGBTQ Studies. She won an Emmy for her documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (2005). She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback (2001) and Transgender History (2008), and is the co-author of Kiss My Genders (2019).
In her lecture, Stryker discussed the intersection of scholarship, filmmaking and grassroots activism in her interdisciplinary approach to social justice and academia. Stryker opened by discussing the statistics that govern our understanding of transgender people, showing that simply being perceived as trans exposes one to premature death and narrows their life’s potential. In this context, every act as a trans person is an act of revolution, and simply breathing becomes a site of struggle. Throughout her lecture, she outlined a model for critical trans histories as a necessary history to understand the roots and methods of the subjugations of trans people. It was humbling, Stryker suggested, to seek an understanding of trans history and your place in the world without universalizing your own experience in harmful ways. Stryker outlined the first steps of a critical transgender history: an unshakeable curiosity in the actual existence of radical otherness that exceeds your grasp; openness towards encounter with incommensurable difference; humility regarding the partialness of one’s own knowledge; and a deep ethical regard for the worth of others. The goal of such a project should be to change understandings of gender to make it possible for trans people to survive and thrive in bodies that are disruptive to dominant forms of social organization. She ended her lecture by warning against folding trans history into a progress narrative or allowing it to be co-opted by Western powers as the next frontier of liberty.
Stryker’s Dunning Trust lecture was held on February 26, 2015. Listen to an audio recording of the lecture below.