Annual Queer Theory Lecture in Honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

On October 14, 2021 a spirited audience assembled in the East Duke Parlors and online for the Annual Queer Theory Lecture in Honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick delivered by Jules Gill-Peterson (Johns Hopkins University, Department of History). Gill-Peterson’s talk “Queer Theory Killed Venus Xtravaganza: What’s Trans About Queer Studies Now?” previewed work toward her new book project A Brief History of Transfemininity. And, as Professor Gabriel Rosenberg noted in his introduction, it was the first in-person speaker event most people in the room had attended since spring 2020, a long-awaited opportunity to reconnect with intellectual community.

Gill-Peterson’s lecture mined the longstanding “family drama” between queer studies and trans studies. Since the ’90s, the story goes, trans studies has critiqued queer theory for reducing trans people to allegories, instrumentalizing them in the name of its political aspirations. Gill-Peterson argued that contemporary trans studies scholarship similarly stumbles when it invokes the trans woman of color as a mere “figure in whose name activism or intersectional scholarship is done.” What would it mean, Gill-Peterson asked, to consider the trans woman of color as a subject rather than an object of knowledge? Doing so entails attending to the archive where histories of gender variance cannot be meaningfully disarticulated from histories of homosexuality, and the queer/trans academic sibling rivalry is revealed to be a relatively minor part of a massive historical process whereby “sexuality” becomes separate from “gender.”

Gill-Peterson argued that these histories help us understand recent anti-trans moral panics, when over one hundred anti-trans bills—often targeting children in schools and sports—have been considered in the United States in the past year alone. Gill-Peterson noted that the state has cyclically targeted gender variance, as gay children become enfolded into the state as acceptable along racial lines only for trans children become the focus of a brutal pathologizing discourse.

Gill-Peterson concluded her talk with a clarion call to reframe transfemininity not as a “subdivision of generic trans” or “a conceptual predicate to a politically virtuous queer” but rather as a historical form that concerns categories of criminalization and labor, such as sex work. This would be a step, as Gill-Peterson put it, toward making “women like Venus Xtravaganza, black and brown trans women…just as much the ambivalent, complex, and split subjects and objects of knowledge production as anyone else in the academy.” 

In a lively Q&A, Gill-Peterson offered insight into the difficulties inherent in archival work, as well as the possibilities opened up by considering racialized transfemininity as a category of historical analysis.