T236.
Queer Speculation: Transing Genre, Transing Gender
Thursday, February 8, 2024
3:20 pm to 4:35 pm
Queerness is everywhere. Yet so, too are attacks on queer lives, stories, and art. Too often, these attacks—and the erasures and gaps they leave behind—become what we know of queer history. But might introducing speculative elements into narratives allow us to recover a fuller past and future? The writers on this panel will discuss how we deploy imaginative, fantastical, and fabulist moments in our nonfiction, fiction, and hybrid work, transing both gender and genre to remake a queerer world.
Participants
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body, which received a Lambda Award and was translated into eleven languages, and the forthcoming Both and Neither. A 2023 United States Artists fellow, they live in Vancouver, Canada, where they are the Rogers Chair in creative nonfiction at UBC.
Kai Cheng Thom is the author of six books in multiple genres and a winner of the ALA Stonewall Honor Book and Publishing Triangle Awards. Her work on trans liberation and transformative justice has been widely cited and reviewed in publications including Teen Vogue and the New York Times.
KJ Cerankowski is the author of the award-winning book Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming. His current book project Roar of Wanting: Touching Trans History has received support from the Newberry Library, Yale’s Beinecke Library, and Harvard-Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library. He teaches at Oberlin College.
Clare Sears is author of the award-winning book Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Duke UP). Their writing on queer history also appears in Jacobin, GLQ, WSQ, Routledge History of Queer America, and the SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies.
Raquel Gutiérrez is a writer, critic, and educator. Her/Their first book Brown Neon was just published by Coffee House Press. She/They are a 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism. Gutiérrez teaches in the Oregon State University-Cascades low-residency creative writing MFA Program.
