Trans Policy // Trans Poetics

Trans Policy // Trans Poetics: Wisdom from the Five College Archive of Trans Life with Perry Zurn.

Please join us for the final event of the Trans/Queer Studies Colloquium this year on Thursday 4/4 in South College W245. Snacks at 5:30, talk at 5:45. Zoom option available, register here.

Description:
The story of trans life in the university is typically told as the steady implementation of trans-inclusive policies. But we are more than the policies that make (a kind of) room for us. Drawing on archives and interviews across the Five Colleges, I offer a series of vignettes that recenter the trans story in trans poetics--that is, in how we craft our histories, build our struggles, and invoke visions of another world.    

Perry Zurn is Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies, the Honors Program, and the Antiracist Research and Policy Center. Zurn is currently a Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities (‘23-’24) and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies  (‘23-’25). He researches primarily in political philosophy, critical theory, and transgender studies, and collaborates in psychology and network neuroscience. Zurn has produced 7 books, among them Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (2021) and How We Make Each Other: Trans Poetics at the Edge of the University (Duke, forthcoming). Zurn is currently writing two books: one on the philosophy of gender and another on the term “cisgender.”