Kadji Amin - “We Are All Non-Binary: A Brief History of Accidents”

May. 2

5:00–6:30 pm
Hybrid location: 1126 E. 59th St. and via Zoom

This talk offers a genealogy of the emergence of nonbinary identity, not as a progress narrative in which we move toward an enlightened recognition of the many types of human gender and sexual diversity, but rather as the outcome of a slow avalanche of historical accidents. The talk foregrounds the harms that the coinage and idealization of normative identities – from heterosexuality, to cisgender, to binary – has wrought on ordinary gender-variant people, particularly trans femmes, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Along with idealization, the talk identifies divergence, binarism, and autology as four logics that have driven the historical production of new categories of gender and sexuality. The talk concludes with a proposal for how we might throw a wrench in this Western identity machine.
 
Dr. Kadji Amin is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. He is the author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Duke University Press, 2017), and is working on a second book on Backwards Trans Theory.
 
This hybrid event will take place in-person at the Social Sciences Tea Room, located on second floor of the Social Sciences Research Building (1126 East 59th Street) and on Zoom. Registration is required to attend the Zoom option. The event is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.