Events

Join UCLA English for a seminar with Kadji Amin, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Professor Amin will discuss his new chapter, “Trans Negative Affect,” forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect. Please note that this is a closed seminar and an RSVP is required to attend. The chapter will be pre-circulated to those who RSVP for this event.

Register for this event here.

Abstract:

This chapter proposes that scholars attend to how negative affect impacts the qualitative experience of trans life. It begins by sketching how negative affect has become discursively soldered to and even constitutive of transness in the US, from Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966), which depicts transsexuals as uniquely miserable and self-harming, to the DSM-5 (2013), which makes “gender dysphoria” definitional to transness. It proposes that the diagnosis of gender dysphoria and related narratives of trans misery are part of the sociogenesis of trans negative affect. Ultimately, it forwards disability-informed politics that would depathologize transness and make transition-related medical care free upon demand without subscribing to a narrative that conditions medical care upon the promise of “curing” gender dysphoria. The conclusion outlines how scholars might acknowledge bad feelings as central to trans life – the very stuff out of which trans genders are made.

This seminar is co-sponsored by UCLA Gender Studies and UCLA Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, & Queer Studies.

Kadji Amin is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. He is the recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in “Sex” from the University of Pennsylvania and a Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship from Stony Brook University. Amin’s research focuses on the disorienting effects of the queer and transgender past on politicized fields of scholarship. His first book, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Duke 2017) won an Honorable Mention for best book in LGBT studies form the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association. He is currently at work on a second book project, Trans Materialism without Gender Identity, that critiques gender identity as a midcentury psychiatric construct that has done transgender people more harm than good and responds by envisioning a materialist trans politics and theory without gender identity. He is the coeditor, with Amber Jamilla Musser and Roy Pérez, of a special issue of ASAP/Journal on “Queer Form.” Dr. Amin serves on the Editorial Board for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and is the State of the Field Review Editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Questions about the event?
Contact Marta Wallien, Programs and Media Manager
mwallien@english.ucla.edu