Sex and Gender Archives - Public Seminar

Sex & Gender

The Sun is the Size of a Human Foot

An Interview with Andrea Long Chu

October 29, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

But I think the more proper question is: “Whose foot?” It’s not about the foot not “actually” being the size of the sun. It's the fact that there's necessarily a subjective relation that changes from person to person. So I think the place where truth becomes important is not actually ...

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My Butch Career: An Interview With Esther Newton

Resisting gender conformity, coming out in the nineteen-seventies, and fighting for world liberation.

September 9, 2019 • by Theresa Smalec and Esther Newton

I interviewed Esther Newton about her new memoir, My Butch Career on June 20, 2019. Newton earned her PhD in 1968 and published Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (1972), the first major anthropological study of a gay-identified community in America. Though she researched drag queen culture and desired women sexually, Newton resisted the norms of ...

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We Still Need Pronoun Go-Rounds

A response to Jen Manion

December 3, 2018 • by Dean Spade

Jen Manion’s thoughtful and provocative essay, "The Performance of Transgender Inclusion: The pronoun go-round and the new gender binary," proposes that having participants in group spaces identify their pronouns to each other causes more harm than good. I disagree. For almost two decades, I have been working to address the harm ...

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The Performance of Transgender Inclusion

The pronoun go-round and the new gender binary

November 27, 2018 • by Jen Manion

The first time someone asked me my pronoun was about a decade ago at a meeting of directors of LGBTQ centers from colleges and universities in the Northeast. Sitting around a table for our first session, we were invited to share our names, pronouns, and the school we represented. I ...