05/12/19: The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto

The next meeting of the Queer STS Reading Group will take place on Thursday 5th December from 5pm-6pm in the Alice Farrands Room on the ground floor of the UCL STS Department (22 Gordon Square, WC1H 0AW). It’s also the last meeting of term, the year, and the decade. So if you’ve been meaning to check out the group and haven’t managed to yet, why not do it before the end of the 2010s?

This time, we’ll be discussing Sandy Stone’s (1987) “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto”

“The Empire Strikes Back” is often credited with the emergence of contemporary transgender studies (Stryker, 2004). Inspired in part by Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Stone’s essay forwards and demands the centreing of trans experience/narratives as a way to counter transphobic mis-representation of transgender life from mainstream feminists. (In this sense, Stone’s essay is still depressingly relevant three decades later). Notably, in the interest of a Queer STS, “Empire” points to the role played by the medical establishment in the gatekeeping of gender borders and the pathologising of trans experience. In centreing trans experience in this essay, Stone re-asserts the agency of transgender people under the clinical gaze as having to navigate already entrenched and delimiting cultural definitions of gender and transness.

The essay can be found here: https://sandystone.com/empire-strikes-back.pdf

I really look forward to seeing many of you soon! As ever, all are welcome — regardless of experience (academic or life) or identity.

This group operates with a zero tolerance policy for transphobia. I ask that anyone who is unable to respect this rule please refrain from attending.