The Sex Negativity research group, in collaboration with ARC-GS, the Queer Analysis research group, NICA and ASCA welcomes NYU scholar Dr. Emma Heaney for a one-day masterclass and lecture event titled 'Against Cisness'. Following on the recent publication of Dr. Heaney's edited collection Feminism Against Cisness, the event sets the stage for imagining the future of feminist historical, theoretical, and political thought freed from the conceptual strictures of cisness: the fallacy that assigned sex determines sexed experience.

Working from trans historical archives and materialist trans feminist theories, Dr. Heaney explores the ways in which the social processes making cisness compulsory are also implicated in anti-Blackness, misogyny, Indigenous erasure, xenophobia, and bourgeois antipathy for working-class life. In her work, Dr. Heaney proposes a theory of sexual difference that rejects the narratives of cisness and calls for a feminism that does not depend on the ideology's counterrevolutionary pull. Taking up her call to action, we invite scholars and students of various backgrounds to join us for an interdisciplinary conversation aimed at rethinking how we conceptualise transness, sex and sexual difference.

Provisional event programme

• 13:00-15:00, graduate student workshop led by Dr. Emma Heaney (readings and topic TBD)
• 15:00-16:00, break
• 16:00-17:00, keynote lecture from Dr. Emma Heaney
• 17:00-17:10, Dr. Eva Hayward's response to the keynote
• 17:10-17:20, Maxi Wallenhorst's response to the keynote
• 17:20-18:00, open floor and Q&A

Speakers

Emma Heaney is a nationally recognized scholar of comparative literature, feminist studies and trans studies. Her first book, The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory, (Northwestern UP 2017) traces the medicalization of trans femininity and the uptake of the resulting diagnostic in works of literature and theory. Dr. Heaney’s recent  edited collection, Feminism Against Cisness (Duke UP 2024), gathers essays by trans studies scholars that demonstrate the potential of feminist critique freed of the ideology that assigned sex determines sexed experience.

Eva Hayward has taught as assistant professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, the University of Arizona (USA) and the University of New Mexico (USA). A Fulbright Scholar (Austria), she has held postdoctoral fellowships at Duke University (USA) and Uppsala University (Sweden). Her research focuses on ecology, art, and trans studies.

Maxi Wallenhorst is a writer living in Berlin. Next to dance dramaturgy, translation, and art writing, Maxi works on dissociative poetics in capitalism. Recently, Maxi’s essays have appeared in e-flux journal and in Elif Saydam’s Two Cents (Mousse, 2022). In progress: A transvestite romance set in a half-allegorical ’20s Berlin.

Credit Requirements and registration

Students will be able to obtain 1EC for preparatory reading, attendance and active participation in the afternoon graduate student workshop led by Emma Heaney. Students will be able to obtain a further 1EC for preparatory reading, attendance and active participation in the evening keynote lecture including the submission of a 100-200 word critical response to the readings. The readings will be made available closer to the event.

The event is open to RMA students, PhD candidates and academic staff. To register, please email Imogen Grigorovich (m.grigorovich@students.uu.nl), stating which part of the event you are interested in attending.