12 May
2025
12 May
'25
5:18 p.m.
Dear all,
I am excited to invite you to the next installments of the
Trans*Formations series at the Department of Philosophy!
This series of talks and workshops, supported by the Vienna Doctoral
School of Philosophy, provides insights into recent developments in
trans theorizing.
This time, we will be joined by Prof. Emma Heaney, who is a Clinical
Assistant Professor and Faculty Advisor for Experimental Writing at New
York University (US). She will give both a workshop (25 participants,
booking required) and a public talk that everyone is welcome to!
Please find all the info below and in the flyers attached to this mail,
and disseminate to all who might be interested!
Trans*Formations Workshop: On the Cisness of the Bourgeoisie: A Workshop
with Professor Emma Heaney
25.6.2025, 18:00 - 19:30, HS 3A (NIG, 3rd Floor)
This workshop will consider recently published and forthcoming work by
American scholar of Trans Studies and Comparative Literature: Emma
Heaney. Participants will read the introduction to Heaney's recently
published edited collection,_ Feminism Against Cisness_ [1], an
interview [2] with feminist theorist Sophie Lewis (_Full Surrogacy Now_,
_Abolish the Family_, _Enemy Feminisms_), and a forthcoming interview
that addresses questions of historical and linguistic translation in
decentering Anglophone texts (and histories of Western Europe and the
United States) in queer and trans theory. The historical focus on this
workshop is tracing the itinerary of transness and cisness in
medicalization of sex and sexuality from the mid-19th century to the
mid-20th century. Theoretical questions focus on the definition of sex,
the status of the feminine in regard to sex distinctions in the
foliations of the twentieth century, and the imposition of cisness as an
ideology that obfuscates the understanding of sex on both the
experiential and the political level.
To join the workshop, please sign up via e-mail to
flora.loeffelmann(a)univie.ac.at. You will then be sent the workshop
material! Participants are expected to read the material before the
workshop so a productive discussion can be ensured.
Thanks to the support of queer@hochschulen [3], there is a also a
limited number of travel stipends available for university students from
other Austrian universities. Please indicate in your sign-up mail if you
would like to apply for one!
The workshop will be in English with ÖGS translation.
Trans*Formations Talk: Provincializing Cisness
26.6.2025, 19:30 - 21:00, HS 3A (NIG, 3rd Floor)
Most examinations of sex and gender in the academy take bourgeois
national histories of North America and Western Europe as their frame of
reference. In the histories of Germany, the UK, France, and the United
States, doctors and state bureaucracies incorporated sexual and gendered
social practices into a taxonomy of identities (or even species, as
Foucault puts it,) beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. However, in
many sex-gender systems, including those of the proletarian
neighborhoods of these nations' metropoles, the assumptions that formed
expert orderings did not apply. This lecture surveys the non-cis
vernacular categories that ordered these sex-gender systems. The
relation between race/class and cisness means that there is no absolute
geography to this story. Drawing on source material from Indigenous
Americas to the South Asian subcontinent and from the working-class
neighborhoods of Kansas City to the courts of Nigerian nobility, the
talk will be attuned to a range of sex-gender systems that do not accord
with the categories produced by the Euro- American bourgeois in order
to, as the title suggests, reveal the provincial status of cisness.
The talk will be in English with ÖGS translation.
I want to thank the VDP [4], the Culture & Equality Unit [5] of the
University of Vienna, queer@hochschulen [3], and ACCESTECH / TU Wien [6]
for their financial support.
Bio: Emma Heaney is a scholar and teacher of feminist theory,
comparative literature, and trans studies. Her first book, _The New
Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory
_(Northwestern 2017) is a study of the prominence of the medicalized
figure of trans femininity in works of twentieth-century literature and
philosophy. Her edited collection _Feminism Against Cisness _(Duke 2024)
gathers essays that demonstrate the nature and potential of feminist
thought unobscured by the counterrevolutionary mystification of assigned
sex. _This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation --- _a political and
phenomenological report from the gestational sensorium against cisness,
capital, and genocide --- is forthcoming from Pluto Press in November
2025. Her current book project is a sequel edited collection that draws
on the work of scholars from many disciplines and areas of geographical
and historical focus to reveal the provincial nature of the ideology of
cisness. Forthcoming essays theorize the emergence of the trans-gay
distinction in the twentieth century via literary representations. She
is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the XE program at New York
University, where she serves as faculty advisor for the Advanced
Certificate in Experimental Writing.
With all the best wishes and hoping to see many of you at the events,
Flora Löffelmann, MA MA
Pronouns: they/them (for more info see:
https://www.mypronouns.org/what-and-why/)
Happy about a gender neutral "hello"!
Department of Philosophy at University of Vienna
Links:
------
[1] https://www.dukeupress.edu/feminism-against-cisness
[2] https://pinko.online/web/on-the-cisness-of-the-bourgeoisie
[3] https://queer-at-hochschulen.org/
[4] https://vd-philosophy.univie.ac.at/
[5] https://personalwesen.univie.ac.at/en/culture-equality/
[6] https://www.experiencing-access.eu/de/news/