Session Submission Summary

Monsters, Cyborgs, Humans: Trans STS and the Reassembly of Science and Technology I

Sat, December 10, 8:30 to 10:30am CST (8:30 to 10:30am CST), Building A, A106

Abstract

Trans bodies and beings have long evoked a reconfiguration of the human. Early trans scholarship likened trans people to monsters (Stryker) and cyborgs (Stone), while more contemporary theory envisions assemblages such as trans time (Halberstam; Horak) and trans technology (Haimson). Transgender people regularly reconfigure their bodies (with tattoos, hormones, and surgeries) as well as gendered social relations and institutions (with new names, pronouns, and forms of identification). Indeed, trans people routinely create new knowledge about the body as they perform ad hoc experiments with different types and dosages of hormones, as well as new knowledge about society as they navigate social and legal transition. Although recognition of the subfield of Trans STS may be new, trans epistemologies are decidedly not.

As we convene in the context of increasingly powerful global backlash to and hatred of trans existence, this panel seeks to understand trans knowledges, sciences, and technologies, as well as their significance to the larger discipline of STS. How can trans genders and epistemologies recuperate and reconfigure our ways of being and knowing? How do trans sciences and technologies imagine new ways or rearrange old ways to make space for more just and equitable futures? How do trans knowledges relate to feminist, crip, Black, and Indigenous knowledges? We welcome papers based on studies of trans people and trans knowledges, as well as papers that consider the histories and possible futures of trans STS.

Individual Presentations

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Chair

Session Organizer