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, an interview 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@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, 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.
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.
This event is sponsored by the VDP, the Culture & Equality Unit of the University of Vienna, queer@hochschulen, and ACCESTECH / TU Wien for their financial support.
