Arts & Sciences Events
[PAST EVENT] Dr. Susan Stryker at W&M
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Dr. Susan Stryker on campus. Supported by American Studies, GSWS, Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, and History.
Brown Bag Lunch, 10 November, 12-1.30pm, Boswell 314 - Contact [[lsimms, Latasha Simms]]
Lecture, 10 November, 5-6.30pm, Tucker 127A.
Thomas/ine Hall and "The History of Bacon in Virginia": On the Interrelatedness of Sex and Race Classification in Colonial Anglo-America
This lecture revisits an episode in the early history of the Virginia colony well known to scholars of gender and sexuality--the case of the seemingly intersex indentured servant Thomas/ine Hall--and rereads it through contemporaneously emerging concepts of race. It argues that both race and sex categorization in the colonies began to depart from their English antecedents through the articulation of a new biocentric ideology in service to the development of racial chattel slavery. It then illustrates how these emerging cultural logics operate in a once-popular though now obscure theatrical work, Aphra Benn's 1689 play about Bacon's Rebellion, The Widdow Ranter, or, The History of Bacon in Virginia, which revolves around two intertwined plots that depend on cross-racial and cross-gender dressing.
Susan Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women’s Studies. Since retiring from UofA, she has been Presidential Fellow and Visiting Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University (2019-2020), Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women’s Leadership, Mills College (2020-2022), and Marta Sutton Weeks External Faculty Fellow, Stanford University Humanities Institute, 2022-23. She continues to serve as executive editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series ASTERISK: gender, trans-, and all that comes after. She is the author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (2008, 2017), co-editor of the two-volume Transgender Studies Reader (2006, 2013) and The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (2022), as well as co-director of the Emmy-winning documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (2005). She is currently working to complete her book manuscript, Changing Gender (under contract to Farrar Straus Giroux), and developing a variety of film and television projects.