‘Against Cisness’ — A Seminar and Lecture with Emma Heaney

Event |  ‘Against Cisness’ — A Seminar and Lecture with Emma Heaney
Date: 14 June 2024
Time: 13:00-18:00
Location: University of Amsterdam, OMHP, rooms C 1.17 and C 0.17
Organisers: Marija Cetinić, Diego Semerene, Eliza Steinbock, Imogen Grigorovich
Registration: m.grigorovich@students.uu.nl
Registration deadline: 14 June 2024
Credits: 1 or 2 ECTS

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.

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.

Speakers

Emma Heaney is a nationally recognized scholar of comparative literature, feminist studies and trans studies. She is the author of The New Woman and the editor of Feminism Against Cisness. Her book about the political economy and ontological provocation of gestation, This Watery Place, is forthcoming from Pluto Press in 2025.

Eva Hayward is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She has also taught at 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. She is a doctoral student at the Leuphana University Lüneburg where she is working on a trans Marxist poetics of metabolism. She is also currently writing a novel, working title: Sex Without the City.

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.