Finn Enke -- "A Graphic Exploration of Transfeminist Histories and Contemporary Practice"

"Starting Where We Are: A Graphic Exploration of Transfeminist Histories and Contemporary Practice"

October 11, 2019 @ Northwestern University

Historical analysis invites the voices of past visionaries but also presents profound challenges to contemporary communities yearning for justice in a time of intolerable violences and uncertain futures. Feminists have long recognized that coalitional practice toward a more sustainable present and future requires the ongoing struggle among us to recognize our differences: where we came from, the conditions of our arrival, and who we are now. Yet how do we listen to each other in the present when our respective notions of the past seem to erase something on which the other depends? Are we even sitting at the same table, when we relate so differently to the spatial and social geometries that shape our stories?

This talk uses images from Enke’s graphic inquiry of a transgender childhood in the 1970s—the “hay day” of feminism and prior to the languages of transgender-- to explore the contours of transfeminist histories, methodologies and pedagogies. Calling for a more expansive and dynamic past is to call on the present as a place of practice with all our “cables to rage,” awkward efforts to create language for what cannot (yet) be articulated, and multivalent visions of justice.

Finn Enke is Professor of History, Gender and Women’s Studies, and LGBTQ+ Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Author of Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space and Feminist Activism (Duke University Press, 2007), and editor of Transfeminist Perspectives Within and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (Temple University Press, 2012), Enke’s current work includes a graphic memoir, With Finn and Wing: Growing Up Amphibious in a Nuclear Age, and an essay and comic collection, Transfeminist Pedagogies.

Introduction by Janice Radway (Director of Gender & Sexuality Studies)