Department of English

• Thursday, April 14, 2022 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall 401 (reception to follow)

In midcentury America the queen was the central symbol of the gay world before a schism between gay men and trans women unfolded after the Stonewall riots. This talk attends to the literary and social scientific archive of such queens as sovereign figures in “the gay world.” The demise of the street queen by the 1970s mobilizes unresolved tensions about the political and spiritual import of trans femininity to this day.

Gill-Peterson is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), recipient of a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and the Children’s Literature Association Book Award. Drawing on a century’s worth of medical archival evidence, Histories of the Transgender Child establishes not just that trans children have a verifiable history, but that their presumed gender plasticity was in fact central to the development and racialization of transgender medicine. Gill-Peterson has been featured and written about the histories comprising the book in The New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post’s The Lily, and CNN.

Gill-Peterson serves as a General Co-Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. She is the recipient of research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chair in Transgender Studies at the University of Victoria, and the Kinsey Institute for Sexological Research.