Seminar/Lecture | Against Cisness; with Emma Heaney

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 structures 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.