In the summer of 1993, with no academic job and little prospect of getting one, a recent graduate of Berkeley’s PhD program called Susan Stryker stepped onstage at an academic conference dressed in combat boots, threadbare levis, a black lace body suit, and a shredded Transgender Nation t-shirt and read the first iteration of an essay titled “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage”. The title evoked the moment in Mary Shelley’s novel when the monster speaks back to its maker, revealing the depth and complexity of its embodied experience. Stryker set out to transform the rage that she and other transgender activists felt at their socially imposed marginality into a foundation for intellectual inquiry and political action. Published one year later in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, it was one of the first articles in a peer-reviewed journal by an openly transgender author, and it helped to create the field of transgender history.
The story of Susan Stryker’s emergence as a pioneer of transgender history is the subject of today’s episode, which comes to us courtesy of our friend Claire Potter. Beginning in 2006, Claire pioneered radical digital history with her popular blog Tenured Radical; she is now host of the podcast Why Now, part of her Political Junkie Substack. In this wide-ranging and provocative conversation, Stryker describes her many years on the academic margins, where she forged an identity as an activist, archivist, writer, and filmmaker and learned from other queer scholars she encountered in San Francisco’s sexual underground. And on the eve of the publication of a new collection of her essays, When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader, edited by McKenzie Wark, she reflects on the fraught place of the discipline now, when trans issues and the very concept of gender have become supercharged vectors in global political struggles.
Music in the episode: Suspension – Pulsating and Futuristic by kjartan_abel, courtesy Freesound — License: Attribution 4.0