Queer and Transgender Studies Scholar

Videos

Videos
"We Are All Non-Binary: A Brief History of Accidents"
"We Are All Non-Binary: A Brief History of Accidents"

LGBTQ Speaker Series, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and Comparative Literature, University of Chicago

Gender Identity: NOT a Useful Category for Historical Analysis (begins at 33 mins)
Gender Identity: NOT a Useful Category for Historical Analysis (begins at 33 mins)

My talk begins at 33 minutes.

Training Bourgeois Selves: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Subsumption of Pederasty
Training Bourgeois Selves: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Subsumption of Pederasty

Talk given at the Social Science Matrix at the University of California - Berkeley.

"Guy Hocquenghem and the Futures of Gay Liberation"
"Guy Hocquenghem and the Futures of Gay Liberation"
To mark the publication in English of "Gay Liberation after May '68," our co-op hosted a panel discussion, convened and moderated by translator Scott Branson...
"Taxonomically Queer?"
"Taxonomically Queer?"

Queer Directions Symposium, 2020, Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto
"Transsexuality and the Queer Aversion to Identity"

Talk at the ICI Berlin “What Happened to Gay and Lesbian Studies” Conference, 2021. (Scroll for talk on the horizontal bar).

"Radical Thinkers: Kadji Amin and Rajiv Mohabir"
"Radical Thinkers: Kadji Amin and Rajiv Mohabir"

Discussion for Asian-American Writer's Workshop, 2021.

Featured in Nguyen Tan Hoang's "I Remember Dancing"
Featured in Nguyen Tan Hoang's "I Remember Dancing"

“I Remember Dancing” brings together an intergenerational cast of "trans and queer gaysians" ruminating on the past and future of AIDS, activism, gay culture, love, and (un)safe sex. Inspired by Joe Brainard’s I Remember poems, these confessions illuminate perspectives of queer Asian communities often absent from whitewashed narratives of HIV and AIDS. Grief, regret, longing, risk, and pleasure surface as their memories and fantasies blur into one another.

Accessibility note: This video contains several minutes of rapidly flashing and contrasting light.

Commissioned by Visual AIDS for STILL BEGINNING: The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art

Nguyen Tan Hoang is a videomaker and film and media scholar. His short experimental videos include K.I.P, Forever Bottom!, PIRATED! and look_im_azn. He is the author of A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Duke UP, 2014) and articles on porn pedagogy and Southeast Asian queer cinema. He teaches literature, film, and cultural studies at UC San Diego.

Kadji Amin is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University and Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellow for 2023-4 . He earned a PhD from Duke University and has held fellowships from the Mellon foundation and the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University.

Kadji is the author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Duke University Press, 2017), which won an Honorable Mention for the Alan Bray Memorial Award for best book in LGBT studies. As a prisoner, prostitute, thief, author, and activist, Jean Genet (1910-1986) epitomizes the queer hope that social deviance and sexual transgression should birth radical art and politics. Disturbing Attachments troubles this expectation by focusing in on the unsavory attachments - including pederasty, racial fetishism, nostalgia for prison, and fantasies of terrorism - behind Genet's activism with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. Instead of just critiquing him, Disturbing Attachments uses Genet to interrogate the desires that orient the field of Queer Studies. It demonstrates how contemporary queer attachments to non-normativity, sexual transgression, and political radicalism bear the stamp of recent gay American history. Ultimately, the book challenges scholars to disturb the desires of Queer Studies so that the field can reorient itself to an expanded range of geographic, historical, and racial subjects. This requires, first and foremost, challenging the idealizations of queer theory.

Kadji serves on the Editorial Board for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Gender and Women’s Studies and is the State of the Field Essay Editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Kadji is currently at work at:

Trans Materialism without Gender Identity, an academic monograph that critiques gender identity as a midcentury psychiatric construct that has historically done transgender people more harm than good. The monograph lays out a robust materialist trans politics and theory without gender identity.