Based on the play Prometo-me Moderna (I Promise Myself Modern), this conversation will draw on one of the texts that the play uses as its source and theme: My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix – Performing Trans Rage, by Susan Stryker. The author of the text and the author of the play will be present, not excluding the possibility that the author of the novel may also come to haunt the event, in support or outrage (at her discretion).
Starting with this seminal text on what Trans Studies is today as an academic discipline (a discipline that Stryker calls the ‘malevolent twin’ of Queer Studies), this conversation will also address this author’s work as a historian, thinker, academic, and filmmaker. And, inevitably, we will talk about trans people and the contemporary discourses that conceptualise them as dangerous monsters threatening the established order. The speakers therefore hope to scare you enough (reinforcing the invitation for Mary Shelley to come and scream too).
Susan Stryker is an internationally sought-after intellectual. Her historical research, theoretical writing, audiovisual production, activism, and construction of academic spaces have contributed to thinking about trans issues since the early 1990s. She lives in San Francisco. Susan retired from the University of Arizona in 2020, where she was a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies.
