Upcoming Events
Guest Lecture
Emma Heaney: “Ghost Cousins: Literature After Cisness”
Date: Monday, June 23, 2025
Time: 12:00-14:00 c.t.
Place: Unter den Linden 6, Room 1072
Trans femininity is central to the canon of transnational twentieth-century gay novels across the century in which gayness solidified as an individual quality. From 1880 to 1980 the process of medicalization translated queerness from a gritty cultural milieu into a life narrative, from a working-class scene into a bourgeois secret. Through this process, homosexuality (defined by the sex of the object of desire) eclipsed inversion (defined by an irrepressible gender oddity) as the primary mode of understanding gay life. By the mid-twentieth century, transsexuality emerged as a distinct diagnostic category for gender difference. But even as the line between gay people and trans people became firm and bright, the gender implications of same-sex desire, the reality that the very concept of being a real man or real woman requires entry into what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality,” remained as a nervous component of bourgeois homosexual identity. This talk will argue that the gender-disordering effects of same-sex desire haunted the class of men-loving men and women-loving women who sought to name themselves and their love as perfectly normal. It is the reflection of this process––sometimes lovely, sometimes cruel—in the American mid-century that “The Ghost Cousins” will trace.
Emma Heaney is a scholar of comparative literature, feminist studies, and trans studies at NYU. Her first book, The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Northwestern UP 2017) traces the medicalization of trans femininity and the uptake of the resulting diagnostic in works of literature and theory. Her edited collection, Feminism Against Cisness (Duke UP 2023), gathers essays by trans studies scholars that demonstrate the potential of feminist critique freed of the ideology that assigned sex determines sexed experience. Her current research derives a theory of the transformation of queer and trans identities from works of literature spanning the long twentieth century.
This lecture takes place in the context of Jasper J. Verlinden’s seminar on Contemporary Trans and Queer Poetry. All students and colleagues are warmly invited to join.
You are cordially invited to the The Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary (TODO) ERC-funded research group 2025 conference:
FOR NOW: Diasporic Provisions. Containers – Storytelling – Return
July 2nd-4th, 2025 at Savvy Contemporary / Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
For registration and conference program, click here.
Quick fixes, temporary solutions, contingency plans, built-in redundancies, extras to fall back on, just in case– these are forms of diasporic meaning making in the mode of provisional organising. At this conference, we explore how diasporic provisions bring the seemingly marginal and the existential into close proximity. We ask: Does provisional organising lead to provisional storytelling? What are temporary forms of belonging and provisional forms of return? How do traces of queerness pervade diasporic provision?
With contributions by:
Fenja Akinde-Hummel, Soheil Asefi, Maithu Bùi, Lan P. Duong, Leila Essa, Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Feng-Mei Heberer, Thao Ho, Carlos Kong, Maja Lee Langvad, Otis Mensah, Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen, Jeannette Oholi, Christine Okoth, Anne Potjans, Tijana Ristic Kern, Aisha Said, Tarek Shukrallah, Todd & Zoya, Jasper Verlinden, Rhaisa Williams
10.07.2025
Abschiedsvorlesung von Prof. Dr. Eva Boesenberg
Die Abschiedsvorlesung mit dem Titel „Reading the Fishbowl: Settler Colonialism and White American Literature" wird am 10. Juli 2025 um 18 Uhr c.t. in Raum 2094 (UdL 6) stattfinden.
Zur mehr Information bitte hier klicken.