Decolonizing Transgender: A Roundtable Discussion

Tom Boellstorff is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. His publications include The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (2005), A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia (2007), Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (2008), and (with Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T. L. Taylor) Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method (2012).

Mauro Cabral is the codirector of GATE (Global Action for Trans* Equality), based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is the editor of Interdicciones: Escrituras de la intersexualidad en castellano (2009), the second volume of which is forthcoming.

Micha Cárdenas is a Provost Fellow and PhD student in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California and a member of the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0. She works at the intersection of movement, technology, and politics. Her coauthored publications include The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs (2010).

Trystan Cotten is associate professor of gender studies at California State University, Stanislaus. His areas of research are transgender surgery and medicine, and gender, sexuality, race, and migration in Africa and the African diaspora. His latest book is Hung Jury: Testimonies of Genital Surgery by Transsexual Men (2012).

Eric A. Stanley is a President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of Communication and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and an editor of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (2011). Eric's other writing has been published in the journals Social Text, Women and Performance, and American Quarterly.

Kalaniopua Young is a radical Native Hawaiian transgender woman scholar-activist of color, a more-than-survivor of cis-sexist racial violence, and a community organizer with United Territories of Pacific Islanders Alliance in Seattle. As a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington, her forthcoming dissertation, “Re-thinking the Passage Home,” is a critical ethnography that examines the daily lived experiences of frontline Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) houseless and home-free communities in Waianae, Oahu, a critical site for observing ongoing US settler colonialism, indigenous resistance, and survivance in the nation's largest outdoor homeless encampment.

Aren Z. Aizura is an assistant professor in gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the editor of the Transgender Studies Reader 2 (2013). His work has appeared in Medical Anthropology, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Asian Studies Review as well as in the books Queer Bangkok, Transgender Migrations, and Trans Feminist Perspectives.