“Trans*historicities”: A Roundtable Discussion

M. W. Bychowski is an Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow and full-time lecturer at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of ““Unconfessing Transgender” from Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media (2016) and “The Isle of Hermaphrodites” from postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018). She has several forthcoming articles, including ones on transgender saints, premodern sex change operations, medieval manuscripts, and trans suicide in the Middle Ages. Currently, she is developing a book length study of transgender in medieval literature and history.

Howard Chiang is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (2018) and editor of Sexuality in China: Histories of Power and Pleasure (2018).

Jack Halberstam is professor of gender studies and English at Columbia University. He is the author of Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), Female Masculinity (1998), In a Queer Time and Place (2005), The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (2012), and, most recently, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (2018). Halberstam is currently working on several projects, including a book titled Wild Thing: Queer Theory after Nature, on queer anarchy, performance, protest culture, and the intersections between animality, the human, and the environment.

Jacob Lau is a Carolina Postdoctoral Fellow through the Program for Faculty Diversity in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Along with Cameron Partridge, he is coeditor of Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka's 1962 trans memoir Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Spiritual and Gender Transitions (2016), for which he also coauthored an introduction.

Kathleen P. Long is professor of French at Cornell University. She is preparing a translation into English of The Island of Hermaphrodites (L'isle des hermaphrodites) and a book-length study of the relationship between early modern discourses of monstrosity and modern discourses of disability.

Marcia Ochoa is associate professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding advisory board cochair of El/La Para Translatinas, a transgender Latina social justice organization in San Francisco's Mission District. An anthropologist specializing in the ethnography of media, Ochoa is the author of Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela (2014) and coeditor of GLQ. She is at work on a new project, Ungrateful Citizenship, which documents the work of El/La Para Translatinas and the terms on which transgender women from Latin America who live in the United States and Europe participate in, belong to, and are recognized by society.

C. Riley Snorton is professor of English language and literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017) and Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (2014).