Book Talk: Changing Gender

Join Stryker as she discusses her latest book, Changing Gender, where she invites readers to ride along on her lifelong quest to uncover what gender means and does. She traces the gender concept’s roots in grammar and tells the story of how it transformed into a battleground of the culture wars. From the origins of “Yankee Doodle” to acid trips in Joshua Tree National Park, from 19th-century phrenology to present-day anti-trans conspiracy theorists, Stryker finds surprising places to tune in to the origins, idiosyncrasies, and generative possibilities of the gender concept. Along the way, she weaves stories drawn from her lifetime as a pathbreaking historian, filmmaker, activist, and founding figure of transgender studies.

Poignant and deeply researched, lyrical and authoritative, Changing Gender is a book for our fraught time, exposing limiting assumptions about gender across the political spectrum and imagining what life might look like if some of those limitations were lifted. Ultimately, Stryker argues, to change gender is to change what it means to be human – and to change reality itself.

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About the Speaker:

Susan Stryker is professor emerita of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona and currently serves as distinguished visitor at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Since retiring, Stryker has served as presidential fellow and visiting professor of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies at Yale University; Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women’s Leadership, Mills College; and Marta Sutton Weeks External Faculty Fellow, Stanford University Humanities Institute. She is the author of three editions of Transgender History, co-editor of the two-volume Transgender Studies Reader and The Transgender Studies Reader Remix, as well as co-director of the Emmy-winning documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria.