Upcoming Speakers
Visiting Speaker Series

VISITING SPEAKER SERIES
WIDENING THE ARC OF TRANS HISTORY
EMILY HOBSON
LAURIE MARHOEFER
Trans Berlin:Making the Modern Transgender World
in Jazz Age Germany
JO HSU
The Burden of Proof and Other Stories:Reimagining Evidence from the Trans/Crip Diaspora
Abstract: From 1989 through 1992, a coalition of activists fought to convince the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to expand its diagnostic criteria for AIDS and through this to compel the Social Security Administration to grant more people, particularly women, access to AIDS-related health care, services, and benefits. The ultimately successful campaign, led by the Women’s Caucuses of ACT UP and known as Change the Definition, was both a policy fight over medicine and social welfare and a cultural struggle over women’s and lesbians’ racialized, classed, and sexual relationships to AIDS. Change the Definition complicated and destabilized the categories of women as a collectivity and lesbian as an identity, and did so especially by confronting the connections between AIDS and incarceration. By linking women and lesbian to prison and HIV, Change the Definition rearticulated women and lesbian as subjectivities of deviance rather than respectability, difference rather than sameness, and risk rather than safety, thereby challenging prevailing constructions of gender and sexuality. The categories of mobilization that animated Change the Definition form part of the genealogies of prison abolition and trans(-inclusive) feminisms and offer a meaningful model for analyzing the relationships between categories of women, lesbian, bisexual, queer, and trans in racial capitalism.
Bio: Emily Hobson is an historian of radical social movements, queer politics, and HIV/AIDS in the United States. An Associate Professor of History and Gender, Race, and Identity (GRI) at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) and a past chair of the GRI department, she received her PhD and Master’s degree from the University of Southern California in American Studies and Ethnicity and her BA from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges in History and Literature. Emily is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2025-26, terminated by federal action), the National Humanities Center (2024-25), the One Archives Foundation, Smith College, CUNY’s Center for LGBTQ Studies, the University of California Santa Barbara, and other sources. They are the author of Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (2016) and co-editor, with Dan Berger, of Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973-2001 (2020). Emily’s current research examines the history of HIV/AIDS activism by, for, and with people incarcerated in the United States. Activists in this movement organized feminist, queer, and abolitionist opposition to the convergence of state neglect and state violence that defined the Reagan through Clinton eras. Articles from this project have been published or are forthcoming in Signs, Radical History Review, QED, Sinister Wisdom, The Abolitionist, and Truthout, among other venues. Emily currently serves the American Studies Association as a member of the ASA National Council (2023-2025) and the 2025 ASA Program Committee.
Bio: Laurie Marhoefer is a historian of the queer and transgender past. His work has been influential in public conversations about queer and trans people living in Germany under the Weimar Republic and Nazi State. In 2024, he helped to co-write a historians' amicus brief for the pivotal US Supreme Court Case US v. Skrmetti. He also wrote a biography of the Asian Canadian gay activist and Vancouver resident Li Shiu Tong and his boyfriend Magnus Hirschfeld. Marhoefer is a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he lives with his child and dog. He is currently writing Trans Berlin, due out with Tiny Reparations (Penguin Random House) in 2027.
Abstract: In 2025, the question is not should academia imagine differently, but how will our disciplines adapt to a world with ever-compounding cruelties? This talk asks, what possibilities are lost in an overreliance on argument and “evidence”? I use nonlinear storytelling to explore how academic conventions and scientific consensus have buttressed the myriad harms targeting LGBTQ people, people of color, and disabled people. Attacks on gender-affirming care, public health precautions, and anti-racist movements are often portrayed as anti-intellectual, but this view neglects the longstanding involvement of scientists and academics. It also ignores the complicities of our own disciplines and professional standards. Bending rhetorical insight through the prism of the lyric, I explore the knowledge that escapes linear thinking. Drawing from scholars and activists including Cameron Awkward-Rich, Eli Clare, Margaret Price, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Kai Cheng Thom, Johanna Hedva, and Remi Yergeau, I dwell with the irrational, the broken, and the maladaptive. This is a story told in crip time, through trans-of-color imagination, with the urgency of chronic pain and illness. There are no easy answers here, but there is potential in the journey— if you’ll take it with me.
Bio: Jo Hsu (They/Them) is an associate professor of Rhetoric & Writing and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. They’re the author of Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics, and their work explores how storytelling shapes policy and culture. They’re currently working on several projects related to anti-trans rhetoric, narratives of pathologization, and contested diseases.
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