Colloquium: 'Are Black Women Cisgender? Analyzing Brazilian Blackgender Interventions'

For the next installment of the Toward a Liberatory Theory and Praxis Colloquium Series, presented by ASU's School of Human Evolution and Social Change, we are excited to welcome Dr. Tanya Saunders from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, for their talk titled "Are Black Women Cisgender? Analyzing Brazilian Blackgender Interventions."

In this presentation, Dr. Saunders places Black trans* and Black feminist theorists from different locations within the Americas, in conversation to consider a question: is a Black woman who was classified as female at birth the same as a white woman who was classified as female at birth? They argue that the emergence of the unmarked "cisgender" category as an identity and social marker in hegemonic (i.e. white dominated) debates about gender diversity and inequality undermines the interventions and political denouncements of Black trans*, Black feminist and Blackgender gender- and sexual-dissidents.

Dr. Tanya L. Saunders is an Associate Professor in the Language, Literacy and Culture Doctoral Program at UMBC. Their 2015 book, Cuban Underground Hip Hop: Black Thoughts, Black Revolution, was published by the University of Texas Press and is recently translated into Portuguese. In 2021-2022, they were at the Hutchins Center for African American and African Research at Harvard University as a Spring 2022 Mark Claster Mamolen Fellow.