Transgender Studies Reading Group
Event description
- Academic events
- Inclusion
The ASU School of Social Transformation is excited for upcoming, spring sessions of the Transgender Studies Reading Group. Curated and hosted by SST Professor, Sa Whitley, the reading group is an informal place for ASU faculty, students, and staff to discuss scholarship in Transgender Studies in conversation with contemporary art and politics. Participants will read and discuss a few scholarly articles in the field at each meeting. Event location on ASU Tempe campus available upon RSVP. Lunch will be provided!
Guest facilitated by ASU Gender Studies Ph.D. student, Sarah Keeton, the April 2026 reading group session will explore the theme of trans pleasure in Transgender Studies scholarship and memoirs. A 2025 journal article in Sex and Sexualities begins, "Cisness is fucking up our sex lives. And not in a good way" (Robinson et. al 2025). This reading group session centers the praxis, reclamation, and centering of trans pleasure -- from trans sexualities and trans sexual cultures to the pleasure and joy found in trans-affirming parties, comedy, social media, and everyday life. Trans pleasure is a sensual and affective mode of relation that is vital, insurgent, and empowering in our increasingly anti-transgender political climate. Several recent examples of trans pleasure have been cultivated and defined despite exclusionary political practices enacted by white feminism, TERF feminisms, and anti-black feminisms. A few discussion questions that will ground the session include the following:
- What does it mean to embody pleasure in a trans body?
- What does it mean to cultivate a trans politic towards pleasure?
- How do blackness and trans function together to resist normative definitions of embodiment, joy, and pleasure towards a praxis of refusal and transformation?
- How do trans artists and activists envision and enact more liberatory and pleasurable worlds?
Additional discussion questions will be shared during the reading group session. Please aim to read the three readings below, but feel free to attend if you don't get to all the readings.
For any questions about the event, please contact Sa Whitley, Ph.D. ([email protected]) -Assistant Professor of Women & Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation and Co-Director of Queer X Humanities at the ASU Humanities Institute.