FQT Podcast

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Vilashini Coopan, Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Alex Brostoff, Assistant Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Georgetown University, about their co-edited anthology, Autotheories (MIT Press, 2025).  Professors Coopan and Brostoff discuss collaborative writing and the 2025 symposium they convened, "Intimacies of Relation: The Autotheoretical Turn" at UC Santa Cruz. Professors Brostoff and Coopan also discuss how autotheory shapes their own writing styles, the political genealogy of autotheory, and the reason they pluralize the concept, as well as the impact of autotheory on narrative writing, and the relationship between autotheory and affect.

In this episode FQT Center associate director Che Gossett speaks with professor Homi Bhabha.  Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. They discuss professor Bhabha's intellectual iterinary and how distinct sites such as Bombay and Oxford have shaped his cosmpolitan thought.  They also discuss his pathbreaking scholarship including such texts as Nation and Narration (Routledge, 1990) and The Location of Culture (2004, Routledge Classics). Bhabha also elaborates on his recent work on temporality and the pandemic, and the afterlives of his concepts such as mimicry, hybridity and third space.  Finally, Bhabha discusses his writing style, and how for him, the affective power of writing is as important as argumentation. Music Credit (30 seconds): Vidushi Bombay Jayashri Ramnath performing Raga Hamsadhwani

In this episode, FQT director Che Gossett speaks with Charles Gaines about his artistic practice, his interest in systems thinking and unthinking, and how Gaines takes up questions about seriality and discreteness, difference and repetition in relation to race, materiality and infrastructure.  They discuss Gaines's pathbreaking 1993 exhibition with Catherine Lord at the Fine Arts Gallery of the University of California, Irvine, titled "The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism," as well as his 2022 monumental kinetic sculpture Moving Chains commissioned by Creative Time at Governor's Island, and his new 2025 work Hanging Tree, commissioned by the Equal Justice Initiative and installed in Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama. Gaines's work is included in prominent public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), and the Tate (London).   Audio Credit: Moving Chains audio, Creative Time, Governor's Island, New York

In this episode, FQT podcast host Che speaks with their sister, the artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist, Tourmaline. Tourmaline's practice highlights the experiences of Black, queer, and trans communities and their capacity to impact the world. Her films and photographs rewrite mainstream narratives and cultural histories to initiate a paradigm shift and imagine a more pleasure-filled future. Tourmaline's practice invites us to fundamentally reshape our beliefs about what is possible. In the episode they discuss Tourmaline's books, the national best seller Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, published by Reparations Books at Random House in 2025, and her children's book One Day in June published by Penguin Press, as well as her films Happy Birthday Marsha, Salacia and recently, Pollinator, which won the 2022 Baloise Art Prize and was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and her portraits, which are in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tourmaline's work is also part of an upcoming exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Freedom Dreams.

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett continues their conversation with Professor Susan Stryker about the 1966 Compton's cafeteria uprising and its afterlives, and the history and future of trans studies.   Professor Stryker's forthcoming book Changing Gender (FSG, 2026) will be published in August.  Stryker takes an autotheoretical approach in the text, as well as offering a pathbreaking account of the historicity of gender as a category, transforming the ways in which it is conceptualized. Music: "We Can Be Together" by Jefferson Airplane

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with author, film producer and director, actor and model, Geena Rocero about Horse Barbie: A Memoir of Reclamation (Random House, 2003), her modeling, directing and acting careers, her public advocacy work, trans diaspora, spirituality, and her new short film Dolls.  Music cred: "QC Gurlz" by Stef Aranas

In this (first of two parts) episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor Susan Stryker. Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, as well as Distinguished Visitor and 2025-2026 Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research.  Stryker has served as Visiting Professor of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership, Mills College. She is an executive editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series ASTERISK: gender, trans-, and all that comes after. Stryker is the author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution (2008, 2017), co-editor of the two-volume Transgender Studies Reader (2006, 2013) and The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (2022), as well as  co-director of the Emmy-winning documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria (2005).  In episode one of a two part interview, Stryker discusses her field defining scholarship in trans studies, the new of her writing anthology edited by Professor McKenzie Wark, When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader (Duke University Press, 2024), and her recent scholarship bringing together abolitionist politics and trans architectural imaginaries.   Music: "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps," David Bowie

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with psychoanalyst and scholar Avgi Saketopoulou, who is the 2025-26 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at UC Berkeley, about her book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023), and the entanglements of race, gender, sexuality and psychoanalysis.   Music Credit: "Consideration" by Rihanna and SZA

In this episode FQT associate director speaks with Harvard Law professor Michael J. Klarman about his award winning scholarship in civil rights and legal history, including From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press, 2004) which received the 2005 Bancroft Prize in History, and his newest book, The Framer's Coup: the making of the United States Constitution (Oxford UP, 2016) which was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award.   Music Credit: "Animosity" by Tupac

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor David Joselit.  Joselit is  Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies and Chair for Art, Film, and Visual Studies (AFVS) at Harvard University.  Joselit began his career as a curator at The ICA in Boston from 1983-1989. After receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1995, he has also taught at the University of California, Irvine, and Yale University where he was Department Chair of History of Art from 2006-09, and the CUNY Graduate Center. Some of Joselit's most recent books are After Art (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT, 2020) which was awarded the 2021 Robert Motherwell Book Award, and Art's Properties (Princeton University Press, 2023).  Gossett speaks with Joselit about his work as a curator, art historian and about art in an era of globalization.   Music Credit:  "erratum Musical (for three voices)" by Marcel Duchamp

In this episode FQT associate director and podcast host Che Gossett speaks with critic, essayist, curator, and professor Nora Khan.  Nora Khan recently served as the Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts. Her writing on philosophy of artificial intelligence and emergent technologies is referenced heavily across disciplinary formations in the humanities and the arts. Her books include AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (2025), Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019) and Fear Indexing the X-Files (2017), with Steven Warwick. She is a member of the Curatorial Ensemble of the 2026 edition of Counterpublic, one of the nation's largest public civic exhibitions, focused next on 'Near Futures', and she also curated Manual Override at The Shed (2020). Khan discusses art and technology, AI, her craft as a writer and curator, and her pedagogy. Music Credit:  "One Fateful Night" from the Earthbound soundtrack

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Kellie Jones, Professor in Art History and Archaeology and the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University.  Professor Jones is a 2016 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of numerous awards for her scholarship and curation.  Professor Jones is the author of EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Duke, 2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Duke, 2017), which was named a Best Art Book of 2017 in The New York Times. She has worked as a curator for over three decades and her exhibition "Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980," at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Artforum, and the best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).  Professor Jones discusses her extensive scholarship and exhibition curation, growing up embedded in a remarkable artistic community in New York City, the influence of her friends, neighbors and especially her parents, esteemed poets Amiri Baraka and Hettie Jones on her life and work.   Music Credit: Ornette Coleman, Eventually

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Huey Copeland, Andrew W. Mellon Chair and Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh, about his work in art history, criticism, and Black diasporic and contemporary art.  Professor Copeland is the author of the critically acclaimed book Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago, 2013), co-editor of the award-winning volume Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 2023), as well over 70 essays, interviews, and reviews that have appeared in a range of journals and exhibition catalogues, including Artforum International, Histórias Afro-Atlânticas: Antologia, Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, Nka, and Represenations.   Music Credit: Grace Jones, Pull Up to the Bumper

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with poet and professor Tracy K. Smith.  Smith served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, and her book of poetry Life on Mars (Greywolf Press, 2011) received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.  Smith is Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute as well as professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.  Smith discusses her numerous works of poetry, and her recent, more essayistic book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Penguin, 2023), the poetics of blackness, the significance of the ancestral for her life and work and how her critical inhabitation of spirituality shapes her work.    

This 2022 podcast episode is a conversation between Maria Murphy (then associate director of the FQT Center) and Lane Timothy Speidel, Philadelphia artist, musician, writer, and Gender Jawn's podcast producer. In their new exhibition at Vox Populi Gallery, ALL EXITS, Lane Speidel lets us into the backstage of the mind. Sculptures and paintings create a night that is a frozen dream where we can all get lost, take off our underwear, and quit our jobs. Saggy, their music project is deeply discussed, as well as many references from their life practice of surrender. Satre, insomnia, perspectival painting, strikes, and cat accents are all mentioned.    Songs by Saggy in order are:  "big big sky" (2022)  "I can look however I want and I still get to tell you who I am" (2018)  "I hate time" (2018)  "Anti-Work" (2022)  "Clover" (2022)    Saggy is made of Lane Speidel and Jim Strong - as well as any others who wish to be included.  A limited list based on the episode's recordings : Billy Ray Boyer, Elliott Rosenfeld, Lydia Shea, Schuyler Thumb, Jack, and Ian. More Saggy can be found here: https://ihopeilikethis.com/Saggy 

In this episode Che Gossett, associate director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania speaks with the authors of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern UP, 2024) professors Steven Swarbrick of CUNY and Jean Thomas Tremblay of York University.  They discuss the concept of negative life, the contemporary politics of ecocriticism, film theory, psychoanalysis, and queer studies.    Music Credit: The Day the World Turned Day-Glo, by X-Ray Spex

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Jina B. Kim, who is assistant professor of English Language & Literature and of the Study of Women & Gender at Smith College, about her forthcoming book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure: Crip-of-Color Writing after the U.S. Welfare State (Duke UP, March 2025).  Professor Kim speaks about her articulation of a "crip-of-color critique," and how feminist- and queer-of-color literary responses to state austerity measures -- as seen in the work of writers such as Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and others -- provide critical imaginaries wherein dependency figures not as lack, but rather, as an indispensable resource for crisis laden times. Music Credit: "Bird" by Gaelynn Lea

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with literary theory, philosophy, and subaltern studies scholar Professor Gayatri Spivak, who is University Professor in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, the 2012 recipient of the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, and the author of numerous field shaping books and articles, including A Critique of Postcolonial Reason Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Harvard UP, 1999), Readings (2014) and texts of critical essays including Outside in the Teaching Machine (Routledge, 2008), and An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Harvard UP, 2013).  In this episode, Professor Spivak speaks about concepts such as affirmative sabotage, as well as the pedagogical, affective and epistemological labor of rearranging desires, as well as her rigorous work on W.E.B. Du Bois's legacy, scholarship, and archive. Music: "Evil Does not Exist v. 2" by Eiko Ishibashi

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Roderick Ferguson, professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. Ferguson was the 2018-2019 president of the American Studies Association.  He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (University of Minnesota, 2004).     Song Credit: Adrian Piper being interviewed about and performing her street performance piece "Mythic Being", excerpted from "Other Than Art's Sake" a film by Peter Kennedy from 1973

In this episode, recorded during fall semester 2023, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Calvin Warren, associate professor of African American Studies at Emory University about his book Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism and Emancipation (Duke UP, 2018), and his thoughts on Black nihilism and spirituality.    Music credits: "There Are Other Worlds (Have They Not Told You Of) by Sun Ra

In this conversation FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with poet, author and professor Jackie Wang.  Wang is an assistant professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and the author of Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018), and Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun (Semiotext(e), 2023), as well as works of poetry, such as The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void (Nightboat, 2021).  In this expansive conversation, Wang discusses her work on carceral technologies -- including AI -- surveillance, and extraction, as well as her interests in pyschoanalysis, mysticism, and tracing the concept of the oceanic in psychoanalytic and Black thought.   Music Credit: "Ocean of Tears" by Caroline Polachek

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett interviews novelist Torrey Peters about her intellectual and writerly formation, her early online novella publications, The Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, and her novel Detransition Baby (One World, 2021) which received the the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction, and was also named a Best Book of the Century by the New York Times. Peters also speaks about her forthcoming collection, Stag Dance (Random House, 2025), the fascinating history and idiom of queer and trans lumberjack culture, and fashioning queer and trans literary worlds.   Music Credit: "I Can't Shake the Stranger Out of You," Lavender Country

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Paul Gilroy, who is Professor of the Humanities and Founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism & Racialisation at University College London. Professor Gilroy's scholarship has been globally influential, especially his books There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack(1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), and Against Race (2000). In 2019 Professor Gilroy was awarded the Holberg Prize by the government of Norway in recognition of his scholarship. Che Gossett speaks with Professor Gilroy about his intellectual itinerary, his early career as a journalist, and then as a graduate student working under the tutelage of Stuart Hall, and about the field of Black studies in the UK, radical humanism, and the state of the university.   Music credit: "Move on Up" (Extended Version) by Curtis Mayfield

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Amy Tobin, University of Cambridge Associate Professor in the History of Art and Curator of Contemporary Programmes, at Kettle's Yard, about feminist art history, feminist art curation, coalitional politics and her book, Women Artists Together Art in the Age of Women's Liberation (Yale UP, 2023), as well as her 2014 article, co-authored with Victorian Horne, "An unfinished revolution in art historiography, or how to write a feminist art history" in feminist review.    

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Austin Svedjan, doctoral student and Hamilton-Law Graduate Fellow in the Department of English at Penn, and John Paul Ricco, professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, about their co-edited special issue of the journal Postmodern Culture, which is freely available online. Song credit: "If You Can't Help Me" by Brontez Purnell.

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with scholar Colby Gordon, who is associate professor in Department of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College, about early modern trans studies and theology, and his exciting new and first book, Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature (University of Chicago, 2024). Song credit (-30sec): "My Enemies are Mine" by Jim Strong

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with professor Petrus Liu, who is professor of Chinese & Comparative Literature and of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University.  Professor Liu is the author of Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (Duke University Press, 2015) and The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus (Duke University Press, 2023), and other many other publications.  Gossett speaks with Liu about how he sutures together queer theory, gender and sexuality studies and Marxist thought, and about how the analysis of racial capitalism requires a global scope.    Song credits (-30sec): "Feeling Fuzzy" and "Kids Go Down" by Chinese American Bear

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with multimedia artist, director, and producer Zackary Drucker about her archival work on and connection to Flawless Sabrina, about being attuned to the spiritual realm, and her prodigious work in TV & film -- especially her co-directed Sundance award-winning and Emmy nominated HBO original documentary film The Stroll (2023) and the HBO documentary series The Lady and the Dale (2021).

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Dr. Beeta Baghoolizadeh.  Dr. Baghoolizadeh is a historian and an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University, in the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies.  Gossett speaks with Dr. Baghoolizadeh about her book The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran (Duke University Press, March 2024) and how Iranian and Persian Gulf social and political life have been both shaped by racial slavery and  the disavowal of it's history, as well as the ways in which its afterlife reverberates now.

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Lee Edelman, Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University, about the continued resonance and influence his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke UP, 2004) and about his newest work Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing (Duke UP, 2022). Edelman discusses his theorization of queerness as a constitutive exclusion and form of negation, his work with the late Lauren Berlant, psychoanalysis, and the ways in which emotions and affects -- pessimism and utopianism and their interplay -- animate and circulate in the political scene.

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett talks with Black trans activist and writer Raquel Willis about Black trans liberationist movements, intersectionality, Black feminism(s), growing up in the South, and her new book, The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation (St. Martin Press, 2023).

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett talks with filmmaker, actress and cultural worker Nava Mau.  Nava Mau recently received the 2024 Critics Choice Association's "Breakthrough Performance" Award for Television (Limited Series) for her role in the Netflix hit series Baby Reindeer.  Nava Mau was the lead actor and director, and co-producer for the short film Waking Hour (2019), and starred in the HBO Max series Generation. Nava Mau also recently directed and starred in the short film All the Words But One (2024) which is showing at film festivals across the globe and was executive produced by Lily Wachowski.  In this podcast episode Nava Mau talks about her artistic process, her roles both on and behind the screen as a director and producer and her passion for acting and filmmaking, as well as the power of art and politics of trans visibility.

McKenzie Wark is professor of Culture and Media at the New School, Eugene Lang College and the author of over 10 books.  Her memoir Love and Money, Sex and Death was published in September 2023 by Verso Press, and her other recent writing moves at the nexus of trans studies, autotheory and autofiction, including Rave (Duke UP, 2023), Philosophy for Spiders: on the low theory of Kathy Acker (Duke UP, 2021).  We discuss her prolific contributions to trans studies, trans literature, Marxist theory, critical theory and philosophy. 

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks to professor Perry Zurn.  Zurn Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University, Fellow at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities ('23-'24) and a Visiting Scholar at the FQT at Penn.  He is the author of Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (UMinn, 2021), and co-editor of Trans Philosophy (forthcoming UMinn, 2024), and Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition (Springer, 2016), among other edited and co-authored volumes, as well as copious articles.  In the interview Zurn upacks a transnational genealogy of the term cis, it's pre-history, and limits and potentials.  Zurn also discusses the philosophical iterinary of curiousity, how the concept has morphed and transmuted over time.

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, Jack Halberstam about his latest book, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire and his prolific writing in queer theory, trans studies and cultural studies. This episode includes a musical clip from "Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak as narrated by Tammy Grimes.

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with the luminary and accomplished filmmaker, director and producer Lilly Wachowski.  Lilly Wachowski discusses some her most influential and heralded films, such as The Matrix, which she co-directed and filmed with her sister, filmmaker Lana Wachowski, as well as recent work she has been involved in either writing, directing and/or producing such as the Netflix series Sense8, and also the Showtime series Work in Progress, created by Abby McEnany and Tim Mason.  Lilly Wachowski discusses trans politics, and the power of art to transform, forge bonds of solidarity, and create convivial spaces.

In this episode (recorded fall 2023) FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Judith Butler, who is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.  Butler discusses their now published book Who's Afraid of Gender? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), their extensive scholarship, including on the politics of loss and mourning, grief and grievance.

In this episode of the Gender Jawn podcast, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with poet, professor and "intellectual cabaret" performer extraordinaire Wayne Koestenbaum about his conception of "fag ideation," queer theory, art, poetics, and Koestenbaum's rich body of work. Also discussed is Koestenbaum's newest book of poetry, Stubble Archipelago just recently published by Semiotexte Press. Koestenbaum closes the interview by reading a selection from Subble Archipelago, a poem titled "#34 [Two quartered radishes], currently featured in The Yale Review.

In this episode Che Gossett, associate director of The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, speaks with UC Davis assistant professor in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Christoph Hanssmann about his book Care Without Pathology: How Trans- Health Activists Are Changing Medicine (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).  Professor Hanssman discusses transnational trans health and justice organizing and trans histories of medicine.

In this episode FQT Associate Director Che Gossett speaks with William Lampson Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University: Tavia Nyong'o. Nyong'o is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and most recently, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (NYU Press, 2018).  Gossett speaks with Nyong'o about blackness, queerness, the Zora Neale Hurston inspired concept of "angular sociality," and the role of what Nyong'o terms -- extending psychoanalytic interventions -- "critical ambivalence."   Writers and/or works referenced:   James Baldwin and Audre Lorde "Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde" (1984)  http://theculture.forharriet.com/2014/03/revolutionary-hope-conversation-between.html   Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011), On the Inconvenience of Other People (Duke University Press, 2022)   Samuel Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village (University of Minnesota Press, 1988)   Erica R. Edwards Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)   Zora Neale Hurston,  Mules and men (New York: Perennial Library, 1935), Their Eyes Were Watching God (Amistad, Harper Perennial, 1937), Baracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" (Amistad, Harper Perennial Reprint, 2018)   Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS (Routledge Press, 1990), Globalizing AIDS (University of Minnesota, 2002)   Rustin (film, 2023)   Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (UC Berkeley Press, 1990), Touching Feeling (Duke University Press, 2003)   Jackie Stacey, "Wishing Away Ambivalence," Feminist Theory, 2014, Vol. 15(I) 39-49   Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects: Towards a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (Duke University Press, 2007)                        

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with philosopher Brian Massumi, whom is professor of communication at the University of Montreal, about affect studies, critical theory, the work of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead, and process philosophy.  Massumi is the author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke UP, 2002) and most recently, Couplets: Travels in Speculative Pragmatism (Duke UP, 2021), as well as many other texts, several co-written with his companion in art and thought, Erin Manning, professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal).

In this episode FQT Center associate director Che Gossett speaks with trans historian and John Hopkins University professor Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), which received a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and the Children's Literature Association Book Award.  Gill-Peterson is also the author of A Short History of Trans Misogyny (Verso Press, 2024).  Gill-Peterson speaks about both of these texts and also in process work on DIY trans community care.

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Yale University Professor Daphne Brooks about her newest book, Liner Notes: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021) -- winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame -- about Black feminist archives, music history, and Beyonce's brilliance. Music Credits: Koko by Charlie Parker (1945) I Wish it Would Rain by The Temptations (1967) I Want You Back by The Jackson 5 (1969) The Way We Were by Barbra Streisand (1987) I Write the Songs by Barry Manilow (1977) Let's Stay Together by Al Green (1972) I'll Be Around by the Spinners (1972) Oh Bondage! Up Yours! by X-Ray Spex (1977) London Calling by The Clash (1979) Message in a Bottle by The Police (1979) There Stands a Bluebird by Zora Neale Hurston (1936) Lawdy Lawdy Blues by Ida Cox (1961) Don't Hurt Yourself by Beyonce (2016)

In this interview Che Gossett speaks with Maggie Nelson -- poet, writer, 2016 MacArthur fellow, and professor of English at the University of California -- about her newest book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Random House, 2021) and many other works of poetry and prose.  Also mentioned in the episode are poets and writer Eileen Myles and poet and NYU professor, Fred Moten.

The first episode of the 2023-2024 academic year, September's Gender Jawn podcast features an engaging and dynamic conversation with Kate Scott, the play-by-play announcer for the Philadelphia 76ers, as well as the Seattle Seahawks, who is also the first woman play-by-play caster in Philadelphia's history.  Scott has called play-by-plays for NHL, NFL and the Olympics, as well as the 2023 World Cup.  In conversation with Dr. Maria Murphy, Scott discusses the implications of being a first, the politics of sports, inclusion, queerness, visibility, and identity. For more about Scott's prolific and impactful work, see: https://www.inquirer.com/soccer/kate-scott-sixers-fox-womens-world-cup-announcers-20230608.html    

December's edition of Gender Jawn features a two-part series on housing issues facing Philadelphians. Part-one featured a discussion with Akira Drake Rodriguez on saving the UC Townhomes and Jane Allen on the Whole Home Repair Program. In part two, Gwendolyn Beetham considers how home ownership has been plagued by discriminatory lending practices and how homeowners can support queer, trans, and POC laborers in the trades. She speaks with Kathleen Riley and Kelly Ireland, aka "Tiny Plumber Girl," about representation in the trades, maintaining accessible housing prices, and supporting long-time residents in west Philly. Kelly Ireland Instagram page Handy Dandy Home Services Instagram page Women in Nontraditional Careers (WINC) "These Queer Handyworkers Want to Make Your Life Easier," Autostraddle July 14, 2022: Ta-Nehisi Coats. "The Case for Reparations." The Atlantic, June 2014 Aaron Glantz and Emmanuel Martinez. "Kept Out: For people of color, banks are closing the door to home ownership". Reveal, February 15, 2018 Alliance for Housing Justice Juliana Feliciano Reyes, Broken Rung, The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 30, 2022 Original music by David Chavannes: www.dchavannes.com For more information about the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies visit www.gsws.sas.upenn.edu

December's edition of Gender Jawn features a two-part series on housing issues facing Philadelphians. In part one, Maria Murphy speaks with Akira Drake Rodriguez about saving the UC Townhomes and Penn's role in the destabilization of west Philly and the displacement of its residents. Jane Allen, Policy Director for the Office of State Senator Nikil Saval, shares the goals for the Whole Homes Repair Program, which aims to help keep Pennsylvanians in their homes by providing support for essential home repairs. Save the UC Townhomes DEMAND PENN STOP PUNISHING PEACEFUL PROTESTERS PETITION The Case for PILOTs at Penn Applications for the Whole-Home Repairs Program are coming Spring/Summer 2023: Whole Home Repairs Program Original music by David Chavannes: www.dchavannes.com For more information about the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies visit www.gsws.sas.upenn.edu

November's episode features a discussion on the politics of laughter with Delia Casadei, Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California Berkeley. Gender Jawn host Maria Murphy and Casadei discuss the social reproductive labor of laughter, how laughter articulates political unknowns, the Feminist killjoy practice of withholding the social reproductive labor of laughing, and laughter that renders unrecognized labor audible. Maya Angelou's "We Wear the Mask" Episode produced by Tamir Williams Podcast original music by David Chavannes For more information about the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies visit www.gsws.sas.upenn.edu

Penn community members Serena Mayeri, Carol Tracy, Antoilyn Nguyen, and Alicia Meyer comment on the recent Dobbs ruling that overturned the nearly 50 year precedent of the constitutional right to an abortion. This ep also features excerpts from the work of SaraEllen Strongman, Dorothy Roberts, and Jessa Lingel. Resources mentioned in this ep: Center for Reproductive Rights Our Data Bodies Tech Learning Collective  Electronic Frontier Foundation Penn-specific resources: Penn Reproductive Justice Working Group Penn Association for Gender Equality (PAGE) Penn Nurses for Sexual and Reproductive Health     Penn If/When/How: Lawyering For Reproductive Justice SaraEllen Strongman's Washington Post article  "Despite antiabortion campaigns, Black feminists support abortion rights" Dorothy Roberts' new book Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World Jessa Lingel in Penn Today article on privacy post-Roe Podcast original music by David Chavannes For more information about the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies visit www.gsws.sas.upenn.edu

In this last episode on this year's theme, "Care for the Future," Tamir Williams speaks with Rachel Kauder Nalebuff about her genre-bending book Stages: On dying, working, and feeling. Kauder discusses her experience as an artist-in-residence at an elder care facility in the Bronx, NYC; the lessons she learned from staff members at the nursing home about dying, grief, time, and caregiving; and her expansive dreams for what end of life carework systems could look like in the future. You can purchase Stages directly from Thick Press. And you can pre-order her forthcoming Our Red Book. A recording of the theatrical production that Nalebuff created with staff members at the elder care facility is available.  Episode produced by Tamir Williams. Original music by David Chavannes: www.dchavannes.com. For more information about the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies visit www.gsws.sas.upenn.edu.