Most examinations of sex and gender in the academy take bourgeois national histories of North America and Western Europe as their frame of reference. In the histories of Germany, the UK, France, and the United States, doctors and state bureaucracies incorporated sexual and gendered social practices into a taxonomy of identities (or even species, as Foucault puts it,) beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. However, in many sex-gender systems, including those of the proletarian neighborhoods of these nations' metropoles, the assumptions that formed expert orderings did not apply. This lecture surveys the non-cis vernacular categories that ordered these sex-gender systems. The relation between race/class and cisness means that there is no absolute geography to this story. Drawing on source material from Indigenous Americas to the South Asian subcontinent and from the working-class neighborhoods of Kansas City to the courts of Nigerian nobility, the talk will be attuned to a range of sex-gender systems that do not accord with the categories produced by the Euro- American bourgeois in order to, as the title suggests, reveal the provincial status of cisness.
The talk will be in English with ÖGS translation.
I want to thank the VDP, the Culture & Equality Unit of the University of Vienna, queer@hochschulen, and ACCESTECH / TU Wien for their financial support.
Bio: Emma Heaney is a scholar and teacher of feminist theory, comparative literature, and trans studies. Her first book, The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Northwestern 2017) is a study of the prominence of the medicalized figure of trans femininity in works of twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Her edited collection Feminism Against Cisness (Duke 2024) gathers essays that demonstrate the nature and potential of feminist thought unobscured by the counterrevolutionary mystification of assigned sex. This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation ––– a political and phenomenological report from the gestational sensorium against cisness, capital, and genocide ––– is forthcoming from Pluto Press in November 2025. Her current book project is a sequel edited collection that draws on the work of scholars from many disciplines and areas of geographical and historical focus to reveal the provincial nature of the ideology of cisness. Forthcoming essays theorize the emergence of the trans-gay distinction in the twentieth century via literary representations. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the XE program at New York University, where she serves as faculty advisor for the Advanced Certificate in Experimental Writing.
