Selected Publications by Faculty

Jeanne Vaccaro

Feelings and Fractals: Woolly Ecologies of Transgender Matter

The public artwork Crochet Coral Reef and the ecocatastrophe of coral erosion are a prompt in this essay to examine the geometric shapes and patterns of harm for transgender life.

“Look More at the Camera than at Me”: Susan and the Transgender Archive

This essay looks at the transgender archive of participant-observer photographer Brian Weil and how his haptic approach to visual material contributes to new reading practices around representational difference.

Marta Vicente

Transgender: A Useful Category?: Or, How the Historical Study of “Transsexual” and “Transvestite” Can Help Us Rethink “Transgender” as a Category

This article seeks to start a discussion that may help us understand why the category “transgender,” created to include all trans* experiences, has excluded some.

The Medicalization of the Transsexual: Patient-Physician Narratives in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

This article explores the history of what was labeled in 1966 as “the transsexual phenomenon.” This study reveals how the newsworthy narrative was created from the intersection of interests from both patients and their physicians, and how the media’s coverage of this factored into the process. The article appears in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.

Abraham Weil

Trans* Versal, Animacies and the Mattering of Black Trans* Political Life

This article explores trans*versal connections between transness, blackness, and the animal. Drawn from the conceptual vocabulary of cultural theorist Félix Guattari, this article argues that the central purpose of transversality is to create linkages between previously unexplored singularities in a field, and then to create connections in other conceptual topographies at different levels of discursivity.