Amin Queens of Stigma

Professor Kadji Amin will deliver the Fourteenth Annual Sedgwick Lecture on March 19, 2026.

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Poster and details to come.

Queens of Stigma: Trans Queens and the Class Project of Queer Theory

From Eve Sedgwick’s generative writing on “shame-creativity” to the 2003 “Gay Shame” conference to Heather Love’s contention that queer theory and gay liberation share a faith in “transmuting abjection into glorious agency,” queer theorists have celebrated the creative transformation of shame as a recognizably queer affective signature. The meanings of this signature change, however, when we shift its frame from elite literature, cinema, and art to the mundane history of everyday social practices. This talk puts queer theoretical work on shame into conversation with Esther Newton’s foundational Mother Camp and my own research on the oral histories of queens of the 1960s and 1970s to argue that the undisputed twentieth-century queer icon of shame-creativity was the queen. In the gay world, both the professional drag queen and the trans street queen who dressed in drag in public were simultaneously revered and despised for publicly embodying the stigma of homosexuality. This queer iconicity came at a cost. The material consequences of public transfemininity were scarce employment options, criminalization, and poverty. For that very reason, trans queens tended to come from racially diverse working-class backgrounds and to never complete high school. The stigma they embodied was not just that of homosexuality and male femininity but also, crucially, that of poverty. In elevating shame-creativity into a signature queer affect while discarding the working-class and poor queens who taught shame-creativity to the gay world, queer theory reveals its contours as a class project. The job of professional-managerial class queer theorists has been to lionize the creative classes for gentrifying the neighborhoods and cultural innovations of those who have born the economic brunt of queer stigma. As an antidote, this talk proposes a queer theoretical justice project of both class restitution and of reading for class.

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Kadji Amin is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. He is the recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in “Sex” from the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum (2015-16) and a Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship from Stony Brook University (2015). Amin’s research and teaching focuses on bringing empirical scholarship on queer and trans history and on gender and sexual variance in the Global South to bear on queer and trans theory. His book, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Duke 2017) won an Honorable Mention for best book in LGBT studies form the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association. Disturbing Attachments deidealizes Jean Genet’s coalitional politics with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians by foregrounding their animation by unsavory and outdated modes of attachment, including pederasty, racial fetishism, nostalgia for prison, and fantasies of queer terrorism.

Amin is currently at work on a second book project, tentatively titled Trans Materialism without Gender Identity. Trans Materialism without Gender Identity rethinks the foundations of contemporary transgender politics and scholarship by arguing that the concept of gender identity is a fiction that has historically done transgender people more harm than good. It demonstrates that, both historically and globally, gender identity structurally abandons those transfeminine people whose cultures are too public, too sexual, irreducibly social, and too shaped by the exigencies of labor to be privatized as individual identities. Trans Materialism outlines a materialist transgender theory and politics that robustly opposes the harms faced by the most vulnerable transgender populations, trans women and femmes of color. Amin has published articles in journals including TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Social Text, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, and Representations. He is the coeditor, with Amber Jamilla Musser and Roy Pérez, of a special issue of ASAP/Journal on “Queer Form.” He serves on the Editorial Board for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Gender and Women’s Studies and is the State of the Field Review Editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.