![\"\"](\"\/honoringeve\/files\/2026\/03\/sedgwick-2026-AMIN-C4-683x1024.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe Howard Thurman Center, 808 Commonwealth Avenue<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
From Eve Sedgwick\u2019s generative writing on \u201cshame-creativity\u201d to the 2003 \u201cGay Shame\u201d conference to Heather Love\u2019s contention that queer theory and gay liberation share a faith in \u201ctransmuting abjection into glorious agency,\u201d 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\u2019s foundational Mother Camp<\/em> 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<\/em>. 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<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n Sponsored by: The Boston University Center for the Humanities, The Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Foundation, The Department of English, the Program in Women\u2019s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, The LGBTQIA+ Center for Faculty & Staff, and Boston University Faculty Development .<\/p>\n Kadji Amin<\/strong>\u00a0is Associate Professor of Women\u2019s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. He is the recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in \u201cSex\u201d from the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum (2015-16) and a Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship from Stony Brook University (2015). Amin\u2019s 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,\u00a0<\/span>Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History<\/em>\u00a0(Duke 2017) won an Honorable Mention for best book in LGBT studies form the GL\/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association.\u00a0<\/span>Disturbing Attachments<\/em>\u00a0deidealizes Jean Genet\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Amin is currently at work on a second book project, tentatively titled\u00a0<\/span>Trans Materialism without Gender Identity<\/em>.\u00a0<\/span>Trans Materialism without Gender Identity<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>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.\u00a0<\/span>Trans Materialism<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>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\u00a0<\/span>TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Social Text, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, and Representations<\/em>. He is the coeditor, with Amber Jamilla Musser and Roy P\u00e9rez, of a special issue of\u00a0<\/span>ASAP\/Journal<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>on \u201cQueer Form.\u201d He serves on the Editorial Board for\u00a0<\/span>TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Gender and Women\u2019s Studies<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>and is the State of the Field Review Editor for\u00a0<\/span>GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Professor Kadji Amin will deliver the Fourteenth Annual Sedgwick Lecture on April 14, 2026 at 5pm The Howard Thurman Center, 808 Commonwealth Avenue Queens of Stigma: Trans Queens and the Class Project of Queer Theory From Eve Sedgwick\u2019s generative writing on \u201cshame-creativity\u201d to the 2003 \u201cGay Shame\u201d conference to Heather Love\u2019s contention that queer theory […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6364,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/honoringeve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/706"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/honoringeve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/honoringeve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/honoringeve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6364"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/honoringeve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706"}],"version-history":[{"count":53,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/honoringeve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":987,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/honoringeve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/706\/revisions\/987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/honoringeve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}