14th Annual Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Memorial Lecture with Kadji Amin 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 elevated the creative transformation of shame as a recognizably queer affective signature. The meanings of this signature shift, however, when we shift its frame from elite literature, cinema, and art to the mundane history of everyday social practices.

Kadji Amin is an Associate Professor within Emory University’s Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program and was a 2023-2024 fellow at the Cornell Society of Fellows. This talk puts queer theoretical work on shame into conversation with Esther Newton’s foundational Mother Camp and Kadji Amin’s research on the oral histories of queens of the 1960s and 1970s to demonstrate 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.

Open to all BU students, faculty, staff, alums, and the wider community.

Presented by the Boston University Gender and Sexuality Studies Group and cosponsored by the Boston University Center for the Humanities; the departments of: English, History, Religion, Romance Studies, Sociology, and World Languages & Literature; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Foundation; LGBTQIA+ Center for Faculty & Staff; and programs in: African American Studies and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies