Tell Shelley Anne — Dr. Susan Stryker

Dr. Susan Stryker: Educator, Author, Theorist and founding executive editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly

Dr. Susan Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona and holds the Barbara Lee Professorship in Women’s Leadership at Mills College (Oakland, CA), 2020-2022. An award-winning scholar and filmmaker whose historical research, theoretical writing, and creative works have helped shape the cultural conversation on transgender topics since the early 1990s, Dr. Stryker earned her Ph.D. in U.S. history at the University of California-Berkeley in 1992. She later held a Ford Foundation/Social Science Research Council postdoctoral fellowship in sexuality studies at Stanford University, and has been a distinguished visiting faculty member at Harvard University, Yale University, Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins University, University of California-Santa Cruz, Macquarie University in Sydney, and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. She is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books and anthologies, including Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area (Chronicle 1996), Queer Pulp: Perverse Passions in the Golden Age of the Paperback (Chronicle 2000), The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge 2006), The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (Routledge 2013), and Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (Seal Press 2008, 2017).

Her academic articles have appeared in such publications as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Radical History Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, Parallax, Australian Feminist Studies, Social Semiotics, and Journal of Women’s History, while her public scholarship has appeared in Aperture, Wired, The Utne Reader, and Slate.com. She won an Emmy Award for her documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (ITVS 2005), and is also the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award (2006), the Ruth Benedict Book Prize (2013), the Monette-Horowitz Prize for LGBTQ activism (2008), the Transgender Law Center’s Community Vanguard Award (2003), two career achievement awards in LGBTQ Studies—the David Kessler Award in  from the City University of New York’s Center for LGBT Studies in 2008, and Yale University’s Brudner Memorial Prize in 2015—and the Local Genius Award from the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art in 2018.

Dr. Stryker served for several years as Executive Director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco (1999-2003) and was Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University 2009-2011). At the University of Arizona, she served for five years as Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies (2011-2016) and was founder of the university’s Transgender Studies Initiative and faculty cluster hire. In 2019-20 she was a Presidential Fellow at Yale University, and in 2020-2022 holds the Barbara Lee Professorship in Women’s Leadership at Mills College. In addition to developing and consulting on various media project, Dr. Stryker’s current work in process is Changing Gender: A Trans History of North America, under contract to Farrar Straus Giroux.

This is the bio of all bios. I always ask the people I interview to send me one, yet this is one of the best. Why? Because Dr. Stryker is a professional in every sense of the word. I enjoyed developing the interview and trust you will enjoy reading about Dr. Stryker’s amazing work focusing on the transgender community and outlook on life.

TGForum: You have helped shape the cultural conversation on transgender topics since the early 1990s. What have you learned and where in your mind do you feel we stand today?

Ms. Stryker: It really feels like a best of times, worst of times sort of thing. On the one hand, the cultural understanding of gender diversity has really experienced a sea-change, in ways that still boggle my mind. On the other hand, this elevated profile has resulted in higher levels of violence being directed against the most vulnerable parts of the community, and it has provoked a serious backlash. The so-called ‘tipping point’ in 2014, when Laverne Cox was on the cover of Time magazine, has unfortunately been tipped in the wrong direction since 2015, when the ‘trans toilets’ moral panic erupted with vengeance in the struggle to repeal Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance. The resurgence of explicitly anti-trans feminism, after seeming to be on the wane for decades, is also quite concerning, given the way this discourse has crossed over from relatively marginalized enclaves of reactionary feminist thought into far more dangerous ethno-nationalist movements that demonize ‘gender ideology’. It is one thing, in other words, for Janice Raymond or Sheila Jeffreys to fulminate about us, and quite another for Viktor Orban to outlaw the teaching of gender studies in Hungary and not allow trans people to legally transition.

TGForum: Talk about that groundbreaking essay you penned 25 years ago. Is what is old new again?

Ms. Stryker: You know, that ol’ thing has never gone out of style, which tickles me. I have often said that I do not feel like I really wrote it, that it just came out of me. I have never had that experience with any other piece of writing. I am happy that it is still kicking around. I had a chance to write a reflection about the piece for the 25th anniversary of the academic journal in whose first volume it appeared, and said that I’d set a google alert for My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix and enjoyed getting little notices in my inbox, like postcards from the Travelocity gnome, about all the places it traveled. Swedish glitterpunk band doing a cover version? Italian anarcho-vegan collective celebrating its de-privileging of the human? Special symposium at Cambridge University devoted to its influence? Check, check, check. And mille grazie. The thing I have been most pleased about, I have to say, besides its sheer longevity, is how it seems to have anticipated what cultural studies scholars call the ‘new materialisms’ and the ‘ontological turn’, and how much it seems to be in conversation with the really exciting trans-of-color critique that has been emerging over the past couple of years.

TGForum: If someone wanted to be a theorist, what makes a good one?

Ms. Stryker: Read eclectically, picking a few topics, thinkers, and approaches to really drill down deep on. Then cultivate a body of expertise on some topic like transgender, for example, that you can approach from a variety of angles or theoretical lenses. Where it really gets interesting is when you can direct your topical expertise back to the theoretical lens, and perhaps help change it, critique it, or develop some new way of using it, in a way that puts you in conversation with others who use those conceptual tools regardless of their topical specialization.

TGForum: Of all the noteworthy books you have written what is your favorite and why?

Ms. Stryker: I love all my children equally! And I love each one differently. I liked Gay by the Bay because it was my first. Queer Pulp because it was quick and easy and had cool pictures. The Transgender Studies Reader because it demonstrated that there was a field. The Transgender Studies Reader 2 because it showed how quickly the field was changing and expanding. Transgender History because I was a little grouchy about doing it. I was asked to by Seal Press, and I really wanted to be working on something else, but thought I should write it, so I did. And it is the most successful thing I have ever done, in terms of audience. It was the child I did not want that I then became quite proud of.

TGForum: Do you consider Screaming Queens among your best film projects?

Ms. Stryker: Yes. That was another one where I have been kind of blown away by its longevity. I mean, that thing came out in 2005, and it is still getting programmed in festivals, shown on television, used by community groups and activist organizations, and is still up on streaming platforms. To me, that is a testament to the story, which I was honored to have helped be remembered in the present. It was my first film, and I am grateful that it gave me an opportunity to learn skills that have served me well as I have tried to have a career.

TGForum: Quite an honor to recently have joined Mills College. What curriculum will you covering?

Ms. Stryker: I indeed feel quite honored to have been invited to serve as the 2020-22 Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women’s Leadership, in route to my quasi-retirement. I am teaching an exceptionally light load of classes of my own design, in my area of specialization, as well as doing some public-facing events. What this boils down to in practice is that I teach one class on trans literature, and another class on trans history, and do a monthly public lecture, an ‘in conversation with’ style event with somebody who has something interesting to say on trans something or other.

TGForum: Are there any misconceptions that people sometimes have about you?

Ms. Stryker: I increasingly notice that people get all shy or star-struck around me, and I must work to encourage them to chill out. I am always a little baffled by this, because most of my career has just been trying to figure out ways to get paid for something I knew how to do, or thought would be fun, or useful, and it is only in retrospect that it looks like anything that anyone would consider ‘important’ or add up to anything other than a series of one-offs.  I also notice that people I do not know can seem really angry with me on social media, and I just take that with a grain of salt because usually they are just tilting at some straw-man caricature of what they think I am.

TGForum: What is the best advice you ever received and who did it come from?

Ms. Stryker: Hard one, but since we are talking mostly about work here, I am going to say the brilliant MacArthur ‘genius’  award-winning historian Allan Bérubé sharing a burrito with me one night back around 1992 at some Mission District (San Francisco) taqueria, after we had both been working late at the GLBT Historical Society archives, and walking me through his own process of becoming a successful independent scholar. Forever grateful for that.

TGForum: What do you consider your greatest virtue?

Ms. Stryker: I like to think I am very willing to be proved wrong. And I think that’s because I am very clear about always wanting to take my best shot, give the best answer, provide the deepest context, suggest the most significant meaning, express the highest value, and if I have failed to do that, then I am just thankful for being shown how I can improve my game and do better. I aim for humility in the pursuit of excellence. 

TGForum: Any regrets about what life has brought you?

Ms. Stryker: I have had a few, but then again, too few to mention.

Tags: featured, interview, Susan Stryker, Transgender

Category: Interview