Susan Stryker's Toronto BOOK LAUNCH for Changing Gender
About the event
In a very rare Toronto appearance, legendary trans trailblazer SUSAN STRYKER will join us at Glad Day to launch her new book.
It's the TORONTO BOOK LAUNCH for
Susan Stryker's CHANGING GENDER
Schedule: 7pm - Doors 7:30pm - Introduction by Sheila Cavanagh 7:40pm - Presentation on the Legacy of Susan Stryker by Toby Anne Finlay 7:50pm - Interview with Susan Stryker and Sheila Cavanagh 8:30pm - Questions and Answers with the Audience 9:00pm - Book Signing and Social
RSVP This event is FREE to attend. We strongly encourage you to RSVP to attend, which helps us with our planning.
This event is made possible, in part, by a SSHRC research grant held by Dr. Sheila Cavanagh at York University.
Changing Gender is a provocative, genre-bending call to reconsider the story we tell about gender itself.
With the far right weaponizing the rhetoric of anti-gender ideology and increasingly targeting the lives of transgender people, one question becomes ever more urgent and contested: What are we even talking about when we talk about gender? Where did the concept itself come from, and where might it go?
In Changing Gender, the leading trans scholar Susan Stryker invites readers to join her lifelong quest to uncover what gender means and does. She traces the concept’s roots in grammar and shows how it has been transformed into a battleground in the culture wars. From the origins of “Yankee Doodle” to acid trips in Joshua Tree National Park, from nineteenth-century phrenology to present-day anti-trans conspiracy theorists, Stryker finds surprising places to tap into the origins, idiosyncrasies, and generative possibilities of the gender concept. Along the way, she weaves in stories drawn from her lifetime as a pathbreaking historian, filmmaker, activist, and founding figure of transgender studies.
Poignant and deeply researched, lyrical and authoritative, Changing Gender exposes the limiting assumptions about gender that span the political spectrum and imagines what life might look like if some of those limitations were lifted. Ultimately, Stryker argues, to change gender is to change what it means to be human—and to change reality itself.
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Susan Stryker’s historical research, theoretical writings, media-making, activism, and academic field-building activities have helped shape the conversation on trans issues since the early 1990s. Susan retired from the University of Arizona as Professor of Gender and Women's Studies in 2020, and currently holds a distinguished visiting appointment at Stanford University's Michelle Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
Related forthcoming Special Issues of Australian Feminist Studies: one on Susan Stryker’s legacy and a second on trans studies more broadly
