Queer X Humanities
We are Queer X Humanities.
A new intellectual community and initiative at the ASU Humanities Institute that fosters queer and transgender scholarship, interdisciplinary collaboration, and critical dialogue about LGBTQIA2S+ culture, history, and politics. We aim to situate Arizona State University as a formative knowledge hub in the Southwest for Queer Studies, Transgender Studies, and Sexuality Studies and the emerging (sub)fields in the interstices yet to be named.
At ASU, leading scholars and engaged students across our five-campus institution have developed groundbreaking epistemologies, methodologies, art and literature, and publicly engaged scholarship. We see Queer X as an opportunity to connect this community of scholars and practitioners as we address, create, and collaborate on varying forms of knowledge and knowledge production across disciplines. In this initiative, we will discuss the state of the field, delve into the openings and closings that may exist between our fields, and push these fields in provocative new directions. As a possible horizon, we also position, Queer X Humanities, as a place for ASU scholars to dream big and articulate otherwise and ethical ways of being in (but not of) the university, on stolen land, implicated in or experiencing multiple global crises, and in a dangerously regressive political climate.
Banner image: Dale Frank (Australian, b. 1959), "Kosher Berries," 2019. Acrylic, varnish and epoxyglass on Perspex, 78.70 x 59.10 in. (200.00 x 150.00 cm.), courtesy of the artist and Dale Frank Studio
Julia Himberg
Julia Himberg is associate chair of English and associate professor of Film & Media Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of The New Gay for Pay: The Sexual Politics of American Television Production. Her work has appeared in journals such as Communication, Culture, & Critique, Television & New Media, and JCMS. She served as the Special Features Editor for JCMS from 2017-2022. Outside of the university, she translates her research on social change and media representation of the LGBTQ community into persuasive messaging guidance for business clients. She also serves as a board member and chair of communications for GLSEN Arizona, which works to provide safe, supportive, and LGBTQ-inclusive K-12 education. Her work has been featured in the FX docuseries Pride, BBC News, PBS Newshour, and Women’s Health magazine among others.
Sa Whitley
Sa Whitley is an Assistant Professor of Women & Gender Studies in the ASU School of Social Transformation. They hold a Ph.D. in Gender Studies and an M.A. in African American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and an A.B. in English from Princeton University. Whitley’s research projects explore black and LGBTQ housing-justice movements, queer financial subjectivities, and the politics of black urban land reclamation and architectural preservation. Their first book manuscript is entitled The Collective Come-Up: Black Queer Placemaking in Subprime Baltimore. Their recent scholarly writing is available or forthcoming in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography. Their research has been generously supported by the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, and the ASU Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.
Whitley is also an award-winning poet and contributor to the literary arts. They are the winner of the 2024 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and the runner up for both the 2024 Ninth Letter Literary Contest and the 2024 Palette Poetry Previously Published Poem Prize. Their recent poems appear in POETRY Magazine and several others are forthcoming in Fall 2024 in Paperbag and the aforementioned literary journals. Whitley is currently a Cave Canem Poetry Fellow and a former Poetry & the Senses Fellow with the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the ASU Center for Imagination in the Borderlands (2023-24).
A BRIEF NOTE ON X
The letter “X” is a guiding prompt for this initiative. “X” has lived a intrepid life in trans*, queer, feminist, and crip theories alongside popular culture and everyday linguistics. From the “X” in transgender and non-binary politics that represent gender neutrality (and illegibility) on identification documents and clothing brands; terms and phrases like folx and Afro-Latinx; “X” in the afterlife of slavery in the lexicon of formerly enslaved people to sign their names and replace the surname of their former slave owners (i.e. Malcolm X),“X” is a marker that propels queer, trans, and racial counterdiscourses forward in radically divergent ways. At the same time, antitransgender feminists (past and present) use terms such as “womxn” and “womyn” to exclude transgender women and femmes from women’s movements, spaces, and even Women’s Studies (now, often named, Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies). In Colonial America, European settlers used X to steal and render native land into propertied cartographies and projects of Western expansion and genocide. In our invocation, we pursue a daring reclamation of “X” through the phrase, “Queer X.” We mobilize it as a fluid synergy that calls on the symbolism of crossing, transition, and bridges for the work we are doing to critique power and build social movements and intellectual spaces.
Queer X Events
Queer X Faculty Flash Talks: A Roundtable
Ross-Blakley Hall 196 | Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024, 4:30 p.m. – 6 p.m. (MST) | RSVP
Join us for an event series organized by Sa Whitley and Julia Himberg, the co-directors of the Queer X Humanities initiative at the ASU Humanities Institute. This roundtable features five prominent ASU scholars with an eclectic array of research projects and scholarship situated in Queer Studies and/or Transgender Studies. These faculty members will give 5-7 minute “flash talks” about their current research projects and identify emergent and provocative directions for queer and trans theories, epistemologies, methodologies. The Queer X Co-Directors will moderate a subsequent roundtable discussion and audience Q&A, inviting panelists to bridge academic scholarship with contemporary politics, art, and subculture and fostering connections and dialogue in this significant research area across ASU.
Confirmed speakers include:
Aviva Dove-Viebahn, Film & Media Studies, Department of English,
Crystal Jackson, Women & Gender Studies, School of Social Transformation
Lore/tta LeMaster, Associate Professor, Hugh Downs School Of Human Communication
Rachel Corbman, Women & Gender Studies, School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies
Black Trans Futurities: Political Imaginaries in the Academy and the Arts
A Symposium Co-sponsored by the ASU Humanities Institute and the ASU School of Social Transformation | Mar. 20-21, 2025
Save the date for this exciting series of conversations featuring leading scholars and key creative practitioners. Organized by Queer X Initiative Co-Director Sa Whitley and Assistant Professor Aaron Mallory in the School of Social Transformation. The symposium will include a public panel on black trans studies and trans of color critique and an off-site poetry reading that celebrates black trans poetics. A call for participants that is open to graduate students and faculty will be published in the next HI Newsletter!