Inaugural lecture Dr. Eliza Steinbock

"We Have Always Existed: The Arts of Transgender Survival"

Transgender visibility in public domains like museums, media, and sports significantly increased during the early 2010s, as did the ferocity of legislative backlashes and misinformation campaigns that endure today. This lecture will discuss the cultural activism that arose in the last decade as a counterpoint to disinformation propagating the idea that trans people don’t or shouldn’t exist. A central aim of transgender cultural activism is to resist forces seeking to erase trans existence now, in the past, with the future of trans people hanging in the balance. One means to oppose this kind of destructive force is to assign value to historical materials from trans lives, to recognize it as vital heritage, worth preserving in its material form and through the transmission of practices, knowledge, and memory. Another means is to draw a line from precedents in history to contemporary cultural politics to illuminate how we have been here before, survived, and can find in the past resources for present-day activism.

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