DMP Podcast, Episode 2
In this episode, DMP collaborators Michi and Julia interview Davidson College Gender & Sexuality Studies professors Dr. Katie Horowitz and Dr. Melissa González about gender, sexuality, identity, pronouns, and microaggressions. They reflect upon their educational and professional paths including pivotal moments that have inspired their research and teaching agendas. Drs. González and Horowitz discuss how Davidson College’s LGBTQ+ community climate has evolved and shifted in their time as members of the college community. They offer strategies to confront microaggressions both as a microaggressee and microaggressor. These experts also elaborate upon the importance of gender pronouns and how to approach the topic in the classroom. Check out our guests’ bios below and their resource recommendations for further self-education.
Dr. Katie Horowitz is a queer femme cis white woman, a single mom, a prison abolitionist, an occasional memestress, and an Assistant Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies and Writing at Davidson. She received her PhD and MA in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley and her BA in Dance and French Studies from Wesleyan University. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in Signs, Porn Studies, CrossCurrents, and The SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies. Her first book, Drag, Interperformance, and the Trouble with Queerness (Routledge, 2020), uses a comparative ethnography of drag kings and queens as a lens through which to examine political and cultural rifts within queer theory and activism. She is currently working on a collaborative study of gender-based abuse between university faculty and a second monograph, Love Under Capitalism, which uncovers an emerging rhetorical trend by which the US state uses romantic and familial love to justify a host of subtle violences against queer and trans folks, disabled folks, the working classes, indigenous people, and people of color. Katie’s teaching focuses on queer and trans theory and activism in a transnational US context. Outside of the classroom, she is also working on a project with Dean Sarah Buchanan to implement restorative justice approaches to student conduct, teaching, and community-building at Davidson.
Dr. Melissa M. González (she/her) is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, Core Faculty in Latin American Studies, and Chair of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Davidson College. Her research spans trans and queer studies of twentieth-century and contemporary Latin American and US Latinx literature and culture. At present, she is completing an MA in Computational Media at Duke University as a Mellon New Directions Fellow and developing a multilingual digital resource for the work of intersectional Latinx sexual dissidence in the hemisphere. In her research, she uses rhetorical analysis, qualitative methods, and feminist theoretical frameworks to study the marginalized knowledges produced by minoritarian, dissident sexual cultures in contemporary South and North America. She works to understand and publicize how these cultures prefigure intersectional liberation, in the context of inclusions and exclusions that operate transnationally. For example, the inclusion of predominantly white or criollo, upper-middle class, and fashionable gay men within the imagined communities of the large metropolises of South and North America is represented as an advancement of human rights; however, this new inclusion excludes and silences those queer subjects less assimilated into a bourgeois lifestyle, including those who are trans, gender-transgressive, black, indigenous, immigrant, and/or poor. Her scholarship and commentary have been published in American Quarterly, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Latin American Cultural Studies, and Transgender Studies Quarterly.
Recommended resources collated
by Drs. Horowitz & González:
Individuals and organizations to follow on Twitter:
Tourmaline (@tourmaliiine), Alok Vaid Menon (@alokvmenon), Che Gossett (@autotheoryqueen), Caleb Luna (@chairbreaker_), Indya Moore (@IndyaMoore), Raquel Willis (@raquel_willis), Ericka Hart (@iHartEricka), Grace Lavery (@graceelavery), Florence Ashley (@ButNotTheCity), Kai Green (@Kai_MG), Jacob Tobia (@jacobtobia), Janet Mock (@janetmock), Charlotte Uprising (@cltuprising), Sylvia Rivera Law Project (@SRLP), Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (@immissmajor), Kai Cheng Thom (@razorfemme), Dean Spade (@deanspade), Trans Student Educational Resources (@transstudent), Trans People of Color Coalition (@TransPOCC), Marsha P. Johnson Institute (@MPJInstitute)
For more on pronouns and how cis folks can avoid transphobic microaggressions:
International Pronouns Day website: https://pronounsday.org/
My Pronouns: Resources on Personal Pronouns: https://www.mypronouns.org/
Jen Manion, “The Performance of Transgender Inclusion” https://publicseminar.org/essays/the-performance-of-transgender-inclusion/
Dean Spade, “We Still Need Pronoun Go-Rounds” http://www.deanspade.net/2018/12/01/we-still-need-pronoun-go-rounds/?fbclid=IwAR1H_KsX1fLzvNZOLNvNnfTi43BibWyhv_7PWRyB0t7qA7aKpD149RVTgsQ
Jacob Hale, “Suggested Rules for Non-Transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism, or Trans___” https://sandystone.com/hale.rules.html
For a broad range of historical, popular, and scholarly work on trans topics:
Digital Transgender Archive: https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/
Non-Binary and Genderqueer Academic Resources: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1btffcjQ-l0nDngYrMCiDSEdi-lQal1kDRnYlKPdV-i8/edit#gid=0
