Abstract: Trans Studies have become an epistemological project that challenges who has the power to intervene in violent knowledge production that shape trans lives. The field promises to form a radical critical intervention in pathologizing, criminalizing, marginalizing, and dehumanizing discourses. But what happens when the promise is not fulfilled? How can we imagine the field’s future considering its myriad legacies of colonialism and eugenics in knowledge production on gender? I suggest thinking through a version of Critical Trans Studies that continues to resist and transform oppressive power systems while building generous and generative worlds in developing knowledge, political and artistic practices.  

Bio: Dr. YV Nay is Senior Lecturer at the Zürich University of Applied Sciences ZHAW. They were Visiting Professor for Political Science at the University of Vienna, Postdoctoral Fellow of the Trans Studies Research Cluster at the University of Arizona, Fellow at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry ICI Berlin, and Lecturer in Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science LSE, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Gender Studies at the University of Geneva.

Dr. Nay’s interdisciplinary and intersectional research and teaching is positioned in gender, queer and trans studies, sociology of the family, social movement studies, and transformative education science.

Their first book entitled Feeling Family. The Affective Paradoxes of the Normalisation of ‘Rainbow Families’ (Zaglossus 2017) is a study of the affective politics of queer families, which interweaves feminist, queer, affect theory and queer of color critique. YV Nay’s current project Affective Activism – The Feeling of Belonging in Transgender Communities, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, focuses on the affective structure of activism within transnational trans communities. Nay is co-editor of The Europa Issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly TSQ (Duke University Press 2021, 8.2.) and of the collection Affect and Gender (Zaglossus 2014). Contact: yv.nay@zhaw.ch