Changing Gender: Susan Stryker

Co-presented with the Bay Area Lesbian Archives

What might our lives look like without the limiting assumptions that gender, as a concept, imposes across the political spectrum?

In Changing Gender, the leading trans scholar Susan Stryker invites readers to ride along on her lifelong quest to uncover what gender means and does, tracing the gender concept's roots in grammar and how it transformed into a battleground of 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 tune in to the origins, idiosyncrasies, and generative possibilities of the gender concept. Along the way, she weaves stories drawn from her lifetime as a pathbreaking historian, filmmaker, activist, and founding figure of transgender studies. In conversation with award-winning filmmaker Cheryl Dunye. Doors at 6:30pm. $15 adv / $20 door