Queer@King's welcomes Emma Heaney – scholar of comparative literature, feminist studies, and trans studies – for a talk that makes the bold claim that we must abandon analytics of gender and “the binary” in favor of analytics of cisness and patriarchy. Heaney suggests that both theoretical and historical precision are served by retraining our attention away from a false universal binary of sex or the taxonomic proliferation of genders and toward an account of how the naturalising conceit of cisness serves existing racial and class social orders.

Emma Heaney is the author of The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Northwestern UP, 2017) and the editor of Feminism Against Cisness (Duke UP, 2024). This Watery Place, her collection of essays on gestation’s potential to ground resistance to cisness, wage work, and the deathcult of endless war, is forthcoming from Pluto Press. She teaches and serves as Faculty Advisor for the Advanced Certificate in Experimental Writing in the XE Program at NYU.

Please note this event is on the 6th floor of the King's Building on the Strand campus. We request that guests arrive 15 minutes early to allow time to sign in at reception and to find the room. This event finishes promptly at 4pm.