Trans of Color Approaches to Trans* Literature

Join UCLA English for a talk featuring Jian Neo Chen, associate professor of queer studies in the departments of English and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. Chen will share their reflections on reading contemporary trans* literature during the ongoing racial gender/sex wars. Their talk will offer some initial thoughts on the politics, aesthetics, and science of trans* auto- writing and theory spanning the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries.

The talk will be followed by a Q & A moderated by Summer Kim Lee, assistant professor in UCLA’s English Department.

This event is free and open to the public. A light reception will follow the event.

Register here to attend.

Jian Neo Chen (they/ he) is associate professor of queer studies in English and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. Their research focuses on transgender and queer aesthetics and embodied practices in literature, visual culture and contemporary theory and their reimagining and reconstruction of social relations and movements. Chen’s first book Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement (ANIMA series, Duke University Press, 2019) was awarded a 2021 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award and was a 2020 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. They serve as a co-editor in the new ASTERISK book series at Duke University Press with Susan Stryker and Eliza Steinbock. Chen is working on two new books. The first engages with lineages of Asian American and Asian diasporic queer and feminist thought to develop a racial trans/disciplinary methodology attuned to the literary and visual sensorium of Asian American trans and gender variant political experience. The second explores the potential autonomy of trans* literature within and outside the aesthetic, political, and scientific orders of US and Western European settler racial capitalism.