6th Dec 2016 6:30pm-8:00pm
Edward Street Lecture Theatre
Conny Wächter (Ruhr University, Bochum)
Complicity and Transgender Politics
Transgender politics are suffused with rhetorics of complicity. To name but a few examples,
especially in radical feminist and queer circles, trans women are frequently accused of
complicity in patriarchal ideology and in reaffirming the gender binary – whereas trans men
rarely face analogous criticism; representations of trans* people are often criticised for their
complicity in cissexism and sensationalism; and cis-gendered scholars in the fields of
medicine, sociology, or literary and cultural studies may become complicit in power/
knowledge constructs that disavows the voice of transgendered subjects and contributes to
their marginalisation and pathologisation. As this lecture is going to demonstrate, the critical
analysis of complicity rhetorics can serve to unmask and to illustrate ongoing ideological
struggles and discursive fault lines in transgender politics. A particular focus will be placed on
the politics of representation in this respect.
Dr Cornelia Wächter is Assistant Professor of British Cultural Studies at the Ruhr University
Bochum, Germany. She is he author of Place-ing the Prison Officer: The ‘Warder’ in the
British Literary and Cultural Imagination (Brill/Rodopi, 2015) and co-edited Middlebrow and
Gender, 1890-1945 (Brill, 2016) with Christoph Ehland. Cornelia currently works on a book
project on complicity and the politics of representation.
