Susan Stryker, Transformation Art on Transgender Identity
Susan Stryker serves as an artist, activist, and associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. As an artist, Stryker works in critical theory, literature, and film. Her work as an editor on the 2006 Transgender Studies Reader earned her a Lambda Literary Award. In addition, she won an Emmy Award for her 2005 documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria. Considered alongside her artist’s statement, Stryker’s work reveals her deep commitment to highlighting transgender narratives, while simultaneously demonstrating the ways in which these narratives interact with other facets of life, including technology, commerce, and history.
The above clip comes from an opening segment of Stryker’s “Screaming Queens.” In the clip, we hear a voiceover of a television newscaster from the 1960s, wherein the newscaster derides the “screaming queens” who dared to make a scene at the Compton Cafeteria in the early hours of the morning. This depiction of events fails to capture the nuances of this chapter in history, though. As Stryker sets out to demonstrate in her film, the August 1966 riots at Compton Cafeteria in San Fransisco served as a precursor to the Stonewall Riots. Due to transphobia within the gay and lesbian communities — a reality Stryker addresses in her artist’s statement — queens found themselves barred from gay clubs, and consequently, turned to all-night cafeterias. The police, relying on cross-dressing bans, would then raid the cafeterias and arrest the queens, during which the police often brutalized the queens. As a speaker in this clip notes, then, the Compton Cafeteria riot was not a cat-fight between dramatic queens; rather, it represented a vital demonstration against police violence. This demonstration was about civil rights.
This second clip from “Screaming Queens” features a queen describing her inability to find a job due to the constrictive nature of the gender binary. Even when the queen manages to “pass” as a cis-gender woman for a time, this job security proves illusory, as people will “out” her to her employer. Her defiant response to this predicament, “To hell with it: why should I be legitimate? Why should I be respectable? Why should I be anything,” demonstrates total dismissal of heteronormative rules governing work, sex, and notions of “propriety.” Similarly, the voiceover at the video’s close illustrates Stryker’s commitment to honoring the stories of sex workers in order to challenge dominant narratives concerning trans individuals. By recognizing that the need for work and the desire for love may coexist, Stryker elucidates the ways in which individuals weave together discourses of capital, consumption, and love, as these different strands all speak to issues of personal value.
2013 Interview with TSQ Editors Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker
Here, Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker discuss their work on the transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ). Espousing a desire “to change the conditions of knowledge production on trans and gender variant issues worldwide,” Stryker underscores her commitment to centering trans narratives within a wide range of contexts and subject areas. Moreover, by committing to focusing on a particular theme with each issue, Currah and Stryker demonstrate their commitment to inclusivity and coalition building, as this structure, coupled with their commitment to allowing ample time to gather papers, encourages people from lots of different backgrounds to submit their work. For example, the issue, “Making Transgender Count,” centered on issues of population and epidemiology, allows for submissions not just from scholars in the humanities, but also from medicine, biology, geography, and other scientific fields. In this way, Styker’s work on TSQ affirms her observation that “homo is not always the most relevant norm against which trans needs to define itself” (Q/DCA 204). TSQ provides a forum, then, for interrogating norms other than homonormativity in order to better understand trans experiences.
As an academic, artist, and activist, Stryker masterfully engages with various mediums in order to amplify trans voices, and in doing so, effectively advocates for increasingly awareness to the narratives of trans individuals.
