Sarah M. Steele: "Trans & Queer Sexual Politics"

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SARAH M. STEELE
Postdoc, Trans+ People in Canadian Prisons Project, Chair in Transgender Studies
PhD, Sociology, University of Illinois, Chicago
"Trans & Queer Sexual Politics: The Practice of Reimagining Desire"
Thursday, February 29th, 2024
1:00 - 2:30 PM Pacific
UVic Cornett B135 & Zoom
If you're attending on Zoom, registration is required.
Sarah M. Steele, PhD, (they/them) is a postdoctoral scholar for the Trans+ People in Canadian Prisons Project at the University of Victoria, BC with a PhD in Sociology from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Sarah’s academic work, activism and research interests lie at the intersections of race, sexuality, and trans and queer politics. As a recent immigrant from the US, they are currently enjoying the short winter and early flower blooms on Vancouver Island.
As the classic feminist slogan goes: “the personal is political.” This social movement ideology worked by challenging the binary of public/ private arguing that private issues are indeed political issues. In this talk, I examine the inverse of this classic feminist idea, examining the political as personal. Or in other words, I'm looking at whether political ideologies and understandings shape the real experience of sexualities in the social world. Specifically, I examine the connections that trans and queer activists draw between their political commitments and their private sexual lives. Because culturally available, normative, and hegemonic structures of desire replicate larger systems of domination, Chicago’s queer organizers work to create a politics of desire that reimagines erotic life, denounces erotic injustice and deeply challenges heteronormative modes of dominance and control. In this talk, I explore in detail how queer and trans political ideologies are transforming the sexual lives of contemporary trans and queer activists in Chicago.