William and Sally Searle Graduate Fellow
About
"That We Live is Protest: A Conceptual History of Black Trans Resistance"
How people conceptualize resistance matters. It shapes what they understand to be politically possible and, in turn, how they live. My current project constructs a constellation of moments of Black trans experience, examining ideas of resistance, protest, and self-making across space and time. I examine fugitive resistance and gender nonconformity in the antebellum United States (1830s–1860s), practices of resistant self-making under state policing in Harlem ball culture (early 1930s), and Pauli Murray's experiments in militant nonviolence in the United States and Ghana (1940s–1960s). Bringing these moments into conversation, I argue that Black trans experience offers a distinctive theoretical lens through which to reconsider the strengths and limitations of contemporary theories of resistance, protest, and political action.
Jay Hasper is a PhD candidate in Political Science.
