Feminism Against Cisness: A book talk and discussion

Watch on YouTube Live: https://youtube.com/live/lUdO7seJ5TA

Feminism against Cisness showcases the future of feminist historical, theoretical, and political thought freed from the conceptual strictures of cisness: the fallacy that assigned sex determines sexed experience. The essays demonstrate that this fallacy hinges on the enforcement of white and bourgeois standards of gender comportment that naturalize brutalizing race and class hierarchies. It is, therefore, no accident that the social processes making cisness compulsory are also implicated in anti-Blackness, misogyny, Indigenous erasure, xenophobia, and bourgeois antipathy for working-class life. Working from trans historical archives and materialist trans feminist theories, this volume demonstrates the violent work that cis ideology has done and thinks toward a future for feminism beyond this ideology's counterrevolutionary pull.

Speakers:

Emma Heaney is a teacher and scholar of comparative literature, trans studies, and Marxist feminism. She is the author of The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (2017) and This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation (2025). She is the editor of Feminism Against Cisness (2024) and is currently editing a follow-up volume entitled Provincializing Cisness: Essays Beyond the Empire of Bourgeois Sex. A study of the literary reflection of the historical disarticulation of gayness from transness, entitled Ghost Cousins: Literature After Cisness, is forthcoming in 2027.

Sophie Lewis is a writer and self-described “recovering academic” who lives in Philadelphia and teaches online courses at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her essays appear everywhere from the LRB to n+1, and you can follow or support her writing at patreon.com/reproutopia/ or lasophielle.org/. Sophie is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019), Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022), and Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Girlbosses and Policewomen Against Liberation (2025). Her forthcoming books include the essay collection Femmephilia (Haymarket, June 2026), and a monograph from Penguin Random House: The Liberation of Children.

Lola Olufemi

Maxi Wallenhorst is a writer living in Berlin. She’s a PhD candidate at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Recent writing has appeared in Berlin Review. She’s working on a fiction project, working title, Sex After the City.

This event will be moderated by Alexander Stoffel.