Please join the Center for Gender and Sexuality for a special online talk by Dr. Nat Raha. There are two ways to watch the event: 1) you can stream the talk using the link in this posting, or 2) visit the Center (670 Student Center, 6th floor) for a community watch party in our workshop room.

Description

How does transfeminism influence and shape our ideas of solidarity and collective action? How can transfeminist herstories reframe our understanding of feminist movements as generative for trans practices, life, and wider social solidarities, rather than simply sites of hostility? Acknowledging the importance of trans and queer hi(r)stories for our contested present, this talk will consider transfeminist practices in the present alongside unarchived trans histories of solidarities from the 1970s, where lesbian separatism and feminist challenges to social movements emerge as the sites of possibilities for trans organising.

Dr. Raha will link these herstories to thinking from her monograph Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (co-authored with Mijke van der Drift), elaborating on how femme inflects practices of and reflections on collective worldmaking. In the face of engineered divisions and separations in our contemporary world around gender/sex, race, and class, this talk will consider everyday social practices that dissolve such divisions.

About Dr. Nat Raha

Dr. Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar. Her research--spanning poetry, art, politics, and hi(r)story--focuses on transfeminism, practices and collectives of care and social reproduction, racial capitalism, and decolonisation.

She is the author of four books of poetry, including apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, 2024) and of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018). With Mijke van der Drift, Dr. Raha is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024), which was a finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Awards, and co-author of essays in The Funambulist and Social Text, and co-editor of Radical Transfeminism zine.

Dr. Raha's poetry is anthologised in 100 Queer Poems, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, and Tendrills: Ecopoetics of Community and Justice. Her critical writing appears in Transgender Marxism, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Utter Vulnerability: Essays on the Poetry of John Wieners. Performance work includes epistolary (on carceral islands), co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023.

She teaches in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland.

Photo of Nat Raha by Phyllis Christopher