CURRENTS: Ari Page (ENGL) and Vanessa Wills (GWU)

CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now is lunchtime series that showcases exciting new faculty work in the humanities in a dynamic and inter-disciplinary setting.

Ari Page, M.A. Candidate, Texts, Technologies, and Literature, UMBC

Past generations of trans advocates and activists have centered assimilation into current structures of gender through legislation and normalizing trans identities as a necessity of recognition and survival. However, the current generation has seen a large uptick in the number of trans people not only visible online, but actively engaging in their own practice of trans euphoria. Tik Tok is the primary platform for this kind of euphoric community building, and trans people are more visible there than we have ever been on any other social media site. On Tik Tok, fandom practices like head canons and shipping can be shared publicly without needing to be discreet about gender identity or burying our communication within pre-established subcultural spaces. In this talk, Page argues that fan studies needs to make room for the work and affective experiences of trans fans, and acknowledge the shifting perspectives of fans in the direction of queer representation, celebration, and gender euphoria.

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Vanessa Wills, Assistant Professor, Philosophy, George Washington University; Spring 2022 Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

This talk emerges from research carried out in the furtherance of Dr. Wills’ project exploring Black woman Marxists’ thought about the relationships among race, class, and gender. The philosopher Angela Davis is easily the most well-known Black woman Marxist, yet her work is often curiously sidelined in contemporary work on the philosophy of race and gender. In this talk, Wills traces the development of Davis’s thought on race and gender throughout her career and address several ways in which her work sheds light on contemporary debates in critical philosophy of race and in feminist thought.