What is the Gender of Gender Abolition?
March 6
5 PM
A.D. White House
Alongside and in uneasy relationship with conservative calls to destroy gender, progressive calls to abolish gender have become increasingly insistent. Drawing on resources as disparate as abolition democracy, prison abolition, reproductive justice, Marxism, and transfeminism, gender abolitionists often grapple with (and are called to grapple with) competing conceptualizations of abolition—how it works, what it looks like, and by what means it is accomplished. In this talk, I turn, however, to parse the gender in gender abolition. After diagnosing a latent cisheteronormativity undergirding even some trans-affirming versions, I explore what a prior commitment to gender as lived and conceptualized among queer and trans people demands of the gender abolitionist tradition.
Perry Zurn is Visiting Associate Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University and Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University. He researches primarily in political philosophy, critical theory, and transgender studies and collaborates in psychology and network neuroscience. He is especially interested in the politics of inquiry and voice, material histories of resistance, poetics, and ecology.
Zurn is the author of Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (2021) and How We Make Each Other: Trans Life at the Edge of the University (Duke, 2025), as well as the co-author of Curious Minds: The Power of Connection (2022). He is also the co-editor of Trans Philosophy (2024), Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge (2020), and Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition (2016), as well as the co-editor and co-translator of Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, 1970-1980 (2021).
Zurn has just finished writing a book on the term “cisgender” and is currently writing another on the philosophy of gender.
Website: https://www.perryzurn.com
pzurn@american.edu
Light refreshments following talk.
For more information questions about this event contact fgss@cornell.edu.
This event is presented by the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, the Government Department.
