Susan O'Neal Stryker (born 1961), best known as Susan Stryker,[3] is an American professor, historian, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and sexuality and trans realities. She is a professor of Gender and Women's Studies, former director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, and founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona.
Stryker is the author of several books and a founding figure of transgender studies as well as a leading scholar of transgender history.[4][5]
She came out as transgender and began to transition shortly after earning her doctorate.[12][13] Her scholarly article "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix", published in 1994, was her first published academic article, and after trail-blazing Australian transgender academic Roberta Perkins who began publishing her research on female sex workers in the 1980s, one of the first articles ever published in a peer-reviewedacademic journal by an openly transgender author.[14]
In 2004, Stryker was distinguished visiting faculty in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. In 2007-8 she held the Ruth Wynn Woodward Endowed Visiting Professorship in Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. In fall 2008 she was distinguished visiting faculty with the Committee on Degrees in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University, and in Spring 2009 she was Regents' Distinguished Lecturer in Feminist Studies at University of California-Santa Cruz. She was hired with tenure as Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University in 2009, and left to accept a position as Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona in 2011.
In 2013, Stryker established the Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona.[15] She focused on "hiring faculty of color", in her own words.[15]
In 2015, Yale University awarded Stryker the James Robert Brudner Class of 1983 Memorial Prize for lifetime accomplishment and scholarly contributions in the field of lesbian and gay studies. In 2007, the Monette-Horowitz Trust honored her for her anti-homophobia activism.[16][17] Among her other honors are a Community Vanguard Award from the Transgender Law Center, and recognition as a "Local Hero" by San Francisco public television station KQED.[16]
In the critical survey Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback (Chronicle Books 2001), Stryker turned her attention to the lesbian pulp fiction and gay male pulp fiction published in the United States from the 1930s through the 1960s.
With Stephen Whittle she co-edited The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge 2006), which was her first work to win a Lambda Literary Award. Her following book, Transgender History (Seal Press 2008), covers transvestism, transgender people, and transsexualism in the United States from the conclusion of World War II to the 2000s.[21][22][23][24] After this, she co-edited The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (2013, with Aren Aizura) and The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (2022, with Dylan McCarthy Blackston).[25][26]
Stryker is now working on a new book project, Cross-Dressing for Empire: Gender and Performance at the Bohemian Grove. The Bohemian Grove is a campground in Northern California, and the summer meeting-place of the Bohemian Club, a private organization of American men with considerable political and economic power or cultural influence.[27][28][29] In 2024 the anthology When Monsters Speak. A Susan Stryker Reader was published with an introduction by McKenzie Wark.[30]
Film and video
Stryker received a San Francisco / Northern California Emmy Award for her directorial work on Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria (2005),[31] a documentary film about the Gene Compton's Cafeteria riot of 1966; the film was co-written, -directed, and -produced by Victor Silverman. With director Michelle Lawler and executive producer Kim Klausner she subsequently co-produced Forever's Gonna Start Tonight (2009), a documentary film about Vicki Marlane, an HIV-positive, transgender performer at nightclubs and lounges. Stryker's most recent documentary is Christine in the Cutting Room (2013), an experimental film about Christine Jorgensen.[32]
In one paper, "Transgender Studies: Queer Theory's Evil Twin" (2004), Stryker describes how transgender people are often marginalized within the queer community, and how the academic discipline of Queer Studies privileges specific narratives of sexual orientation over gender identity.[13]
Bibliography
Books
Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area (1996), Chronicle, ISBN978-0811811873
Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback (2001), Chronicle, ISBN978-0811830201
^Silverman, Victor (director, writer); Stryker, Susan (director, writer, presenter) (2005). Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria (DVD). San Francisco, California: Frameline Distribution. 3 minutes in. OCLC68045197. Archived from the original on 13 August 2006. Retrieved 20 July 2012. I had recently finished my Ph.D. in History, come out as transsexual, and started my transition from man to woman—all in the same year.
^ abJoselow, Maxine (22 June 2016). "A Push for Transgender Studies". Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 22 June 2016. "One reason why the search didn't work the first year is that the three people who had been hired were all white, and we were really trying to prioritize hiring faculty of color," she said.