This two-day hybrid workshop brings together scholars at various stages of their careers to explore the emerging field of trans German studies.
Trans German Studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines German-language cultures, histories, and societies through a trans studies perspective, focusing on how gender diversity, embodiment, and identity are represented, lived, and regulated in German-speaking contexts. As a field it not only expands how we understand German culture and history, but also shows how questions of gender, citizenship, medicine, and rights are deeply interconnected, helping scholars and students think more critically about power, belonging, and social justice—both in Germany and beyond.
Engaging with literature, visual culture, archives, and histories from German-speaking Europe and its diasporas, participants will critically reflect on the complex legacies of transness in German contexts—from early sexological frameworks and Weimar-era organizing to the German literary canon and film. The workshop seeks to advance interdisciplinary research, build international networks, and foster both scholarly and creative collaborations in a historically underrepresented area of inquiry.
This workshop is co-organized by Dr. Jonah I. Garde (The University of British Columbia) and Dr. Cedar Lensing-Sharp (University of California, Los Angeles), and hosted in collaboration with Dr. Laurie Marhoefer (University of Washington) and PhD Candidate John O’Hara (University of British Columbia).
How to Attend
This event will be held on May 21, 2026 from 9:00 am – 6:30 pm PT, and May 22, 2026 from 9:30 am – 5:00 pm PT. Attendees can join in-person in Buchanan Tower 997 or online via Zoom. If attending online, please register here.
Thank you to our co-sponsors: the German Academic Exchange Service, the UBC Centre for European Studies, the Centre for Queer and Trans Cultural Praxis (UBC Research Excellence Cluster), the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, the UBC Public Humanities Hub and the UBC Robert Quartermain Centre for SOGI-Inclusive Excellence in Education.
Program
To learn more about the pre-program and how to register, please click here.
12:00 pm - 3:00 pm Graduate Student Seminar: “Decoding Trans – Translating Gender-Diverse Texts from German” (hybrid) led by Dr. Cedar Lensing-Sharp and Dr. Jonah I. Garde
3:30 pm - 5:30 pm Trans*Form_ations: A Mini-Zine Making Workshop (in-person only) led by Dr. Cedar Lensing-Sharp and Dr. Jonah I. Garde
8:30 am - 9:00 am Arrival & light breakfast
9:00 am - 9:30 am Welcome & opening remarks
9:30 am - 11:00 am Keynote speaker Emma Heaney (New York University): “The First Ghost Cousins: a History in Literature”
11:00 am - 11:30 am Coffee break
11:30 am - 1:00 pm Panel 1: German Trans Cinema
- Leila Mukhida (University of Cambridge): “Collapsing Time in Rosa von Praunheim’s Ich bin meine eigene Frau (1992)”
- Jul Tirler (University of Vienna) & Zoë Steinsberger (University of Innsbruck): “Trans Representations in Times of Fascistization: A Focus on Contemporary German-Language Film Productions” (online)
- Be Schierenberg (University of California Berkeley): “Berlin Blues”
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Lunch break
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm Panel 2: Spectres of Madness and Disability
- Denise Henschel (Maynooth University): “Challenging Kantian Time: Neurotrans* Temporalities in Contemporary German-language literature" (online)
- Willa Smart (University of California, Davis): “Daniel Paul Schreber and the Specter of Untreatability in the Midcentury Clinic”
3:30 pm - 4:00 pm Coffee break
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm Panel 3: Literary Figures, Literary Objects, and Trans Reading Practice
- Hazel Rhodes (University of Minnesota): “The Literary History of Trans Objects: On Gendered Labor, Fetishism, and Affective Commodities”
- Charlie Johnson (University of Illinois Chicago): “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and the Secret of Gender” (online)
- Evan Martens (University of California, Davis): “Dysphoria as Definition? Gregor Samsa’s Gender Non-Conformity”
5:00 pm - 5:15 pm Break
5:15 pm - 6:30 pm BOTH AND NEITHER: A reading with author Alex Marzano-Lesnevich in conversation with Laurie Marhoefer
9:00 am - 9:30 am Arrival & light breakfast
9:30 am - 10:30 am Panel 4: Confronting Fascism Across Time
- Zavier Nunn (Northwestern University): “Trans Liminality and the Fascist State: Is it over?”
- Thomas Vonier (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): “Property, Protection, Panic: From U.S. Alt-Right Discourse to German Transphobia” (online)
10:30 am - 11:00 am Coffee Break
11:00 am - 12:00 am Panel 5: Negotiating Language, Negotiating History
- Jonah Reimann & Anna-Lena Almstedt (Freie Universität Berlin): Trans Geschichte(n): “Wenn sich Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit treffen” (online)
- Luan Dannerbauer (Universität Wien): “The FLINTAs and Their Foes Between Revolutions: FLINTA Politics as a Site of Trans Critique” (online)
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Lunch break
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Panel 6: Transatlantic Transfers and Haunted History
- Christopher Wolff (Concordia University): “Vital Nostalgia: Memories of Trans Germany in Transvestia”
- Marcel Strobel (NC State University): “Respectability Interrupted: Queer German History and the Nazi Archive”
2:00 pm - 2:30 pm Coffee break
2:30 pm - 4:00 pm Keynote speaker Kadji Amin (Emory University): “Bourgeois Heterosexual Transvestites and the Class Politics of Gender Identity”
4:00 pm - 4:15 pm Coffee break
4:15 pm - 4:45 pm Future planning & concluding remarks
Keynote abstracts
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the various elite models that ordered late nineteenth-century bourgeois queer men’s self-perception – invert, pederest, lover of comrades – gave way to the increasing consolidation of a model of same-sex love was unmarked by difference between partners. What were the material conditions that accompanied this shift? How did it feel to live it? How was this process reflected in literature? Answering these questions is the first task of this talk.
But, to begin again: this transmutation of the invert into the homosexual is a class and race-bound story, or put more precisely, it is, the talk argues, the story of a crucial dialectical progression in the self-perception of the white metropolitan bourgeoisie. This is the history of the emergence of cisness as a class and racial credential.
This talk aims to right-size the historical emergence of the homosexual individual in the much larger and more various story of the colonial, racialized, proletarian, and lumpen communal histories of sexual social life in the first decades of the twentieth century. What springs forth from this inquiry is a conceptual dislocation of both cisness and the related individuation of sexuality.
The result is the first generation of ghost cousins, those literary pairings between the individual cis gay character and a representation – running the gamut from full character to whispered rumor – of trans femininity. This pair is a primary means through which the texts that constitute the emergent gay canon engage the historical permutations and conceptual provocations that are this talk’s concern. The novel, its primary archive, is an inhospitable vessel for the communal representations that show us the majoritarian lifeways that are the center and queer and trans life. And yet, there they are.
Toggling between history and literature, this talk aims to display the fine texture of a historical shift in elite understanding in contrast with the enduring tones, sounding even today, of queer and trans collective life.
This talk analyzes the role of class struggle in producing the preconditions for contemporary gender identity – bourgeois sexual selfhood in the late nineteenth century and bourgeoise sexed selfhood in the early twentieth century.
The talk focuses on German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s alliance with bourgeois homosexuals and transvestites and in early twentieth-century Berlin. It argues that the sexological concept of core sexed selfhood emerged as a form of class enclosure. The function of this concept was to cordon off a respectable bourgeois subject whose homosexuality or transvestism was the private expression of a biologically-determined sexual or sexed selfhood.
In the thick of a battle over Paragraph 175 – the anti-sodomy law – the German homosexual emancipation movement sought to legitimate bourgeois homosexuals and transvestites by pathologizing, criminalizing, and demonizing working-class practices of sex between men without homosexual identity and of transfeminine sex work without transvestite identity.
By casting working-class practices of same-sex activity and transfeminine cross-dressing as dangerously contagious and outside of the proposed legal protections of sexological identity, the German homosexual emancipation movement invented sexual and gender identity politics. This movement has much to tell us about how a politics based on sexual and gender identity structurally excludes working-class practices devoid of core identities and, with them, a materialist trans politics.