Judith Pamela Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminist, queer, and literary theory. In 1993, she began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has served, beginning in 1998, as the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. She is also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School.
Disability studies is an academic discipline that examines the meaning, nature, and consequences of disability. Initially, the field focused on the division between "impairment" and "disability", where impairment was an impairment of an individual's mind or body, while disability was considered a social construct. This premise gave rise to two distinct models of disability: the social and medical models of disability. In 1999 the social model was universally accepted as the model preferred by the field. However, in recent years, the division between the social and medical models has been challenged. Additionally there has been an increased focus on interdisciplinary research. For example, recent investigations suggest using "cross-sectional markers of stratification" may help provide new insights on the non-random distribution of risk factors capable of acerbating disablement processes.
Jack Halberstam, also known as Judith Halberstam, is a tenured Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. Prior to this appointment in 2017, Halberstam was a Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies, and Comparative Literature and the Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California (USC). Halberstam was the Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego before working at USC. Halberstam is a gender and queer theorist and author.
José Esteban Muñoz was a Cuban American academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory. His first book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) examines the performance, activism, and survival of queer people of color through the optics of performance studies. His second book, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity, was published by NYU Press in 2009. Muñoz was Professor in, and former Chair of, the Department of Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Muñoz was the recipient of the Duke Endowment Fellowship (1989) and the Penn State University Fellowship (1997). He was also affiliated with the Modern Language Association, American Studies Association, and the College Art Association.
Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian scholar whose area of study includes the intersection of feminist theory, lesbian feminism, queer theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism.
Jasbir K. Puar is a U.S.-based queer theorist and Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, where she has been a faculty member since 2000. Her most recent book is The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017). Puar is the author of award-winning Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), which has been translated into Spanish and French and re-issued in an expanded version for its 10th anniversary. She has written widely on South Asian disaporic cultural production in the United States, United Kingdom and Trinidad, LGBT tourism, terrorism studies, surveillance studies, biopolitics and necropolitics, disability and debilitation, theories of intersectionality, affect, and assemblage; animal studies and posthumanism, homonationalism, pinkwashing, and the Palestinian territories.
Camera Obscura is a journal of feminism, culture, and media studies published by Duke University Press. Published three times per year, the journal focuses on "the conjunctions of gender, race, class, and sexuality with audiovisual culture; new histories and theories of film, television, video, and digital media; and politically engaged approaches to a range of media practices." It was founded in 1976 by four graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Janet Bergstrom, Sandy Flitterman, Elisabeth Lyon, and Constance Penley. The four co-founders had met while working on the magazine Women and Film.
Robert McRuer is an American theorist who has contributed to fields in transnational queer and disability studies. McRuer is known as being one of the founding scholars involved in forming the field of queer disability studies, particularly for a theoretical outlook known as crip theory. He is currently professor of English at The George Washington University in Washington, DC.
Susan O'Neal Stryker is an American professor, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality. She is 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, and is currently on leave to while holding an appointment as Visiting Professor of Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University (2019–20). Stryker also serves on the Advisory Council of METI. She is the author of several books about LGBT history and culture.
A subfield of LGBT studies, transgender studies provides an interdisciplinary approach to gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and sexology by studying the intersections of sex and gender as related to cultural representations, lived experience, and political movements. Interdisciplinary subfields of transgender studies include transgender history, transgender literature and film, transgender anthropology and archaeology, transgender psychology, and transgender health. The researches theories within transgender studies focus on cultural presentations, political movements, social organizations and the lived experience of various forms of gender nonconformity. The discipline emerged in the early 90s in close connection to queer theory. Other non-transgender-identified peoples are often also included under the "trans" umbrella for transgender studies, such as intersex people, crossdressers, drag artists, third gender individuals and genderqueer people.
Sharon Marcus is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in nineteenth-century British and French literature and culture, and teaches courses on the 19th-century novel in England and France, particularly in relation to the history of urbanism and architecture; gender and sexuality studies; narrative theory; and 19th-century theater and performance. Marcus has received Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, and ACLS fellowships, and a Gerry Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award at Columbia. She is one of the senior editors of Public Culture, as well as a founding editor and Fiction Review Editor of Public Books. Marcus is the author of Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London, which received an honorable mention for the MLA Scaglione Prize for best book in comparative literature, and Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Between Women has been translated into Spanish and won the Perkins Prize for best study of narrative, the Albion prize for best book on Britain after 1800, the Alan Bray Memorial award for best book in queer studies, and a Lambda Literary award for best book in LGBT studies. With Stephen Best, she recently edited a special issue of Representations on "The Way We Read Now" that has been important within the growing field, in literary criticism and cultural studies, of postcritique. Before coming to Columbia in 2003, Marcus taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her B.A. from Brown University and her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University Humanities Center.
Carolyn Dinshaw is an American academic and author, who has specialised in issues of gender and sexuality in the medieval context.
Corbett O'Toole is a disability rights activist. She had polio as a child. She ran the Disabled Women's Coalition office with Lynn Witt in the 1970s. She worked as a staff member at the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley from 1973-1976, and as a staff member for the Disability Rights and Education Fund (DREDF) from 1980-1983.
Marlon M. Bailey is a professor of gender studies and American studies and an adjunct assistant professor of theater and drama. He currently teaches at Arizona State University and is a visiting professor at the University of California, San Francisco, in the Department of Medicine.
Ann Cvetkovich is a Professor and the Director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women's and Gender Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. Until 2019, she was the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she had been the founding director of the LGBTQ Studies Program, launched in 2017. She has published three books: Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (2012). She has also co-edited Articulating the Global and Local: Globalization and Cultural Studies (1996) with Douglas Kellner, as well as Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication (2010) with Janet Staiger and Ann Reynolds. Furthermore, Cvetkovich has co-edited a special issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, entitled "Public Sentiments" with Ann Pellegrini. She is also a former co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies with Annamarie Jagose.
Kara Keeling is an American humanities academic. As of 2016 she is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California in the Critical Studies of Cinematic Arts and in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity.
Juana María Rodríguez is a professor of Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly writing in queer theory, critical race theory, and performance studies highlights the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and embodiment in constructing subjectivity.
Folx, an alternative spelling of the word folks, is a gender neutral collective noun used to address a group of people. Although the term "folks" is already gender-neutral, the ending "-x" on "folx" specifically and explicitly includes and highlights LGBTQ, gender non-conforming, and non-binary people, just like the "-x" in the term Latinx. It can also be used to signal inclusion of people of color.
Emma Pérez is an American author and professor, known for her work in queer Chicana feminist studies.
