Pembroke Center

Míša Stekl is a transdisciplinary scholar of gender, sexuality, and race. Stekl is currently revising their dissertation, “Accursed Races: Anti-Blackness and Queer/Trans Modernity,” for publication. “Accursed Races” argues that modern Western models of queerness and transness were constructed on the grounds of a racialized, anti-Black genre of the Human. Through archival research, Stekl shows that British and German sexologists constructed both homosexual and trans “inverts” as normatively white subjects, while drawing upon historically racialized terms to measure their deviance from “civilized” (cishetero)sexual norms. “Accursed Races” further explores how anti-Black sexological discourses on “inversion” have shaped queer and trans literature, politics, and lived experience. 

While completing their first monograph, Stekl is also starting two other projects that mine the place of race in twentieth- and twenty-first century trans cultures. One project, “The Race of Schreber: On the Racial Imaginaries of (Trans) Psychoanalysis,” critically revisits Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which is commonly read as a foundational text for psychiatric and psychoanalytic approaches to transness as a mental illness. Stekl seeks to illuminate the historical role that psychoanalysis has played in proliferating implicitly racialized constructions of transness; at the same time, they retool (trans) psychoanalysis, so as to recursively analyze the racial-sexual norms that are constitutive of psychoanalysis itself. Stekl’s third project is an autotheoretical text, titled “Raving and Nothingness.” This project ruminates on the world-making and world-destroying capacities that are often claimed by contemporary queer/trans raving cultures, as well as much “writing on raving.” 

In the Spring semester, Stekl will teach a GNSS seminar called “Trans Studies of Gender and Sexuality.” This course will explore how trans studies has rethought the big-picture questions of Gender and Sexuality Studies. It will open with an introductory unit on the fraught historical relations between transfeminism and dominant traditions of feminist theory and activism. Each subsequent unit of the course will home in on what trans scholarship has contributed to the study of one or more major categories of intersectional feminist theorizing: gender and sexuality; race; and class. By reading trans theory alongside works of trans literature and film, students will develop their own trans studies of gender, sexuality, race, and class. 

Stekl holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, with PhD minors in Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity and in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Their work is forthcoming in Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism and has previously appeared in journals such as GLQ, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, and South Atlantic Review.