Join the Conversation: The State of Sex

Join us for a timely and provocative dialogue on the politics of sex, gender, and state power featuring:

Paisley Currah

Affiliation: Professor of Political Science, and Women’s & Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and of Political Science, Women's & Gender Studies, and English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).
Key Work: Author of the recent book, Sex Is As Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity (NYU Press, 2022). His work interrogates how sex classification shapes transgender recognition and governance.
Background: Currah writes widely on transgender issues, including on topics such as discrimination, sex classification, and the transgender rights movement. He was a founding board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute, served on the founding board of directors of Global Action for Trans Equality, and sat on the advisory board of Human Rights Watch’s LGBT Program.

Affiliation: Associate Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University.
Key Work: Author of Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism and the State in Lebanon (SUP, 2022). Her research explores the intersections of law, religion, and gender in Lebanon and the U.S., focusing on the relationships between sexual difference and political difference, the religious and the secular, and law, bureaucracy, and biopower.
Background: Her work is grounded in ethnographic and archival research, and has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. She is also a co-founding editor of Jadaliyya.

Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.
Focus: Gambino will moderate the conversation. Her scholarship is focused on race, sexuality, and political theory. Her work focuses in particular on how everyday political actors have deployed these traditions to build coalitions, and how they seek to contest and repair the inequalities that underpin modern political society and to imagine radical futures premised on racial and sexual accountability.