Kadji AminAssociate Professor - WGSS, On Leave for the 2024-2025 Academic Year

Kadji Amin is a 2023-4 Fellow at the Cornell Society for the Humanities. He is on leave for the 2024- 2025 academic year.

Kadji Amin is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. He is the recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in “Sex” from the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum (2015-16) and a Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship from Stony Brook University (2015). Amin’s research and teaching focuses on bringing empirical scholarship on queer and trans history and on gender and sexual variance in the Global South to bear on queer and trans theory. His book, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Duke 2017) won an Honorable Mention for best book in LGBT studies form the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association. Disturbing Attachments deidealizes Jean Genet’s coalitional politics with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians by foregrounding their animation by unsavory and outdated modes of attachment, including pederasty, racial fetishism, nostalgia for prison, and fantasies of queer terrorism.

Amin is currently at work on a second book project, tentatively titled Trans Materialism without Gender Identity. Trans Materialism without Gender Identity rethinks the foundations of contemporary transgender politics and scholarship by arguing that the concept of gender identity is a fiction that has historically done transgender people more harm than good. It demonstrates that, both historically and globally, gender identity structurally abandons those transfeminine people whose cultures are too public, too sexual, irreducibly social, and too shaped by the exigencies of labor to be privatized as individual identities. Trans Materialism outlines a materialist transgender theory and politics that robustly opposes the harms faced by the most vulnerable transgender populations, trans women and femmes of color. Amin has published articles in journals including TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Social Text, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, and Representations. He is the coeditor, with Amber Jamilla Musser and Roy Pérez, of a special issue of ASAP/Journal on “Queer Form.” He serves on the Editorial Board for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Gender and Women’s Studies and is the State of the Field Review Editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.