November 19, 2025

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with author, film producer and director, actor and model, Geena Rocero about Horse Barbie: A Memoir of Reclamation (Random House, 2003), her modeling, directing and acting careers, her public advocacy work, trans diaspora, spirituality, and her new short film Dolls. 

Music credit: “QC Gurlz” by Stef Aranas

October 28, 2025

In this (first of two parts) episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor Susan Stryker.

Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, as well as Distinguished Visitor and 2025-2026 Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Stryker has served as Visiting Professor of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership, Mills College.

She is an executive editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series ASTERISK: gender, trans-, and all that comes after. Stryker is the author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution (2008, 2017), co-editor of the two-volume Transgender Studies Reader (2006, 2013) and The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (2022), as well as co-director of the Emmy-winning documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria (2005).

In episode one of a two part interview, Stryker discusses her field defining scholarship in trans studies, the new of her writing anthology edited by Professor McKenzie Wark, When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader (Duke University Press, 2024), and her recent scholarship bringing together abolitionist politics and trans architectural imaginaries.

Music credit: "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps," David Bowie

October 28, 2025

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with psychoanalyst and scholar Avgi Saketopoulou, who is the 2025-26 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at UC Berkeley, about her book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023), and the entanglements of race, gender, sexuality and psychoanalysis.

Music Credit: "Consideration" by Rihanna and SZA

October 28, 2025

In this episode FQT associate director speaks with Harvard Law professor Michael J. Klarman about his award winning scholarship in civil rights and legal history, including From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press, 2004) which received the 2005 Bancroft Prize in History, and his newest book, The Framer's Coup: the making of the United States Constitution (Oxford UP, 2016) which was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award.

Music Credit: "Animosity" by Tupac

September 26, 2025

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor David Joselit.  Joselit is  Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies and Chair for Art, Film, and Visual Studies (AFVS) at Harvard University.  Joselit began his career as a curator at The ICA in Boston from 1983-1989. After receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1995, he has also taught at the University of California, Irvine, and Yale University where he was Department Chair of History of Art from 2006-09, and the CUNY Graduate Center. Some of Joselit's most recent books are After Art (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT, 2020) which was awarded the 2021 Robert Motherwell Book Award, and Art’s Properties (Princeton University Press, 2023).  Gossett speaks with Joselit about his work as a curator, art historian and about art in an era of globalization.

Music Credit: "erratum Musical (for three voices)” by Marcel Duchamp

September 26, 2025

In this episode FQT associate director and podcast host Che Gossett speaks with critic, essayist, curator, and professor Nora Khan.  Nora Khan recently served as the Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts. Her writing on philosophy of artificial intelligence and emergent technologies is referenced heavily across disciplinary formations in the humanities and the arts. Her books include AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (2025), Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019) and Fear Indexing the X-Files (2017), with Steven Warwick. She is a member of the Curatorial Ensemble of the 2026 edition of Counterpublic, one of the nation’s largest public civic exhibitions, focused next on ‘Near Futures’, and she also curated Manual Override at The Shed (2020). Khan discusses art and technology, AI, her craft as a writer and curator, and her pedagogy.

Music Credit: “One Fateful Night” from the Earthbound soundtrack

April 17, 2025

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Kellie Jones, Professor in Art History and Archaeology and the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University.  Professor Jones is a 2016 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of numerous awards for her scholarship and curation.  Professor Jones is the author of EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Duke, 2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Duke, 2017), which was named a Best Art Book of 2017 in The New York Times. She has worked as a curator for over three decades and her exhibition “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980,” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Artforum, and the best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).  Professor Jones discusses her extensive scholarship and exhibition curation, growing up embedded in a remarkable artistic community in New York City, the influence of her friends, neighbors and especially her parents, esteemed poets Amiri Baraka and Hettie Jones on her life and work.

Music Credit: Ornette Coleman, Eventually

April 17, 2025

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Huey Copeland, Andrew W. Mellon Chair and Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh, about his work in art history, criticism, and Black diasporic and contemporary art.  Professor Copeland is the author of the critically acclaimed book Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago, 2013), co-editor of the award-winning volume Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 2023), as well over 70 essays, interviews, and reviews that have appeared in a range of journals and exhibition catalogues, including Artforum International, Histórias Afro-Atlânticas: Antologia, Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, Nka, and Represenations.

Music Credit: Grace Jones, Pull Up to the Bumper

March 29, 2025

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with poet and professor Tracy K. Smith.  Smith served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, and her book of poetry Life on Mars (Greywolf Press, 2011) received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.  Smith is Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute as well as professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.  Smith discusses her numerous works of poetry, and her recent, more essayistic book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Penguin, 2023), the poetics of blackness, the significance of the ancestral for her life and work and how her critical inhabitation of spirituality shapes her work.

March 27, 2025

This 2022 podcast episode is a conversation between Maria Murphy (then associate director of the FQT Center) and Lane Timothy Speidel, Philadelphia artist, musician, writer, and Gender Jawn's podcast producer. In their new exhibition at Vox Populi Gallery, ALL EXITS, Lane Speidel lets us into the backstage of the mind. Sculptures and paintings create a night that is a frozen dream where we can all get lost, take off our underwear, and quit our jobs. Saggy, their music project is deeply discussed, as well as many references from their life practice of surrender. Satre, insomnia, perspectival painting, strikes, and cat accents are all mentioned. 

Songs by Saggy in order are: 

"big big sky" (2022) 

"I can look however I want and I still get to tell you who I am" (2018) 

"I hate time" (2018) 

"Anti-Work" (2022) 

"Clover" (2022) 

Saggy is made of Lane Speidel and Jim Strong - as well as any others who wish to be included. 

A limited list based on the episode's recordings: Billy Ray Boyer, Elliott Rosenfeld, Lydia Shea, Schuyler Thumb, Jack, and Ian. More Saggy can be found here: https://ihopeilikethis.com/Saggy 

March 14, 2025

In this episode Che Gossett, associate director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania speaks with the authors of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern UP, 2024) professors Steven Swarbrick of CUNY and Jean Thomas Tremblay of York University.  They discuss the concept of negative life, the contemporary politics of ecocriticism, film theory, psychoanalysis, and queer studies. 

Music Credit: The Day the World Turned Day-Glo, by X-Ray Spex

February 26, 2025

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Jina B. Kim, who is assistant professor of English Language & Literature and of the Study of Women & Gender at Smith College, about her forthcoming book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure: Crip-of-Color Writing after the U.S. Welfare State (Duke UP, March 2025). 

Professor Kim speaks about her articulation of a "crip-of-color critique," and how feminist- and queer-of-color literary responses to state austerity measures -- as seen in the work of writers such as Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and others -- provide critical imaginaries wherein dependency figures not as lack, but rather, as an indispensable resource for crisis laden times.

Music Credit: "Bird" by Gaelynn Lea

January 21, 2025

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with literary theory, philosophy, and subaltern studies scholar Professor Gayatri Spivak, who is University Professor in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, the 2012 recipient of the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, and the author of numerous field shaping books and articles, including A Critique of Postcolonial Reason Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Harvard UP, 1999), Readings (2014) and texts of critical essays including Outside in the Teaching Machine (Routledge, 2008), and An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Harvard UP, 2013).  In this episode, Professor Spivak speaks about concepts such as affirmative sabotage, as well as the pedagogical, affective and epistemological labor of rearranging desires, as well as her rigorous work on W.E.B. Du Bois's legacy, scholarship, and archive.

Music: "Evil Does not Exist v. 2" by Eiko Ishibashi

December 21 2024

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Roderick Ferguson, professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. Ferguson was the 2018-2019 president of the American Studies Association. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (University of Minnesota, 2004).

Song Credit: Adrian Piper being interviewed about and performing her street performance piece "Mythic Being", excerpted from "Other Than Art's Sake" a film by Peter Kennedy from 1973

December 13, 2024

In this episode, recorded during fall semester 2023, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Calvin Warren, associate professor of African American Studies at Emory University about his book Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism and Emancipation (Duke UP, 2018), and his thoughts on Black nihilism and spirituality.

Music credits: "There Are Other Worlds (Have They Not Told You Of) by Sun Ra

December 04, 2024

In this conversation FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with poet, author and professor Jackie Wang. Wang is an assistant professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and the author of Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018), and Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun (Semiotext(e), 2023), as well as works of poetry, such as The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void (Nightboat, 2021). In this expansive conversation, Wang discusses her work on carceral technologies -- including AI -- surveillance, and extraction, as well as her interests in pyschoanalysis, mysticism, and tracing the concept of the oceanic in psychoanalytic and Black thought.

Music Credit: "Ocean of Tears" by Caroline Polachek

November 25, 2024

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett interviews novelist Torrey Peters about her intellectual and writerly formation, her early online novella publications, The Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, and her novel Detransition Baby (One World, 2021) which received the the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction, and was also named a Best Book of the Century by the New York Times. Peters also speaks about her forthcoming collection, Stag Dance (Random House, 2025), the fascinating history and idiom of queer and trans lumberjack culture, and fashioning queer and trans literary worlds.

Music Credit: "I Can't Shake the Stranger Out of You," Lavender Country

November 15, 2024

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Paul Gilroy, who is Professor of the Humanities and Founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism & Racialisation at University College London. Professor Gilroy's scholarship has been globally influential, especially his books There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack(1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), and Against Race (2000). In 2019 Professor Gilroy was awarded the Holberg Prize by the government of Norway in recognition of his scholarship. Che Gossett speaks with Professor Gilroy about his intellectual itinerary, his early career as a journalist, and then as a graduate student working under the tutelage of Stuart Hall, and about the field of Black studies in the UK, radical humanism, and the state of the university.

Music credit: "Move on Up" (Extended Version) by Curtis Mayfield

November 12, 2024

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Amy Tobin, University of Cambridge Associate Professor in the History of Art and Curator of Contemporary Programmes, at Kettle's Yard, about feminist art history, feminist art curation, coalitional politics and her book, Women Artists Together Art in the Age of Women's Liberation (Yale UP, 2023), as well as her 2014 article, co-authored with Victorian Horne, "An unfinished revolution in art historiography, or how to write a feminist art history" in feminist review.

October 31, 2024

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Austin Svedjan, doctoral student and Hamilton-Law Graduate Fellow in the Department of English at Penn, and John Paul Ricco, professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, about their co-edited special issue of the journal Postmodern Culture, which is freely available online.

Song credit: "If You Can't Help Me" by Brontez Purnell.

October 23, 2024

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with scholar Colby Gordon, who is associate professor in Department of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College, about early modern trans studies and theology, and his exciting new and first book, Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature (University of Chicago, 2024).

Song credit (-30sec): "My Enemies are Mine" by Jim Strong

October 10 2024

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with professor Petrus Liu, who is professor of Chinese & Comparative Literature and of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University. Professor Liu is the author of Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (Duke University Press, 2015) and The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus (Duke University Press, 2023), and other many other publications. Gossett speaks with Liu about how he sutures together queer theory, gender and sexuality studies and Marxist thought, and about how the analysis of racial capitalism requires a global scope.

Song credits (-30sec): "Feeling Fuzzy" and "Kids Go Down" by Chinese American Bear

October 1, 2024

n this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with multimedia artist, director, and producer Zackary Drucker about her archival work on and connection to Flawless Sabrina, about being attuned to the spiritual realm, and her prodigious work in TV & film -- especially her co-directed Sundance award-winning and Emmy nominated HBO original documentary film The Stroll (2023) and the HBO documentary series The Lady and the Dale (2021).

September 10, 2024

IIn this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Dr. Beeta Baghoolizadeh.

Dr. Baghoolizadeh is a historian and an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University, in the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies. Gossett speaks with Dr. Baghoolizadeh about her book The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran (Duke University Press, March 2024) and how Iranian and Persian Gulf social and political life have been both shaped by racial slavery and the disavowal of it's history, as well as the ways in which its afterlife reverberates now.

August 21, 2024

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Lee Edelman, Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University, about the continued resonance and influence his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke UP, 2004) and about his newest work Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing (Duke UP, 2022). Edelman discusses his theorization of queerness as a constitutive exclusion and form of negation, his work with the late Lauren Berlant, psychoanalysis, and the ways in which emotions and affects -- pessimism and utopianism and their interplay -- animate and circulate in the political scene.

August 6, 2024

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett talks with Black trans activist and writer Raquel Willis about Black trans liberationist movements, intersectionality, Black feminism(s), growing up in the South, and her new book, The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation (St. Martin Press, 2023).

June 24, 2024

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett talks with filmmaker, actress and cultural worker Nava Mau. Nava Mau recently received the 2024 Critics Choice Association's "Breakthrough Performance" Award for Television (Limited Series) for her role in the Netflix hit series Baby Reindeer. Nava Mau was the lead actor and director, and co-producer for the short film Waking Hour (2019), and starred in the HBO Max series Generation. Nava Mau also recently directed and starred in the short film All the Words But One (2024) which is showing at film festivals across the globe and was executive produced by Lily Wachowski. In this podcast episode Nava Mau talks about her artistic process, her roles both on and behind the screen as a director and producer and her passion for acting and filmmaking, as well as the power of art and politics of trans visibility.

May 21, 2024

McKenzie Wark is professor of Culture and Media at the New School, Eugene Lang College and the author of over 10 books. Her memoir Love and Money, Sex and Death was published in September 2023 by Verso Press, and her other recent writing moves at the nexus of trans studies, autotheory and autofiction, including Rave (Duke UP, 2023), Philosophy for Spiders: on the low theory of Kathy Acker (Duke UP, 2021). We discuss her prolific contributions to trans studies, trans literature, Marxist theory, critical theory and philosophy.

May 9, 2024

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks to professor Perry Zurn. Zurn Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University, Fellow at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities ('23-'24) and a Visiting Scholar at the FQT at Penn. He is the author of Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (UMinn, 2021), and co-editor of Trans Philosophy (forthcoming UMinn, 2024), and Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition (Springer, 2016), among other edited and co-authored volumes, as well as copious articles. In the interview Zurn upacks a transnational genealogy of the term cis, it's pre-history, and limits and potentials. Zurn also discusses the philosophical iterinary of curiousity, how the concept has morphed and transmuted over time.

April 19, 2024

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, Jack Halberstam about his latest book, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire and his prolific writing in queer theory, trans studies and cultural studies.

This episode includes a musical clip from "Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak as narrated by Tammy Grimes.

April 2, 2024

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with the luminary and accomplished filmmaker, director and producer Lilly Wachowski. Lilly Wachowski discusses some her most influential and heralded films, such as The Matrix, which she co-directed and filmed with her sister, filmmaker Lana Wachowski, as well as recent work she has been involved in either writing, directing and/or producing such as the Netflix series Sense8, and also the Showtime series Work in Progress, created by Abby McEnany and Tim Mason. Lilly Wachowski discusses trans politics, and the power of art to transform, forge bonds of solidarity, and create convivial spaces.

April 2, 2024

In this episode (recorded fall 2023) FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Judith Butler, who is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler discusses their now published book Who's Afraid of Gender? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), their extensive scholarship, including on the politics of loss and mourning, grief and grievance.

March 20, 2024

In this episode of the Gender Jawn podcast, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with poet, professor and "intellectual cabaret" performer extraordinaire Wayne Koestenbaum about his conception of "fag ideation," queer theory, art, poetics, and Koestenbaum's rich body of work. Also discussed is Koestenbaum's newest book of poetry, Stubble Archipelago just recently published by Semiotexte Press. Koestenbaum closes the interview by reading a selection from Subble Archipelago, a poem titled "#34 [Two quartered radishes], currently featured in The Yale Review.

March 11, 2024

In this episode Che Gossett, associate director of The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, speaks with UC Davis assistant professor in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Christoph Hanssmann about his book Care Without Pathology: How Trans- Health Activists Are Changing Medicine (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). Professor Hanssman discusses transnational trans health and justice organizing and trans histories of medicine.

February 28, 2024

In this episode FQT Associate Director Che Gossett speaks with William Lampson Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University: Tavia Nyong'o. Nyong'o is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and most recently, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (NYU Press, 2018). Gossett speaks with Nyong'o about blackness, queerness, the Zora Neale Hurston inspired concept of "angular sociality," and the role of what Nyong'o terms -- extending psychoanalytic interventions -- "critical ambivalence." Writers and/or works referenced: James Baldwin and Audre Lorde "Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde" (1984) http://theculture.forharriet.com/2014/03/revolutionary-hope-conversatio… Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011), On the Inconvenience of Other People (Duke University Press, 2022) Samuel Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village (University of Minnesota Press, 1988) Erica R. Edwards Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and men (New York: Perennial Library, 1935), Their Eyes Were Watching God (Amistad, Harper Perennial, 1937), Baracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" (Amistad, Harper Perennial Reprint, 2018) Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS (Routledge Press, 1990), Globalizing AIDS (University of Minnesota, 2002) Rustin (film, 2023) Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (UC Berkeley Press, 1990), Touching Feeling (Duke University Press, 2003) Jackie Stacey, "Wishing Away Ambivalence," Feminist Theory, 2014, Vol. 15(I) 39-49 Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects: Towards a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (Duke University Press, 2007)

February 19, 2024

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with philosopher Brian Massumi, whom is professor of communication at the University of Montreal, about affect studies, critical theory, the work of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead, and process philosophy. Massumi is the author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke UP, 2002) and most recently, Couplets: Travels in Speculative Pragmatism (Duke UP, 2021), as well as many other texts, several co-written with his companion in art and thought, Erin Manning, professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal).

January 31, 2024

In this episode FQT Center associate director Che Gossett speaks with trans historian and John Hopkins University professor Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), which received a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and the Children's Literature Association Book Award. Gill-Peterson is also the author of A Short History of Trans Misogyny (Verso Press, 2024). Gill-Peterson speaks about both of these texts and also in process work on DIY trans community care.