The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies

Eva Pensis is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and scholar of media, sexuality, and expressive cultural performance. She holds a dual-PhD in Theater and Performance Studies and Music from the University of Chicago with a Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her current book project reappraises performances of transfemininity in popular culture, from its inception in blackface minstrelsy to present day trans/queer night-life-worlds. Blending feminist performance ethnography, oral history, mixed media and archival methods, the book explores the public cultivation of trans feminist expressive cultural practices, spanning genres of performance and embodiment innovated by the trans femme figures of the street queen and the femme queen in the underworlds of lipsync drag, pageantry, sex work, diva worship, and the house-structured ballroom system from the 20th to 21st century.

 

Currently, she is the Oral History Postdoctoral fellow with the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Trans Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, at work on an oral history of the longest running drag show in the U.S. Her writing is featured or forthcoming in Critical Inquiry, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, The Drama Review, Trans Studies Quarterly, e-Flux, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies.