A Conversation with Susan Stryker

Susan Styker

SFU Ruth Wynn Woodward Endowed Chair, 2007-2008

Susan Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, and holds the Barbara Lee Professorship in Women’s Leadership at Mills College, 2020-2022. An award-winning scholar and filmmaker whose historical research, theoretical writing, and creative works have helped shape the cultural conversation on transgender topics since the early 1990s, Dr. Stryker earned her Ph.D. in United States History at the University of California-Berkeley in 1992. She later held a Ford Foundation/Social Science Research Council post-doctoral fellowship in sexuality studies at Stanford University, and has been a distinguished visiting faculty member at Harvard University, Yale University, Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins University, University of California-Santa Cruz, Macquarie University in Sydney, and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. She is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books and anthologies, including Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area (Chronicle 1996), Queer Pulp: Perverse Passions in the Golden Age of the Paperback (Chronicle 2000), The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge 2006), The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (Routledge 2013), and Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (Seal Press 2008, 2017).

Her academic articles have appeared in such publications as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Radical History Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, Parallax, Australian Feminist Studies, Social Semiotics, and Journal of Women’s History, while her public scholarship has appeared in Aperture, Wired, The Utne Reader, and Slate.com. She won an Emmy Award for her documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (ITVS 2005), and is also the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award (2006), the Ruth Benedict Book Prize (2013), the Monette-Horowitz Prize for LGBTQ activism (2008), the Transgender Law Center’s Community Vanguard Award (2003), two career achievement awards in LGBTQ Studies—the David Kessler Award in  from the City University of New York’s Center for LGBT Studies in 2008, and Yale University’s Brudner Memorial Prize in 2015—and the Local Genius Award from Tucson’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2018.

Dr. Stryker served for several years as Executive Director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco (1999-2003), and was Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University 2009-2011). At the University of Arizona, she served for five years as Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies (2011-2016) and was founder of the university’s Transgender Studies Initiative and faculty cluster hire. In 2019-20 she was a Presidential Fellow at Yale University, and in 2020-2022 holds the Barbara Lee Professorship in Women’s Leadership at Mills College. In addition to developing and consulting on various media project, Dr. Stryker’s current work in process is Changing Gender: A Trans History of North America, under contract to Farrar Straus Giroux.