Anne Enke, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, History and LGBT Studies, was awarded a Feminist Scholars Fellowship from the Center for Research on Gender and Women.
This fellowship is designed to provide UW-Madison faculty working on feminist scholarship a one semester full-time research appointment.
In fall 2010, Enke will work on: "Gender Changes: Transfeminist Activism from the 1960s to the New Millennium".
She describes this project as "a history of transfeminist activism that establishes the integral relationship between feminist and transgender movements beginning in the 1960s".
Enke will trace how a movement calling for freedom of gender expression and transsexual rights took form within and alongside feminism. Like feminism, transgender liberation was deeply invested in the workings of gender, sexuality, and bodies, but its relationship with feminism was regularly contested.
Focusing on grassroots movement-building, one of Enke's driving questions is why, when transgender people were so often key leaders and participants in feminist efforts, the larger feminist trajectory is one of gender dis-integration as well as integration.
Rather than ceding the definition of feminism to trans-exclusive frameworks, Enke is compelled by feminism’s challenges to gender hierarchy, and by the feminist history of transgender movement-building, to offer a new historical framework that sees their interdependence.