Welcome Kadji Amin

Please join me in offering a warm welcome to Dr. Kadji Amin as our newest faculty member in the Department of Gender Studies!!  Dr. Amin is joining us from the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. His fields of specialization include Transgender Studies, Queer and Sexuality Studies, History of Sexuality, Class and studies in Political Economy, Racial Capitalism and Feminist Science Studies. He received a Ph.D. in Romance Studies (French) from Duke University. Dr. Amin is currently working on the completion of a monograph titled: Trans Materialism without Gender Identity.  He is also the author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty and Queer History (Duke University Press, 2017). He also contributes to wider public debates through various contributions such as the Law and Political Economy Project Blog: “How Anti-Trans Attacks Forge the Anti-Social State,” amongst other sites.

Kadji will be developing courses for this upcoming year (2026-27) in GNDR 309 Masculinities and a 200 level Special Topics course on Sexualities, as well as contributing  a section of GNDR 100. While Kadji is very new to the Lekwungen territories, he is quickly getting acquainted with the surrounding areas as someone who enjoys hiking and the greater outdoors. 

Bio: Dr. Kadji Amin 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 de-idealizes 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coalitional politics with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians by foregrounding their animation by unsavory and outdated modes of attachment, including pederasty, racial fetishism, nostalgia for prison, and fantasies of queer terrorism.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.

All the best

Davina Bhandra