Susan Stryker is an American historian and theorist whose work established transgender studies as a distinct field of inquiry. Her scholarship and activism challenge both feminist and queer theory to account for trans experience not as an exception to their frameworks but as a site where the production of gendered and sexed categories is laid bare.
Core ideas
- Transgender studies as field: Stryker’s edited volume The Transgender Studies Reader (2006) and her co-founding of the journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (2014) established the institutional infrastructure for the field. She argues that trans studies is not a subcategory of gender studies or queer theory but a distinct analytical project that examines how embodied difference, medical authority, legal classification, and cultural representation interact to produce and police the boundaries of sex and gender.
- “My Words to Victor Frankenstein”: in her foundational essay (1994), Stryker reclaimed the figure of the monster — positioning the transsexual body not as a failed copy of nature but as a site where the violence of gender normativity is made visible. The essay challenged queer theory’s tendency to celebrate gender fluidity abstractly while ignoring the material conditions of trans embodiment.
Notable works
- “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix” (1994)
- Transgender History (2008)
- The Transgender Studies Reader (2006, editor)
Related
- Judith Butler — whose work on performativity Stryker both draws on and challenges
- Dean Spade — fellow trans studies scholar focused on administrative violence
- C. Riley Snorton — whose work on trans history centers race
- Feminist queer theory — the tradition her work engages