McKenzie Wark is professor of Culture and Media at the New School, Eugene Lang College and the author of over 10 books. Her memoir Love and Money, Sex and Death was published in September 2023 by Verso Press, and her other recent writing moves at the nexus of trans studies, autotheory and autofiction, including Rave (Duke UP, 2023), Philosophy for Spiders: on the low theory of Kathy Acker (Duke UP, 2021). We discuss her prolific contributions to trans studies, trans literature, Marxist theory, critical theory and philosophy.

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks to professor Perry Zurn. Zurn Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University, Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities (‘23-’24) and a Visiting Scholar at the FQT at Penn. He is the author of Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (UMinn, 2021), and co-editor of Trans Philosophy (forthcoming UMinn, 2024), and Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition (Springer, 2016), among other edited and co-authored volumes, as well as copious articles. In the interview Zurn upacks a transnational genealogy of the term cis, it's pre-history, and limits and potentials. Zurn also discusses the philosophical iterinary of curiousity, how the concept has morphed and transmuted over time.

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, Jack Halberstam about his latest book, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire and his prolific writing in queer theory, trans studies and cultural studies.

This episode includes a musical clip from "Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak as narrated by Tammy Grimes.