Curran Nault
Biographic Data
| ID | 4898664 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Curran Nault |
| GIVEN NAMES | Curran |
| FAMILY NAME | Nault |
| SIGNATURE | NAULT C |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2819-3444 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 7 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 7 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Dance or Die
This introduction contemplates the 2025 moment of queer studies by looking at the past, present, and future of queer and trans living through apocalyptic crises. From queer, queer of color critique, transgender, and feminist studies’ reflections on social, material, and institutional ruins and death, to the art and music that serve as catalysts and content of queer experience, we assemble a scholarly survival guide of sorts that traces a rich ran…
Embodied Apocalypses
This forum includes reflections on queer studies in the wake of apocalyptic state failures of care by Robert McRuer, Bobby Benedicto, and Antonia Randoph. They suggest trenchant critiques and new queer world-building scenarios that include crip, sexual, and affective modes of experiencing and enduring end times. Collectively, these scholars diagnose and pivot queer studies to forms of embodied knowledge that embrace risk and vulnerability as site…
Anti-)Apocalypse and (Kill-)Joy
The following conversation took place on February 16, 2024, as part of the annual OUTsider festival and conference in Austin, Texas. OUTsider is an LGBTQ+ transmedia arts organization instigated by Curran Nault in 2013 as a public-facing extension of their research on queer punk subculture: as a means to maintain the radical, DIT (do-it-together), scrappy spirit of previous queer-as-punk gatherings, like Homo-A-Gogo (2002 – 9).These OUTsider effo…
A conspiracy of cats
This article concerns the curious case of what I label the ‘litterbox lie’: a false narrative propagated on social media that litterboxes are being installed in grade school classrooms for kids who identify as cats. This lie, first circulated in Canada in 2021, has been raised by rightwing forces in response to the perceived accommodation of transgender children in public schools. This article deploys discursive and semiotic analysis to criticall…
No Bodies Business
Chilean Academy Award–winning drama, Una mujer fantástica/A Fantastic Woman (dir. Sebastián Lelio, 2017), is a film that navigates past the superficiality of surface into a transgender interiority and imagination situated below and against dominant culture's demand for transgender display. Within the media mainstream, transgender legibility has been predicated on a hypervisibility tailor-made for cisgender consumption—via celebrated magazine cove…
Documenting the Dead
Call Her Ganda (dir. PJ Raval, 2018) chronicles the murder of transpinay Jennifer Laude by a US marine, and the subsequent court case. This essay draws from theories of necropolitics and hauntology, as well as the author's experience as a documentary producer of Call Her Ganda to raise critical questions about the representation of trans death, and to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of documentary as a trans activist tool. In doing s…
The Cinematic Quiet Girl from The Breakfast Club to the Badlands
This essay is intended to counteract the omission of the quiet girl from critical media thought and to recuperate her for film history and feminism. The quiet girl is a visible presence across numerous films and genres, from heartfelt melodramas like Corrina, Corrina to gruesome horrors like Carrie. Within these diverse texts, the quiet girl represents a consistent threat to authority. She keeps her thoughts to herself and, as such, just beyond t…
Documenting the Dead
Call Her Ganda (dir. PJ Raval, 2018) chronicles the murder of transpinay Jennifer Laude by a US marine, and the subsequent court case. This essay draws from theories of necropolitics and hauntology, as well as the author's experience as a documentary producer of Call Her Ganda to raise critical questions about the representation of trans death, and to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of documentary as a trans activist tool. In doing s…
The Cinematic Quiet Girl from The Breakfast Club to the Badlands
This essay is intended to counteract the omission of the quiet girl from critical media thought and to recuperate her for film history and feminism. The quiet girl is a visible presence across numerous films and genres, from heartfelt melodramas like Corrina, Corrina to gruesome horrors like Carrie. Within these diverse texts, the quiet girl represents a consistent threat to authority. She keeps her thoughts to herself and, as such, just beyond t…
Documenting the Dead
Call Her Ganda (dir. PJ Raval, 2018) chronicles the murder of transpinay Jennifer Laude by a US marine, and the subsequent court case. This essay draws from theories of necropolitics and hauntology, as well as the author's experience as a documentary producer of Call Her Ganda to raise critical questions about the representation of trans death, and to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of documentary as a trans activist tool. In doing s…
No Bodies Business
Chilean Academy Award–winning drama, Una mujer fantástica/A Fantastic Woman (dir. Sebastián Lelio, 2017), is a film that navigates past the superficiality of surface into a transgender interiority and imagination situated below and against dominant culture's demand for transgender display. Within the media mainstream, transgender legibility has been predicated on a hypervisibility tailor-made for cisgender consumption—via celebrated magazine cove…
A conspiracy of cats
This article concerns the curious case of what I label the ‘litterbox lie’: a false narrative propagated on social media that litterboxes are being installed in grade school classrooms for kids who identify as cats. This lie, first circulated in Canada in 2021, has been raised by rightwing forces in response to the perceived accommodation of transgender children in public schools. This article deploys discursive and semiotic analysis to criticall…
Dance or Die
This introduction contemplates the 2025 moment of queer studies by looking at the past, present, and future of queer and trans living through apocalyptic crises. From queer, queer of color critique, transgender, and feminist studies’ reflections on social, material, and institutional ruins and death, to the art and music that serve as catalysts and content of queer experience, we assemble a scholarly survival guide of sorts that traces a rich ran…
Embodied Apocalypses
This forum includes reflections on queer studies in the wake of apocalyptic state failures of care by Robert McRuer, Bobby Benedicto, and Antonia Randoph. They suggest trenchant critiques and new queer world-building scenarios that include crip, sexual, and affective modes of experiencing and enduring end times. Collectively, these scholars diagnose and pivot queer studies to forms of embodied knowledge that embrace risk and vulnerability as site…
Anti-)Apocalypse and (Kill-)Joy
The following conversation took place on February 16, 2024, as part of the annual OUTsider festival and conference in Austin, Texas. OUTsider is an LGBTQ+ transmedia arts organization instigated by Curran Nault in 2013 as a public-facing extension of their research on queer punk subculture: as a means to maintain the radical, DIT (do-it-together), scrappy spirit of previous queer-as-punk gatherings, like Homo-A-Gogo (2002 – 9).These OUTsider effo…
Art (3 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (3 works) · Queer (3 works) · Sociology (3 works) · Aesthetics (2 works) · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues (2 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (2 works) · Gender Studies (2 works) · Gender Studies (2 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (2 works)