Cassius Adair
Biographic Data
| ID | 819472 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cassius Adair |
| GIVEN NAMES | Cassius |
| FAMILY NAME | Adair |
| SIGNATURE | ADAIR C |
| AFFILIATIONS | New School |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8494-7821 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 15 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Powderhorn Park Is the Center of the Universe
This Against the Day contribution is a reflection on the geography of hyperlocal resistance in five short acts, set in Powderhorn Park in South Minneapolis.
Kamala is for they/them
The slogan that the Trump campaign used in the 2024 US presidential election to tie rival Kamala Harris to trans activists in its television ads—“Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is for You”—makes no sense. It's grammatically incoherent, it melds non-binary people and trans women into one generic out-group, and it argues that Kamala Harris was somehow a champion for trans people when in fact many of Harris's strongest critics on the left were (and …
Researching gender in the history of the Internet and the Web. A roundtable at the SHOT 2023 conference
The co-editors of this special issue—Janet Abbate, Autumn Edwards, Leopoldina Fortunati, along with Valérie Schafer, a co-editor of the journal—launched an open call for organizing a roundtable during the SHOT 2023 conference, in which they invited scholars to delve deeper into the multifaceted sources, approaches, and methodologies related to Gender in the history of the Internet and the Web. This edited transcription of the roundtable presents …
Parts of Myself
This essay considers Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself through an inquiry into the multiplicity of trans subjectivities. Beginning with the story of the author's encounter with Butler's text as a newly transitioning graduate student, it asks whether misreadings, both of theory and of bodies, are key to the construction of trans knowledges. From there, the essay reads (or perhaps misreads) Giving an Account alongside Susan Stryker's fou…
Solidarity in the Centerfold
This essay argues that certain print pornography featuring “crossdresser,” “transvestite,” and “transsexual” subjects was, counterintuitively, part of a distributed information and care network by and for US transfeminine people between the 1970s and 1990s. While this genre of “transploitation” magazine did reproduce transfeminine bodies as fetish objects, transfeminine individuals themselves also used the adult magazine and bookstore market to d…
Fucking Theory's Form
Occasionally one reads scholarly reviews in which the reviewer's opinion about a text is expressed with subtlety and deftness, but this is a book about Tumblr and porn, so: I think this book is fucking great and everyone should buy it.Of course, it is also true that no discussion of Tumblr and its aftereffects would be complete without discourse, and I will thus make a longer argument for the importance of this thin, nonacademic volume to the fie…
The Transgender Craze Seducing Our [Sons]”; or, All the Trans Guys Are Just Dating Each Other
Recent antitrans discourses have critiqued trans masculinity in particular as a site of social panic and contagion for proto-trans adolescents. In extreme cases, this is framed as a seduction. Turning “seduction” from a social danger to a benefit, this essay theorizes masc4masc t4t erotics as a type of contagious gendering. The authors discuss the coming into identity that takes place via desire for trans people, including a sexual urge toward or…
Is Transsexualism Chronic
Is Transsexualism Chronic? Cassius Adair (bio) Chronic: 1. Of or relating to time; chronological. Obsolete. 2. a. Of diseases, etc.: Lasting a long time, long-continued, lingering, inveterate; opposed to acute. b. So with invalid, and the like. 3. transf. Continuous, constant. Used colloquially as a vague expression of disapproval: bad, intense, severe, objectionable; also something chronic adverbial phrase, severely, badly. —Oxford English Dicti…
Representing Perpetrators
I was in my old station wagon, driving home from teaching my transgender literature course, when I first heard about Danielle Allen's biography Cuz: Or the Life and Times of Michael A. At first, I was only half listening to the author's interview on public radio, focused instead on the events of the day's class. My students and I had been working through Janet Mock's 2014 memoir Redefining Realness, and I'd offered a reading in which Mock's portr…
Before Trans Studies
In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu's “After Trans Studies,” this collaborative essay also turns to questions of field formation and the ethos of trans studies. Situating the growth of the field in the material conditions of precarity under which trans knowledge-workers work, the authors argue that trans studies can't be “over” because, in fact, it isn't yet here. Rather than viewing this as only a dismal proposition, ho…
Licensing Citizenship
This essay argues that the use of racial categories on identification documents is a critical piece of transgender history. By tracing the development of driver’s licenses as part of a Progressive Era racial project, this essay contends that the discourse of licenses as measures of fitness and citizenship was constructed partly in response to the supposed recklessness of “Negro” drivers. Thus driver’s licenses as tools to regulate mobility are em…
Race, Gender, and the Technological Turn
Dorothy Kim, TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Corrigan Vaughan, Cassius Adair, Veronica Paredes, T. L. Cowan, Race, Gender, and the Technological Turn: A Roundtable on Digitizing Revolution, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1, Women Digitizing Revolution (2018), pp. 149-177
The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back
This article traces the publication history of the canonical woman of color feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back through its official and unofficial editions as it has migrated from licensed paper to PDF format. The digital edition that circulated on the social blogging platform Tumblr.com and other informal social networks constitutes a new and important form of versioning that reaches different audiences and opens up new pedagogical op…
Bathrooms and Beyond
Drawing on personal teaching experiences, this pedagogical reflection asks whether a “pedagogy of access” might connect various strands of trans, disability, and critical race teaching methodologies. Such a pedagogical practice centers questions of nonnormative embodiment and histories of inclusion/exclusion from academic spaces within “trans” instructional praxis
Picturing Model Citizens
Reviewed by: Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture by Thy Phu Cassius Adair (bio) Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture, by Thy Phu. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. 218 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 978-1439907214. Thy Phu’s recent monograph Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture productively moves beyond a common impasse in discussions of citizenship …
Licensing Citizenship
This essay argues that the use of racial categories on identification documents is a critical piece of transgender history. By tracing the development of driver’s licenses as part of a Progressive Era racial project, this essay contends that the discourse of licenses as measures of fitness and citizenship was constructed partly in response to the supposed recklessness of “Negro” drivers. Thus driver’s licenses as tools to regulate mobility are em…
Before Trans Studies
In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu's “After Trans Studies,” this collaborative essay also turns to questions of field formation and the ethos of trans studies. Situating the growth of the field in the material conditions of precarity under which trans knowledge-workers work, the authors argue that trans studies can't be “over” because, in fact, it isn't yet here. Rather than viewing this as only a dismal proposition, ho…
Bathrooms and Beyond
Drawing on personal teaching experiences, this pedagogical reflection asks whether a “pedagogy of access” might connect various strands of trans, disability, and critical race teaching methodologies. Such a pedagogical practice centers questions of nonnormative embodiment and histories of inclusion/exclusion from academic spaces within “trans” instructional praxis
The Transgender Craze Seducing Our [Sons]”; or, All the Trans Guys Are Just Dating Each Other
Recent antitrans discourses have critiqued trans masculinity in particular as a site of social panic and contagion for proto-trans adolescents. In extreme cases, this is framed as a seduction. Turning “seduction” from a social danger to a benefit, this essay theorizes masc4masc t4t erotics as a type of contagious gendering. The authors discuss the coming into identity that takes place via desire for trans people, including a sexual urge toward or…
Is Transsexualism Chronic
Is Transsexualism Chronic? Cassius Adair (bio) Chronic: 1. Of or relating to time; chronological. Obsolete. 2. a. Of diseases, etc.: Lasting a long time, long-continued, lingering, inveterate; opposed to acute. b. So with invalid, and the like. 3. transf. Continuous, constant. Used colloquially as a vague expression of disapproval: bad, intense, severe, objectionable; also something chronic adverbial phrase, severely, badly. —Oxford English Dicti…
Researching gender in the history of the Internet and the Web. A roundtable at the SHOT 2023 conference
The co-editors of this special issue—Janet Abbate, Autumn Edwards, Leopoldina Fortunati, along with Valérie Schafer, a co-editor of the journal—launched an open call for organizing a roundtable during the SHOT 2023 conference, in which they invited scholars to delve deeper into the multifaceted sources, approaches, and methodologies related to Gender in the history of the Internet and the Web. This edited transcription of the roundtable presents …
The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back
This article traces the publication history of the canonical woman of color feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back through its official and unofficial editions as it has migrated from licensed paper to PDF format. The digital edition that circulated on the social blogging platform Tumblr.com and other informal social networks constitutes a new and important form of versioning that reaches different audiences and opens up new pedagogical op…
Picturing Model Citizens
Reviewed by: Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture by Thy Phu Cassius Adair (bio) Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture, by Thy Phu. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. 218 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 978-1439907214. Thy Phu’s recent monograph Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture productively moves beyond a common impasse in discussions of citizenship …
Bathrooms and Beyond
Drawing on personal teaching experiences, this pedagogical reflection asks whether a “pedagogy of access” might connect various strands of trans, disability, and critical race teaching methodologies. Such a pedagogical practice centers questions of nonnormative embodiment and histories of inclusion/exclusion from academic spaces within “trans” instructional praxis
The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back
This article traces the publication history of the canonical woman of color feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back through its official and unofficial editions as it has migrated from licensed paper to PDF format. The digital edition that circulated on the social blogging platform Tumblr.com and other informal social networks constitutes a new and important form of versioning that reaches different audiences and opens up new pedagogical op…
Race, Gender, and the Technological Turn
Dorothy Kim, TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Corrigan Vaughan, Cassius Adair, Veronica Paredes, T. L. Cowan, Race, Gender, and the Technological Turn: A Roundtable on Digitizing Revolution, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1, Women Digitizing Revolution (2018), pp. 149-177
Licensing Citizenship
This essay argues that the use of racial categories on identification documents is a critical piece of transgender history. By tracing the development of driver’s licenses as part of a Progressive Era racial project, this essay contends that the discourse of licenses as measures of fitness and citizenship was constructed partly in response to the supposed recklessness of “Negro” drivers. Thus driver’s licenses as tools to regulate mobility are em…
Representing Perpetrators
I was in my old station wagon, driving home from teaching my transgender literature course, when I first heard about Danielle Allen's biography Cuz: Or the Life and Times of Michael A. At first, I was only half listening to the author's interview on public radio, focused instead on the events of the day's class. My students and I had been working through Janet Mock's 2014 memoir Redefining Realness, and I'd offered a reading in which Mock's portr…
Before Trans Studies
In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu's “After Trans Studies,” this collaborative essay also turns to questions of field formation and the ethos of trans studies. Situating the growth of the field in the material conditions of precarity under which trans knowledge-workers work, the authors argue that trans studies can't be “over” because, in fact, it isn't yet here. Rather than viewing this as only a dismal proposition, ho…
The Transgender Craze Seducing Our [Sons]”; or, All the Trans Guys Are Just Dating Each Other
Recent antitrans discourses have critiqued trans masculinity in particular as a site of social panic and contagion for proto-trans adolescents. In extreme cases, this is framed as a seduction. Turning “seduction” from a social danger to a benefit, this essay theorizes masc4masc t4t erotics as a type of contagious gendering. The authors discuss the coming into identity that takes place via desire for trans people, including a sexual urge toward or…
Is Transsexualism Chronic
Is Transsexualism Chronic? Cassius Adair (bio) Chronic: 1. Of or relating to time; chronological. Obsolete. 2. a. Of diseases, etc.: Lasting a long time, long-continued, lingering, inveterate; opposed to acute. b. So with invalid, and the like. 3. transf. Continuous, constant. Used colloquially as a vague expression of disapproval: bad, intense, severe, objectionable; also something chronic adverbial phrase, severely, badly. —Oxford English Dicti…
Solidarity in the Centerfold
This essay argues that certain print pornography featuring “crossdresser,” “transvestite,” and “transsexual” subjects was, counterintuitively, part of a distributed information and care network by and for US transfeminine people between the 1970s and 1990s. While this genre of “transploitation” magazine did reproduce transfeminine bodies as fetish objects, transfeminine individuals themselves also used the adult magazine and bookstore market to d…
Fucking Theory's Form
Occasionally one reads scholarly reviews in which the reviewer's opinion about a text is expressed with subtlety and deftness, but this is a book about Tumblr and porn, so: I think this book is fucking great and everyone should buy it.Of course, it is also true that no discussion of Tumblr and its aftereffects would be complete without discourse, and I will thus make a longer argument for the importance of this thin, nonacademic volume to the fie…
Researching gender in the history of the Internet and the Web. A roundtable at the SHOT 2023 conference
The co-editors of this special issue—Janet Abbate, Autumn Edwards, Leopoldina Fortunati, along with Valérie Schafer, a co-editor of the journal—launched an open call for organizing a roundtable during the SHOT 2023 conference, in which they invited scholars to delve deeper into the multifaceted sources, approaches, and methodologies related to Gender in the history of the Internet and the Web. This edited transcription of the roundtable presents …
Parts of Myself
This essay considers Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself through an inquiry into the multiplicity of trans subjectivities. Beginning with the story of the author's encounter with Butler's text as a newly transitioning graduate student, it asks whether misreadings, both of theory and of bodies, are key to the construction of trans knowledges. From there, the essay reads (or perhaps misreads) Giving an Account alongside Susan Stryker's fou…
Kamala is for they/them
The slogan that the Trump campaign used in the 2024 US presidential election to tie rival Kamala Harris to trans activists in its television ads—“Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is for You”—makes no sense. It's grammatically incoherent, it melds non-binary people and trans women into one generic out-group, and it argues that Kamala Harris was somehow a champion for trans people when in fact many of Harris's strongest critics on the left were (and …
Powderhorn Park Is the Center of the Universe
This Against the Day contribution is a reflection on the geography of hyperlocal resistance in five short acts, set in Powderhorn Park in South Minneapolis.
Sociology (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Political science (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy (5 works) · Psychoanalysis (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works)