Negative Life: A Conversation with Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay
Release Date: 03/14/2025
"A Constellation of Many Bodies of Understanding" A Conversation with Tourmaline
FQT Podcast
In this episode, FQT podcast host Che speaks with their sister, the artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist, Tourmaline. Tourmaline's practice highlights the experiences of Black, queer, and trans communities and their capacity to impact the world. Her films and photographs rewrite mainstream narratives and cultural histories to initiate a paradigm shift and imagine a more pleasure-filled future. Tourmaline’s practice invites us to fundamentally reshape our beliefs about what is possible. In the episode they discuss Tourmaline's books, the national best seller Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of...
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"Something That Needed to Happen," part two of a conversation with Susan Stryker
FQT Podcast
In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett continues their conversation with Professor Susan Stryker about the 1966 Compton's cafeteria uprising and its afterlives, and the history and future of trans studies. Professor Stryker's forthcoming book Changing Gender (FSG, 2026) will be published in August. Stryker takes an autotheoretical approach in the text, as well as offering a pathbreaking account of the historicity of gender as a category, transforming the ways in which it is conceptualized. Music: "We Can Be Together" by Jefferson Airplane
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"Purpose Bigger Than Fear” A Conversation with Geena Rocero
FQT Podcast
In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with author, film producer and director, actor and model, Geena Rocero about Horse Barbie: A Memoir of Reclamation (Random House, 2003), her modeling, directing and acting careers, her public advocacy work, trans diaspora, spirituality, and her new short film Dolls. Music cred: “QC Gurlz” by Stef Aranas
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When Monsters Speak: Part 1 of a conversation with Professor Susan Stryker
FQT Podcast
In this (first of two parts) episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor Susan Stryker. Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, as well as Distinguished Visitor and 2025-2026 Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Stryker has served as Visiting Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women’s Leadership, Mills College. She is an executive editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and as...
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Traumatophilia: a conversation with Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D
FQT Podcast
In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with psychoanalyst and scholar Avgi Saketopoulou, who is the 2025-26 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at UC Berkeley, about her book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023), and the entanglements of race, gender, sexuality and psychoanalysis. Music Credit: "Consideration" by Rihanna and SZA
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The Framer's Coup: a Conversation with Professor Michael J. Klarman
FQT Podcast
In this episode FQT associate director speaks with Harvard Law professor Michael J. Klarman about his award winning scholarship in civil rights and legal history, including From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press, 2004) which received the 2005 Bancroft Prize in History, and his newest book, The Framer's Coup: the making of the United States Constitution (Oxford UP, 2016) which was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award. Music Credit: "Animosity" by...
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Art’s Properties: a conversation with David Joselit
FQT Podcast
In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor David Joselit. Joselit is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies and Chair for Art, Film, and Visual Studies (AFVS) at Harvard University. Joselit began his career as a curator at The ICA in Boston from 1983-1989. After receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1995, he has also taught at the University of California, Irvine, and Yale University where he was Department Chair of History of Art from 2006-09, and the CUNY Graduate Center. Some of Joselit's most recent books are After...
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The Artificial and the Real: a conversation with Nora Khan
FQT Podcast
In this episode FQT associate director and podcast host Che Gossett speaks with critic, essayist, curator, and professor Nora Khan. Nora Khan recently served as the Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts. Her writing on philosophy of artificial intelligence and emergent technologies is referenced heavily across disciplinary formations in the humanities and the arts. Her books include AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (2025), Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019) and Fear Indexing the X-Files (2017), with Steven Warwick. She is a member of the Curatorial Ensemble of the 2026...
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Now Dig This: A Conversation with Kellie Jones
FQT Podcast
In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Kellie Jones, Professor in Art History and Archaeology and the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University. Professor Jones is a 2016 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of numerous awards for her scholarship and curation. Professor Jones is the author of EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Duke, 2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Duke, 2017), which was named a Best Art Book of 2017 in The...
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Black Modernisms: A Conversation with Huey Copeland
FQT Podcast
In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Huey Copeland, Andrew W. Mellon Chair and Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh, about his work in art history, criticism, and Black diasporic and contemporary art. Professor Copeland is the author of the critically acclaimed book Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago, 2013), co-editor of the award-winning volume Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 2023), as well over 70...
info_outlineIn this episode Che Gossett, associate director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania speaks with the authors of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern UP, 2024) professors Steven Swarbrick of CUNY and Jean Thomas Tremblay of York University. They discuss the concept of negative life, the contemporary politics of ecocriticism, film theory, psychoanalysis, and queer studies.
Music Credit: The Day the World Turned Day-Glo, by X-Ray Spex