Dissertations in Progress

Beshouy Botros, History

“Before Trans Medicine: Race, Gender and Coloniality Between Egypt and the Maghreb”

My dissertation project reckons with a coincidence: two surgeons, on opposite ends of Northern Africa, in Cairo and Casablanca, perform gender affirming procedures in the mid-twentieth century. “Coincidence” signals my non-teleological, non-causal approach to historical inquiry and some of my operational questions; what made trans medicine uniquely feasible in Egypt and Morocco, and inversely, how did Northern African racial topologies shape trans medicine. In the mid-twentieth century Georges Burou, the Franco-Algerian who moved to Casablanca on the eve of the Algerian War of Independence, and Ludwig Levy-Lenz, the German Jew who worked with Magnus Hirschfield before fleeing Nazi Germany and opening a clinic in Cairo, confronted racial, religious and sexual differences with long histories. It would be easy to explain their itineraries in terms of convenience; both doctors fled European wars and settled in major cities on the other side of the Mediterranean, but this would discount the complexity of the worlds they entered, worlds where people had nuanced Amazigh and Arabic grammars for understanding the body. Mining these grammars and prehistories, I turn to a very long nineteenth century as I read Arabic-language medical treatises and analyze the advent of modern medical education in Northern Africa. By excavating the meanings of race, gender and sexuality as they were expressed in Northern Africa, before trans medicine, my project proposes that these dialogical negotiations shaped the emergence of trans medicine and the modern social body more broadly.

Kate Redburn, History

“The Private Square: Gay Rights, Religious Freedom, and U.S. Political Economy at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century”

My dissertation examines the changing meaning of sexual and religious freedom in the marketplace since the mid-1960s. I show how conflicts between LGBT legal advocates and conservative Christian lawyers have changed the way law structures the relationships between state, market, and subject, by looking closely at the history of public accommodations law. In the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, U.S. legal consensus held that private businesses serving the general public were subject to anti-discrimination laws, even when the proprietors objected to racial equality on religious grounds. By 2017, that consensus had largely deteriorated, and cases before the Supreme Court in 2020 suggest that a religious exemption to anti-discrimination law may become constitutional nationwide. How should we understand this dramatic change? I argue that the conservative vision succeeded in devolving public powers of inclusion and recognition to private parties, recalibrating public law to protect religious and business interests, and sometimes limiting the reach of public law altogether. I suggest that these changes form an important part of the transition from a New Deal political economy into a lopsided neoliberalism, where some subjects are rewarded and others penalized for non-normativity in their quest for full economic citizenship.