Red Washburn (they/he) is Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Queens College of the City University of New York. They are Affiliate Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the Graduate Center (CUNY). His book Irish Women’s Prison Writing: Mother Ireland’s Rebels, 1960s-2010s was published by Routledge. Red’s articles appear in Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Journal of Lesbian Studies. Their essays are in several anthologies, including Theory and Praxis: Women’s and Gender Studies at Community Colleges, Introduction to Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies: Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Approaches, and Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community. They are the co-editor of Sinister Wisdom’s Dump Trump: Legacies of Resistance, 45 Years: A Tribute to Lesbian Herstory Archives, and Trans/Feminisms. Finishing Line Press published their poetry collections Crestview Tree Woman and Birch Philosopher X. They co-edited WSQ’s issue Nonbinary. He received an ACLS/ Mellon fellowship for their next project Nonbinary: Tr@ns-Forming Gender and Genre in Nonbin@ry Literature, Performance, and Visual Art.
Research Project
Red’s new book project explores the concept of nonbin@ry as a new configuration of identities, bodies, and families beyond binaries, kinships, and borders in culture and society. Nonbin@ry offers alternatives to categories of knowledge in traditional genres and disciplines, evidenced in the fashionable and flourishing transdisciplinary canon of nonbin@ary literature, performance, and visual art. They focus on the literary work of Zeyn Joukhadar’s Thirty Names of Night, Shola Von Reinhold’s Lote, Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door, Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches, and Joshua Whitehead’s Making Love with the Land. He examines performance, poetry, spoken word, and visual artwork of Alok Vaid-Menon, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Kiyan Williams, Cassils, Elektra KB, and Kris Grey. In addition, they feature interviews with and archives about the writers and artists.
Ultimately, this project views cultural expression as a form of speaking truth to political repression for nonbinary people across communities of difference by centering our own unique languages and forms of creativity in canons of literature, performance, and visual art from a postcolonial, feminist, queer, and trans critical perspective. During his time at the Humanities Institute at University College Dublin, he will integrating archival materials from Ireland, including the National Archives of Ireland, National Library of Ireland, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the Linen Hall Library, The Irish Queer Archive, the Cork LGBT Archive, and the Small Trans Library. He will be doing this work in Ireland this summer in order to include Irish nonbinary writers in this study. He also will be using this time to focus on writing his book.