research

I am a doctoral candidate in Sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt/Main in Germany. My Ph.D. project looks at gender transitions through the lens of  new materialism. I am interested in how contemporary sex/gender transitions are made, how they become evident as transitions and their differentiation from non-transitioning gender. Following Susan Stryker, I understand sex/gender transitions as non-linear movements across socially imposed boundaries, away from an unchosen starting place, the gender assigned at birth and in everyday life. Based on a new materialist ethnography I conducted, including interviews with people who transition in Germany, I develop a situated description of the different material-discursive boundary drawing processes that shape sex/gender transitions. For this, I make use of a new materialist methodology based on Karen Barad’s Agential Realism and Gilles Deleuze’s Difference-in-itself.