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Kadji Amin is Assistant Professor of Queer Studies at Stony Brook University. He is the recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in “Sex” at the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum (2015-16) and a Faculty Fellowship at the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook (2015). He received his Ph.D. in Romance Studies (French) with a graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University in 2009. His research and teaching interests include Queer and Sexuality Studies, Critical Race Studies, Transgender Studies, feminist theory, French and Francophone Postcolonial Studies. He has published or forthcoming articles in GLQ, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Feminist Formations, Women’s Studies Quarterly, French Studies, Études françaises, and L’Esprit créateur. He is the “Books in Brief” editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and an active member of the Sexual Politics / Sexual Poetics Collective, a working group of early career Queer Studies scholars.
His book, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Pederasty, and Queer History, is forthcoming in Fall 2017 with the Theory Q Series at Duke University Press. Disturbing Attachments studies French author Jean Genet’s activism with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians in order to interrogate the aspirations that animate contemporary Queer Studies. The book deidealizes Genet’s coalitional politics by foregrounding their animation by unsavory and outdated modes of attachment, including pederastic kinship, racial fetishism, nostalgia for prison, and fantasies of queer terrorism. By studying “archaic” modes of queer attachment that resist the ideals of the present, Disturbing Attachments challenges Queer Studies to avow the history of its affective tendencies and to allow them to be unsettled and transformed by earlier modes of queer feeling.
Publications:
"‘Blesser’ le spectateur blanc américain: Les Nègres aux États-Unis, 1961-4 et 2003,” Études françaises 51, no. 1 (2015): 67-80.
“Temporality” Keyword, Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1-2 (2014): 219-222.
“Anachronizing the Penitentiary, Queering the History of Sexuality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 19, no. 3 (2013): 301–340.
“Ghosting Transgender Historicity in Colette’s The Pure and the Impure,” L’Esprit Créateur 53, no. 1 (2013): 114-130.
“Spectral Mourning and Carceral Masculinities: Jean Genet's Miracle de la Rose,” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 65, no. 2 (2011): 200-211.
