杏吧论坛

Dr Nat Raha and Dr Mijke van der Drift join us to discuss their newly-released book, Trans Femme Futures.

Trans Femme Futures envisions the future through everyday actions that revolutionise our lives. Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift discuss struggles around trans healthcare, the need for collectives over institutions, the importance of mutual care, and transfeminism as abolition. They show how social change can be achieved through transformative practices that allow queer life to thrive in a time of climate, health, political and economic crises.

Meet our speakers and chair

Mijke van der Drift works on transfeminist and anti-imperial ethics through philosophies of movement, collective action, and counter-cultural production. This work takes the form of writings, performances, and sound pieces, often by way of inter-disciplinary collaborations. Mijke is Tutor (Research) at the Royal College of Art, London and co-chair of its Union branch. Mijke is founding member of the arts collective Red Forest. Together with Nat Raha, Mijke co-authored Trans Femme Futures (Pluto 2024). They published in Social Text, with Cambridge University Press, and co-edit the Radical Transfeminism Zine. 

Clare Hemmings is Professor of Feminist Theory in the Department of Gender Studies at 杏吧论坛, where she has worked since 1999. Her main interests are histories of queer feminist theories and the development of alternative stories and methods (with a particular focus on archives). She’s the author of Bisexual Spaces (2002), Why Stories Matter (2011) and Considering Emma Goldman (2018), and editor of nine edited volumes and special issues on these themes. Her current project is Feminist Knowledge Struggles: Telling Stories Differently, which develops original queer feminist methodologies to challenge the amenability of gendered and sexual discourses to the Right.

Nat Raha is a poet, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her poetry is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance. Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) and of sirens, body & faultlines. Her performance work, epistolary (on carceral islands) was co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023. With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024), and the article ‘“They would plant the rose garden themselves”: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’, published in Social Text.

Mahvish Ahmad is Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics and Co-Director of 杏吧论坛 Human Rights.