YV E. Nay | AS 2024
YV Nay is Walter Benjamin Kolleg Fellow (2024-2025) and Senior Researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies of the University of Bern. Their research and teaching areas are intersectional Gender, Queer and Trans Studies, Affect Theory, Queer and Trans Political Anthropology, Critical Diversity in Education, global Reproductive Technologies, Anthropology of Queer Families and Kinship. Currently, Nay heads the research project Education in Trans*formation funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), which analyses the recent social change in the perception and legal regulation of gender-expansive childhood(s) in public education. Nay earned a doctoral degree with their anthropological research on queer-trans-feminist family and kinship formations at the University of Basel. In an SNSF postdoctoral project entitled Affective Activism, they analyzed the felt experience and emotional engagement in trans communities. Nay extends this research focus in the project Transitioning Reproduction. Social Reproduction in Trans Communities at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg.
Before joining the University of Bern, Nay was Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies at the University of Geneva, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Trans Studies Research Cluster of the University of Arizona, Teaching Fellow in Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI Berlin), SNSF Fellow at Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology and Visiting Professor in Political Science at the University of Vienna.
YV Nay is author of the monograph Feeling Family (Zaglossus 2017) and co-editor of the edited volume Affekt und Geschlecht (Zaglossus 2014) and the special issue The Europa Issue of TSQ Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke University Press 2021, 8.2.). Nay has published – amongst other – in Femina Politica. Journal for feminist Political Science, Gender. Journal for Gender, Culture and Society, Sociologus. Journal for Social Anthropology und TSQ Transgender Studies Quarterly.
Research Project
Transitioning Reproduction. Social Reproduction in Trans Communities
The last few years have seen a rapid increase in public conversations about the lives of trans people, or those whose gender identity and/or gender expression differs from the sex assigned them at birth. Since the 2000s, political activism initiated by trans people and their allies has raised the awareness of politicians, legislators, and the general public regarding the challenges facing trans persons. As a result, innovative legislation on gender recognition has recently been adopted or is currently being drafted in various jurisdictions.
The project Transitioning Reproduction. Social Reproduction in Trans Communities starts from the rapidly growing activism of trans people and their allies who advocate for legal gender self-determination and for full access to all areas of life. It studies the ways in which trans people build structures and opportunities for communal support beyond conventional political activism for state rights to face the various existing discriminations. The overall aim of the project is to provide a complex and nuanced articulation of what it may mean to live and think trans lives as well as to develop an empirically saturated theoretical framework for understanding how full access for trans people to all areas of life might be conceptualized.
