Guest Lecture by Prof. K. Allison Hammer, PhD (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale): “How to Make an Enemy: Transmisogyny and the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election”, followed by a response by Prof. Christine Klapeer (JLU)

This talk argues that the framing of the trans woman as an enemy figure in the 2024 presidential election has historical precedent and shares common ground with similar moral sex and gender panics going back to the Comstock laws of the 1870s and the post-war hysteria surrounding the presence of cisgender women, lesbians, and gay men in the workplace. The creation of enemy figures during such panics suggests the desire to protect cisgender, white, middle-class femininity and thus so-called national, Christian values of family and homeland, whilst obscuring the true sources of economic inequality and the massive, unprecedented investment in the military industrial complex since World War II. The talk will be followed by a response by Professor Dr. Christine M. Klapeer (JLU, Political Science with a Focus on Gender and Queer Studies).