FQT Podcast

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with professors, poets, and artists Fred Moten, Hideo Mabuchi and Sora Han about black study, quantum physics, psychoanalysis, their artistic practices of poetry and ceramics, and the ways that their critical approaches address and undermine the subject/object distinction.  Trained as a physicist and inspired by makers, Hideo Mabuchi works as both a lumper and a splitter. Fred Moten teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. Sora Han is author of Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition (Duke UP 2024) and To Regard a Wave (selva oscura press 2024), and teaches law and critical theory at UC Irvine.   Song Credits: "My Melody," Eric B and Rakhim "Hummingbird Wing Sounds," My Backyard Birding on Youtube

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Vilashini Coopan, Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Alex Brostoff, Assistant Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Georgetown University, about their co-edited anthology, Autotheories (MIT Press, 2025).  Professors Coopan and Brostoff discuss collaborative writing and the 2025 symposium they convened, "Intimacies of Relation: The Autotheoretical Turn" at UC Santa Cruz. Professors Brostoff and Coopan also discuss how autotheory shapes their own writing styles, the political genealogy of autotheory, and the reason they pluralize the concept, as well as the impact of autotheory on narrative writing, and the relationship between autotheory and affect.

In this episode FQT Center associate director Che Gossett speaks with professor Homi Bhabha.  Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. They discuss professor Bhabha's intellectual iterinary and how distinct sites such as Bombay and Oxford have shaped his cosmpolitan thought.  They also discuss his pathbreaking scholarship including such texts as Nation and Narration (Routledge, 1990) and The Location of Culture (2004, Routledge Classics). Bhabha also elaborates on his recent work on temporality and the pandemic, and the afterlives of his concepts such as mimicry, hybridity and third space.  Finally, Bhabha discusses his writing style, and how for him, the affective power of writing is as important as argumentation. Music Credit (30 seconds): Vidushi Bombay Jayashri Ramnath performing Raga Hamsadhwani

In this episode, FQT director Che Gossett speaks with Charles Gaines about his artistic practice, his interest in systems thinking and unthinking, and how Gaines takes up questions about seriality and discreteness, difference and repetition in relation to race, materiality and infrastructure.  They discuss Gaines's pathbreaking 1993 exhibition with Catherine Lord at the Fine Arts Gallery of the University of California, Irvine, titled "The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism," as well as his 2022 monumental kinetic sculpture Moving Chains commissioned by Creative Time at Governor's Island, and his new 2025 work Hanging Tree, commissioned by the Equal Justice Initiative and installed in Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama. Gaines's work is included in prominent public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), and the Tate (London).   Audio Credit: Moving Chains audio, Creative Time, Governor's Island, New York

In this episode, FQT podcast host Che speaks with their sister, the artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist, Tourmaline. Tourmaline's practice highlights the experiences of Black, queer, and trans communities and their capacity to impact the world. Her films and photographs rewrite mainstream narratives and cultural histories to initiate a paradigm shift and imagine a more pleasure-filled future. Tourmaline's practice invites us to fundamentally reshape our beliefs about what is possible. In the episode they discuss Tourmaline's books, the national best seller Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, published by Reparations Books at Random House in 2025, and her children's book One Day in June published by Penguin Press, as well as her films Happy Birthday Marsha, Salacia and recently, Pollinator, which won the 2022 Baloise Art Prize and was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and her portraits, which are in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tourmaline's work is also part of an upcoming exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Freedom Dreams.

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett continues their conversation with Professor Susan Stryker about the 1966 Compton's cafeteria uprising and its afterlives, and the history and future of trans studies.   Professor Stryker's forthcoming book Changing Gender (FSG, 2026) will be published in August.  Stryker takes an autotheoretical approach in the text, as well as offering a pathbreaking account of the historicity of gender as a category, transforming the ways in which it is conceptualized. Music: "We Can Be Together" by Jefferson Airplane

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with author, film producer and director, actor and model, Geena Rocero about Horse Barbie: A Memoir of Reclamation (Random House, 2003), her modeling, directing and acting careers, her public advocacy work, trans diaspora, spirituality, and her new short film Dolls.  Music cred: "QC Gurlz" by Stef Aranas

In this (first of two parts) episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor Susan Stryker. Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, as well as Distinguished Visitor and 2025-2026 Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research.  Stryker has served as Visiting Professor of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership, Mills College. She is an executive editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series ASTERISK: gender, trans-, and all that comes after. Stryker is the author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution (2008, 2017), co-editor of the two-volume Transgender Studies Reader (2006, 2013) and The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (2022), as well as  co-director of the Emmy-winning documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria (2005).  In episode one of a two part interview, Stryker discusses her field defining scholarship in trans studies, the new of her writing anthology edited by Professor McKenzie Wark, When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader (Duke University Press, 2024), and her recent scholarship bringing together abolitionist politics and trans architectural imaginaries.   Music: "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps," David Bowie

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with psychoanalyst and scholar Avgi Saketopoulou, who is the 2025-26 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at UC Berkeley, about her book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023), and the entanglements of race, gender, sexuality and psychoanalysis.   Music Credit: "Consideration" by Rihanna and SZA

In this episode FQT associate director speaks with Harvard Law professor Michael J. Klarman about his award winning scholarship in civil rights and legal history, including From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press, 2004) which received the 2005 Bancroft Prize in History, and his newest book, The Framer's Coup: the making of the United States Constitution (Oxford UP, 2016) which was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award.   Music Credit: "Animosity" by Tupac