Dr. Eva Pensis

Dr. Eva Pensis is a multidisciplinary artist-scholar, poet, filmmaker, and feminist critic interested in how cultural forms and aesthetic practices mediate un/belonging in relation to normative social and political forms. Her research broadly attends to the relation between dominant social and intellectual formations and the communities, social movements, and expressive practices subjected to institutional capture and mainstream representation. Her current book project, Effemination, offers an intellectual history and performance ethnography of the racialized fear of effeminacy and its outsized role in the formation of mass national society. Constructing a genealogy of cross-gender and cross-racial performance from its psychosexual emergence in blackface minstrelsy and redface in collegiate theatricals to vaudeville's female impersonation and contemporary drag and trans/queer performance, the book investigates the hatred of effeminacy (and the shared fear of feminization) as a structure of political feeling—an affective tripwire that induces a radical rethinking about minor genres of performance that denaturalize, invert, coopt, resignify or camp major regimes of meaning, truth, authority, value, and communication.

Eva’s scholarship and creative work grow out of longstanding relationships with the communities in which she has lived, worked and organized for over a decade. Her practice reassesses gay and trans vernacular expressive culture as it lives backstage and offstage, in night clubs, bars, the streets, and other counterpublic spaces at a time when engagement with queer life and history is being increasingly circumscribed by the internet, the academy, and mainstream media. Currently, Eva is shooting an experimental documentary film, Citywide Special, which follows the longest-running drag show in the United States and features oral histories with the elder Black transsexual entertainers who have comprised its cast over the past thirty years in Philadelphia. With Emily Bock, Eva is co-organizing a transnational convening of marginalized trans femme artists, activists, sex work organizers, and anticolonial scholars to build a transnational coalition for collaborative, experimental feminist knowledge production that challenges the racialized grammars of transfemicide and disposability.

Before joining George Washington University, Eva was the Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Trans Studies at the University of Pennsylvania where she received the Lynda S. Hart Award for Feminist Pedagogy. Her research has been supported by the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, the TEN:TACLES Initiative, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Widening the Arc of Trans History Fellowship. With Noelle Deleon and Victor Ultra Omni, Eva co-edited the forthcoming special issue of Trans Studies Quarterly on femme queen legacies in ballroom culture. Eva’s scholarship has been published in The Drama Review, Critical Inquiry, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Journal of Popular Music Studies, e-Flux, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ruckus! Arts Journal, and SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies. Her poetry can be found in Delicate Machinery: Poems on Survival and Healing.