Emrys Travis

My PhD project is titled 'De/Constructing Identity: French, Italian, and British Gay Liberationism in the Long ‘68'. My research grapples with the present impasse of 'identity politics': the decade following the ‘transgender tipping point’ has yielded an explosion of queer and trans cultural representation, but also a potent media and political backlash, troubling straightforward conceptions of ‘progress’. Within this polarised setting, LGBTQ+ identities may only be affirmed or denied, leaving little space for more critical approaches towards ‘identity’ as a hegemonic discourse.

Against the allegation of identity-‘essentialism’ sometimes ascribed to queer theory’s gay predecessors, this project investigates the complex and critical development of gay ‘identity’ in and through the activist press in Britain, France, and Italy, across the decade following the political revolts of 1968. Through an interweaving of archival and textual-theoretical research methods, with the grassroots print culture of gay liberationist groups as primary source material, this project investigates how these underexplored histories might equip activist presents to navigate the apparent paradox of both affirming *and* transcending LGBTQ+ identities – opening onto a reenlivened ‘imagining otherwise’ (Olufemi 2021), which could intervene critically and productively in the present identity-political crisis.

My areas of research interest both within and beyond this project include Marxism and critical theory, particularly elaborating concepts of alienation, reification, dialectics, totality, and social reproduction through queer/trans and disability-focused lenses. I am interested in models of theorising the particular-universal relation, as well as materialist accounts of the role of imagination and its shaping by capitalist ideology in conceptions of identity and in identity-political activist politics.

I achieved a first-class BA in Modern & Medieval Languages from the University of Cambridge, followed by an MPhil with distinction in Comparative Literatures and Cultures. My BA and MPhil research spanned critical theoretical and cultural engagement with a wide variety of materials and traditions including queer and trans theory, disability studies and crip theory, postcolonial literature, feminist philosophy, translation theory, biopolitics, psychoanalysis, Surrealist art, French and Italian film, and contemporary music videos.

My MPhil dissertation proposed a ‘trans[gender] Marxism’ characterised by a dialectical movement between its own terms, intervening in the reuptake of Marxist frameworks and ambition towards a ’unitary theory’ which has burgeoned within the field of identity politics particularly since the 2008 financial crisis. I elaborated how trans activist movements have been dogged by forces of reification which abstract transness from other oppressed subjectivities and elide the interpretive horizon of political economy, resulting in a neoliberal ‘transnormativity’ straightforwardly co-optable to capitalist and imperialist ends. I excavated the ambitious
radicalism of Mario Mieli and other gay liberationists, seeking to lay foundations for the weaponisation of their expansive political horizon against the presentism and pessimism of present trans movements.

In 2023-4 I co-guest-edited Special Issue 11.2 of Transgender Studies Quarterly: The Trans* Marxist Issue.