Job title:
UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow
Bio/CV:
Jordan J. Tudisco (they/iel) is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley under the mentorship of Dr. Damon Young. Jordan holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, a Doctoral Emphasis in Feminist Studies and a Certificate in College and University Teaching (2024) from the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as two Masters in English Literary and Digital Translation and in Digital Literature and Writing (2015) from the Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis.
Their dissertation and first book project, titled “Staking Our Claim: Self-Making, World-Making and Survival in Trans-Authored Narratives,” is a critical exploration of trans memoirs, poetry, and fiction including textual, visual, and performance-based media. It critiques white Western transness as a normative colonial tool for white supremacy and neoliberal selfhood and conceptualizes radical genealogies of transness invested in futurity and liberation. Their interdisciplinary approach combines perspectives from literary, linguistic, sociological, historiographical, queer/trans, and ethnic studies. This work considers how the transnational and cross-temporal journeys of transness as a white Western concept have been facilitated by oppressive frameworks and have expanded the atmospheric violence surrounding trans lives. In the face of genocide, murders, and everyday violence, their work highlights alternative deployments of transness as a radical decolonial tool for survival, world-making, and abolition.
Beyond this project, Jordan’s research also focuses on French and Francophone literature, trauma and memory, non-binary linguistics, and transphobia and trans-exclusionary radical feminism. Published articles include “The Failure of Cis Feminism: Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism in Academia” (Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2023), “Queering the French Académie: Reclaiming Linguistic Authority for Trans and Non-Binary People” (Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 2021), as well as two forthcoming pieces, “‘But… How Can you Call yourself not Binary?’: Linguistic Self-Determination, Gatekeeping and Trans Identities in the French-Speaking Context” (Gender & Language) and “Anti-Trans, Anti-Gender and Transphobic Language” (The Oxford Handbook of Language and Prejudice). Jordan is also a translator with academic and literary translations published in Médias 19 (here, here, and here) and BleuOrange, as well as forthcoming pieces in Histoire, Economie & Société and Théia: Revue d’histoire et histoire de l’art.
As a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley, Jordan’s goal is twofold: First, they will complete the arc of their first book project by writing a fifth chapter focused on trans sexuality as found in photographs, cinema, and pornography. Second, they will start working on their next research project, tentatively titled Trans Then & Now: an Archival and Ethnographic Study of French & Francophone Trans Resistance through Writing and Art. They are here interested in proposing an analysis of trans narratives of the self that continues to complicate the white-centric trans respectability politics identified in their first project and that hints at the need to consider ever-changing technology as a central crux for our understandings of transness. This new research project also highlights how trans people have used the novel, poetry, theater, photography, digital literature and other technological tools, as self-making and self-archiving practices to counter cis-centric discourses and the violent erasure enacted by the normative gaze of the archive and the canon.
Their dissertation and first book project, titled “Staking Our Claim: Self-Making, World-Making and Survival in Trans-Authored Narratives,” is a critical exploration of trans memoirs, poetry, and fiction including textual, visual, and performance-based media. It critiques white Western transness as a normative colonial tool for white supremacy and neoliberal selfhood and conceptualizes radical genealogies of transness invested in futurity and liberation. Their interdisciplinary approach combines perspectives from literary, linguistic, sociological, historiographical, queer/trans, and ethnic studies. This work considers how the transnational and cross-temporal journeys of transness as a white Western concept have been facilitated by oppressive frameworks and have expanded the atmospheric violence surrounding trans lives. In the face of genocide, murders, and everyday violence, their work highlights alternative deployments of transness as a radical decolonial tool for survival, world-making, and abolition.
Beyond this project, Jordan’s research also focuses on French and Francophone literature, trauma and memory, non-binary linguistics, and transphobia and trans-exclusionary radical feminism. Published articles include “The Failure of Cis Feminism: Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism in Academia” (Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2023), “Queering the French Académie: Reclaiming Linguistic Authority for Trans and Non-Binary People” (Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 2021), as well as two forthcoming pieces, “‘But… How Can you Call yourself not Binary?’: Linguistic Self-Determination, Gatekeeping and Trans Identities in the French-Speaking Context” (Gender & Language) and “Anti-Trans, Anti-Gender and Transphobic Language” (The Oxford Handbook of Language and Prejudice). Jordan is also a translator with academic and literary translations published in Médias 19 (here, here, and here) and BleuOrange, as well as forthcoming pieces in Histoire, Economie & Société and Théia: Revue d’histoire et histoire de l’art.
As a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley, Jordan’s goal is twofold: First, they will complete the arc of their first book project by writing a fifth chapter focused on trans sexuality as found in photographs, cinema, and pornography. Second, they will start working on their next research project, tentatively titled Trans Then & Now: an Archival and Ethnographic Study of French & Francophone Trans Resistance through Writing and Art. They are here interested in proposing an analysis of trans narratives of the self that continues to complicate the white-centric trans respectability politics identified in their first project and that hints at the need to consider ever-changing technology as a central crux for our understandings of transness. This new research project also highlights how trans people have used the novel, poetry, theater, photography, digital literature and other technological tools, as self-making and self-archiving practices to counter cis-centric discourses and the violent erasure enacted by the normative gaze of the archive and the canon.
Role:
