Susan Stryker
Susan Stryker is a historian, author, filmmaker, activist, and scholar whose work has helped shape the study and understanding of transgender history and culture for more than three decades. Her historical research, theoretical writing, media-making, activism, and academic field-building have been instrumental in establishing transgender studies as a recognized field of scholarship. She retired from the University of Arizona as Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies in 2020 and has since held a distinguished visiting appointment at Stanford University’s Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
Stryker is the author of Transgender History, a widely used introduction to the political and cultural history of transgender communities in the United States, and co-director, with Victor Silverman, of the Emmy Award-winning documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria. The film helped recover the history of a 1966 uprising by transgender women and queer people at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin—one of the earliest documented acts of collective queer resistance to police harassment in the United States.
That history is inseparable from the story of San Francisco’s Transgender District, the subject of this Sidewalk Ballet conversation. The District encompasses the Tenderloin neighborhood where the Compton’s Cafeteria uprising took place and works to preserve and build upon the cultural legacy of a neighborhood that has long been home to transgender people, particularly trans women of color. Stryker, who lives in San Francisco, has played an important role in recovering the history that helps us understand why this particular piece of the city matters.