Christina B. Hanhardt

Visiting Scholar

Christina B. Hanhardt is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies and an affiliate of the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Consortium for Race, Gender, and Ethnicity. Her research and teaching focus on the history of post-WWII U.S. social movements and cities, with particular attention to the politics of sexuality and punishment. Christina is the author of the book Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Duke, 2013),which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in LGBT Studies and honorable mention for both the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize and its Lora Romero Prize. She is co-editor (with Dayo F. Gore) of a special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly on gender, sexuality, and state power, and she has also published in Radical History Review, GLQ, QED, Women and Performance, Social Text, Theory & Event, Labor, and the Journal of American History, among other journals. Additional writing has appeared in the books Policing the Planet, Keywords in American Cultural Studies, and Communities and Place; the National Park Service’s LGBTQ Heritage Theme Study, and the exhibition catalogues Transition Times: Remembering Anti-Carceral Resistance in the Tenderloin and Tulips: Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled “Left Out,” which engages debates in queer theory and politics to track the history of stigma in U.S. left social movements since the 1960s.




Participating Years


2015–2016

Dialectics of Autonomy and Dependence

Self-determination had a heady run in the 20th century, instanced by both revolutionary assertion and homogenizing mimicry. But what is autonomy now? What is dependence? How are these conditions of existence necessarily related – as contradictory rather than contrasting ideologies, representations, relations, outcomes? What forms reveal the dialectic at work? What forms disguise or displace the dynamic?