As part of the 2022 PIKSI-Rock Public Lecture Series, Tasmin Kimoto will present “Theory for Traps.”

Abstract: On March 16, 2021, a white man drove to several massage parlors in the Atlanta metro area and murdered eight people, including six Asian women. These attacks came in the midst of an increasing tide of anti-Asian violence across the US and were quickly subsumed under the larger banner of #StopAsianHate. While no doubt accurate, such an account flattens the specifically gendered and sexualized components of these and other attacks. In this talk, Kimoto aims to recover those elements and argue for how they shift narratives of Asian America offered by a model minority politics. In making this shift, we can better understand how a robust abolitionist politics is also an Asian American politics—and not simply one of solidarity. Kimoto takes as their central figure throughout the paper the transphobic and racialized figure of the trap to articulate the intervention as an Asian American trans feminist one.

The lecture is open to the public, but advance registration is required.

Tamsin Kimoto is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Goucher College. They work in the areas of women of color feminisms, queer and trans studies, health humanities, philosophy of race, and social and political philosophy. They earned their doctorate from Emory University with a dissertation on critical phenomenology and trans politics. Their current research projects focus on the intersections of Asian American and trans studies. In one project, they are interrogating how racialized conceptions of beauty intersect with the history and contemporary practice of trans medicine. In the second, they bring together Asian American feminism and trans feminism to analyze anti-Asian violence in the US and argue for the need for abolitionist organizing.