Trans Femme Futures

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Envisioning a trans future is an act of revolution

'Femme' describes a constellation of queer, gendered expressions that uproot expectations of what it means to be feminine. Transfeminists take their experiences of desire, belonging and harm to create collective power through femininity, fighting for marginalised and non-conforming people. Trans Femme Futures enriches this power.

We’re proud to host the launch of Trans Femme Futures at this year’s Radical Book Fair! To celebrate, the book’s co-authors Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift are joined by poet Jay Bernard for a conversation about transfeminism, its history, and envisioning the future.

The panel will be chaired by Harry Josephine Giles

Our speakers:

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar. Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (2024) and of sirens, body & faultlines (2018). Nat has been involved in LGBTQ+ collective organising in Edinburgh, London and beyond for over a decade.

With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (2024), co-editor of Radical Transfeminism zine, and their article ‘“They would plant the rose garden themselves”: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’ was recently published in Social Text.

Nat’s creative and critical writing appears in The Brooklyn Rail, Queer Print in Europe, Transgender Marxism, Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’), and South Atlantic Quarterly. She is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.

Mijke van der Drift works on ethics, trans studies, and anti-colonial epistemologies. Mijke is a tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. Mijke’s work is published in various academic journals and edited volumes, and finds form in sound pieces, performances and other outlets. Van der Drift is founding member of the art collective Red Forest, who have shown work at the Milano Triennale (2022), the Helsinki Biennale (2023), and many other events, as part of their research into Extractivism, Fossil Fascism, and cultures of resistance.

With Nat Raha, Mijke co-authored Trans Femme Futures (Pluto Press, 2024), an article in Social Text, and co-edited the Radical Transfeminism zine.

Jay Bernard (FRSL) is an interdisciplinary writer and artist from London whose work is rooted in sound, poetry and social history. Jay was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2020 and winner of the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for their first collection Surge. Recent work includes Far from the Start, an audio installation at Studio Voltaire that re-imagines the Windrush; Blue Now, a live rendition of Derek Jarman’s film ‘Blue’; Joint, a poetic-play about the history of joint enterprise; Crystals of this Social Substance, a sound installation about young people, capitalism and money at the ‘21 Serpentine pavilion; Complicity, a pamphlet about colonial memory in the urban environment, based on the collection at the Tate; and The Last 7 Years, a digital and live sound piece produced by Art Angel. Jay is a DAAD literature fellow and a 2023/24 fellow at the Institute of Ideas and Imagination, Paris.

Our chair:

Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney, living in Leith. Her latest book is the poetry collection Them! (Picador 2024). Her verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia (Picador 2021) won the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction book of the year. Her poetry collections The Games (Out-Spoken Press, 2018) and Tonguit (Freight Books 2015) were between them shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Saltire Prize and the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Her stage show of her poetry sequence Drone toured internationally in 2019, and the performance of Deep Wheel Orcadia will tour in 2025. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Stirling. www.harryjosephine.com

*Please note that masks will be required at this event (as with all Lighthouse events).

*Accessibility: All events will be professionally filmed & livestreamed. The Roxy is wheelchair accessible (including toilets) and we'll have provisions for neurodivergent guests including stims, quiet space and colour-coded lanyards.

*Events are £6 or free -we completely understand paying for one or two events and then getting free spots for others. The Radical Book Fair is entirely bookshop run and ticket sales are vital to keeping the fair sustainable and paying all our speakers so all support is heartily welcome!

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