Prof. Grace Lavery, English, UC Berkeley

“The Diagnostic Demon, or, How Trans Rights Broke Liberal Democracy"

Register in advance

DATE

Thursday, May 15, 2025 

TIME

2:00 p.m.

LOCATION

INTS 1113

Grace Lavery is the author of three books, Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques (Princeton, 2023); Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan (Princeton, 2019); and the memoir Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis (Seal 2022). Her talk draws on research for her current book in progress, Personal Demons: Possession Narratives of Late Liberalism. Personal Demons is concerned with medical transcriptions of “demonic possession” in early diagnoses of gender identity disorder, and the reverberation of those transcriptions across a range of contemporary medical and religious discourses.