Amanda Lock Swarr

Amanda Swarr is Chair and Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and faculty in African Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.  Her research is concerned with queer, trans, and intersex studies, medical inequities, and feminist politics and explores the incoherence of sex and gender through critiques of colonialism, racism, and power.  She serves on the Editorial Collective for Feminist Studies and her work has been published in journals including TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Journal of Homosexuality, Feminist Studies, and Feminist Formations. 

Swarr is the co-editor of Critical Feminist Transnational Praxis (with Nagar, 2010), an anthology engaged with North/South feminist collaborations and power through the lens of praxis, and she co-edited "The Intersex Issue," a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly (with Wolff and Rubin 2022).  Her first monograph, Sex in Transition: Remaking Gender and Race in South Africa (2012), analyzes how the boundaries of sex and gender were policed under South Africa’s apartheid system of racial segregation and during the transition to democracy and was awarded the Sylvia Rivera Prize in Transgender Studies.  Swarr’s latest book, Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine (2023), articulates how histories of colonialism and scientific racism shape contemporary intersex medicine, focusing on African intersex activists' challenges to misrepresentation and violence.  This book received the Bonnie and Vern Bullough Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and the Professional Book Award from the Diverse Sexualities Research and Education Institute and is available for free download through Duke University Press here.