
Contact Information
Biography
Swarr is the co-editor of Critical Feminist Transnational Praxis (with Nagar, 2010), an anthology engaged with North/South feminist collaborations and power, 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.
Research
Selected Research
- Amanda Lock Swarr, “Intersex Autonomy in African Contexts: Colonial Histories and Activist Leadership for the Future,” Alison L. Des Forges International Symposium, 2024.
- Swarr, Amanda Lock. Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine. Durham: Duke University Press, 2023.
- Wolff, Michelle, David Rubin, and Amanda Lock Swarr. 2022. "The Intersex Issue: An Introduction." Transgender Studies Quarterly 9.2: 143-159.
- National Women's Studies Association, Annual Conference, 2019.
- Dworkin, Shari L., Amanda Lock Swarr, and Cheryl Cooky. “(In)Justice in Sport: The Treatment of South African Track Star Caster Semenya.” Feminist Studies, 39(1), spring 2013.
- Amanda Lock Swarr. "Paradoxes of Butchness: Lesbian Masculinities and Sexual Violence in Contemporary South Africa." SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 37(4): Summer 2012.
- Amanda Lock Swarr. Sex in Transition: Remaking Gender and Race in South Africa. New York, SUNY Press, 2012.
- Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar, eds. Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis. New York: SUNY Press, 2010.
- Amanda Lock Swarr, with Sally Gross and Liesl Theron. "South African Intersex Activism: Caster Semenya's Impact and Import." Feminist Studies, 35(3): Fall 2009.
- Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar. "Dismantling Assumptions: Interrogating 'Lesbian' Struggles for Identity and Survival in India and South Africa." SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 29(2): Winter 2004.
- Toward Intersex Futures: Panel with Emi Koyama, Amanda Sáenz & Sean Saifa Wall. University of Washington, Seattle, February 11, 2025.
Research Advised
- Eric Villiers, "Falling Asleep in the Museum," GWSS Colloquium, 2025.
- Jarvis, S. (2020). Informatic Afterlives and Database Erotics: The Performativity of Surveillance in Economies of Fidelity. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
- O’Laughlin, L. N. (2018). Toxic Animal Encounters: Queer Environmental Threats and Racialized Reproduction Anxieties. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.