University of Wisconsin–Madison
Finn Enke

Finn Enke

Professor of History and Gender and Women’s Studies

Office Hours: TBA
 
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Joint Appointment: Gender & Women's Studies

Finn Enke

I am the Director of the undergraduate LGBTQ+ Studies Certificate Program. I specialize in history of sexuality and gender, primarily 20th century United States, focusing on transgender, queer and feminist social movements; my work is also animated by queer crip studies, critical race and indigeneity studies, graphic art and comics studies.

Education

Ph.D., 1999, University of Minnesota, Department of History
M.A., 1992, University of Minnesota, Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society
B.A., 1987 Swarthmore College, Religious Studies, Asian Studies.

Books

Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies

Finn Enke. Transfeminist Perspectives in and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies. Temple University Press, 2012.

If feminist studies and transgender studies are so intimately connected, why are they not more deeply integrated? Offering multidisciplinary models for this assimilation, the vibrant essays in Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies suggest timely and necessary changes for institutions of higher learning. Responding to the more visible presence of transgender persons as well as gender theories, the contributing essayists focus on how gender is practiced in academia, health care, social services, and even national border patrols. Working from the premise that transgender is both material and cultural, the contributors address such aspects of the university as administration, sports, curriculum, pedagogy, and the appropriate location for transgender studies. Combining feminist theory, transgender studies, and activism centered on social diversity and justice, these essays examine how institutions as lived contexts shape everyday life.

Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism

Finn Enke. Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism. Duke University Press, 2007.

In Finding the Movement, Anne Enke reveals that diverse women’s engagement with public spaces gave rise to and profoundly shaped second-wave feminism. Focusing on women’s activism in Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis-St. Paul during the 1960s and 1970s, Enke describes how women across race and class created a massive groundswell of feminist activism by directly intervening in the urban landscape. They secured illicit meeting spaces and gained access to public athletic fields. They fought to open bars to women and abolish gendered dress codes and prohibitions against lesbian congregation. They created alternative spaces, such as coffeehouses, where women could socialize and organize. They opened women-oriented bookstores, restaurants, cafes, and clubs, and they took it upon themselves to establish women’s shelters, health clinics, and credit unions in order to support women’s bodily autonomy. By considering the development of feminism through an analysis of public space, Enke expands and revises the historiography of second-wave feminism. She suggests that the movement was so widespread because it was built by people who did not identify themselves as feminists as well as by those who did. Her focus on claims to public space helps to explain why sexuality, lesbianism, and gender expression were so central to feminist activism. Her spatial analysis also sheds light on hierarchies within the movement. As women turned commercial, civic, and institutional spaces into sites of activism, they produced, as well as resisted, exclusionary dynamics.

Selected Publications

  • “Collective Memory and the Transfeminist 1970s: Toward a Less Plausible History”  TSQ 2018: 5(1) 9-29.
  • “Transgender History and Otherwise Approaches to Queer Embodiment” in Romesburg ed., The Routledge History of Queer America (2018):224-236.
  • “Transfeminist Perspectives on History and Pedagogy” Process: A Blog for American History, September 1, 2016.
  • “Translation” Transgender Studies Quarterly Vol 1 Issue 1-2 (Summer 2014)
  • “The Education of Little Cis: Binary Gender and the Discipline of Opposing Bodies” in The Transgender Studies Reader Volume 2. Routledge Press, 2012.
  • “Unlikely Sex Change Capitols of the World: Trinidad, United States, and Tehran, Iran, as Twin Yardsticks of Homonormative Liberalism” (with Elizabeth Bucar). Feminist Studies, 37:2 (Summer) 2011.
  • “Smuggling Sex Throough the Gates: Race, Sexuality, and Contested Space in Second Wave Feminism,” American Quarterly vol. 55 number 4 (December) 2003.
  • “Taking Over Domestic Space: The Battered Women’s Movement and Public Protest, 1971-1985” in Van Grosse and Richard Moser, eds., The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America. Temple University, 2003.

History Courses