Associate Professor
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Advisor, LGBTQ Studies Minor
Jointly Appointed to Integrative Studies (IRIS)

PhD, American Studies, University at Buffalo

Email: [email protected]
Phone: (616) 331-8216
Office: 211 Lake Ontario Hall
Visit Professor Keegan's Professional Page                                       

Classes:
IDS/WGS 180: Gender and Sexuality in Comics
WGS 200: Intro to Gender Studies
WGS 224: Intro to LGBTQ Studies
WGS 255: Gender and Popular Culture
WGS 365: Queer Theory
WGS 495: WGS Capstone
INT 201: Diversity in the United States
INT 325: LGBTQ Identities

Directed Readings Supervised:
WGS 399: Queer Theory 2 (W 2020)
WGS 499: Advanced Research in Trans Studies (W 2019)
HNR 499: Queer Video Game Studies (W 2019)
WGS 399: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Horror Cinema (F 2018)
WGS 399: Trans Studies (F 2017)
CFV 399: Queer Theory and Film Genres (S 2017)
WGS 399: Latinx Queer/Trans Theories (W 2017)
WGS 399: Transgender of Color Masculinities (F 2016)
WGS 399: Queer/Trans Disability and Trauma Studies (F 2016)
HNR 499: Critical Trans Studies and Policy (W 2014)

Bio: 
Professor Keegan is a cultural theorist of transgender/queer media and literature. He is primarily interested in the aesthetic forms trans and queer people have created and how those forms shape our popular culture. At GVSU, he teaches courses in queer, transgender, and feminist theories, LGBTQ studies, popular and visual culture, and American studies. He is a Capricorn sun/Gemini moon/Scorpio rising, and a PlayStation gamer who loves cats.

Professor Keegan is Special Editor for Arts and Culture at Transgender Studies Quarterly and Senior Co-chair of the Queer and Trans Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. In 2019, he was awarded the National Women’s Studies Association’s Trans Caucus prize for best essay in transgender studies as well as GVSU’s Distinguished Early Career Scholar Award.

Professor Keegan’s book, Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender (University of Illinois Press, 2018) is the first academic analysis of the world’s most influential transgender media producers, the Wachowski sisters. Offering new readings of the Wachowskis’ visual works from Bound (1996) to Sense8 (2015-18), the book traces how their cinema invented a trans imaginary of the senses that has disrupted our conventional schemas of race, gender, space, and time.

Books:  
Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018.

Edited Volumes:
Somatechnics. Special Issue: “Cinematic Bodies.” Co-edited with Laura Horak and Eliza Steinbock. Vol. 8.1 (March 2018).

Recent Peer-Reviewed Articles:
2018  “Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer Studies Now?” Journal of Homosexuality.

2017  “History, Disrupted: The Aesthetic Gentrification of Queer and Trans Cinema After the Recession.” Social Alternatives 35.3 (Spring 2017): 50-6.

2016  “Revisitation: A Trans Phenomenology of the Media Image.” MedieKultur 61.1-5 (Fall 2016): 26-41.

2016  “On Being the Object of Compromise.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3.1-2 (Spring 2016): 150-7.

2016  “Emptying the Future: Queer Melodramatics and Negative Utopia on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture 1.1. (Jan. 2016): 9-22.

2013  “Queer Sensations: Postwar American Melodrama and the Crisis of Queer Juvenility," Thymos 7.2 (Fall 2013): 115-29.

2013  “Moving Bodies: Sympathetic Migrations in Transgender Narrativity," Genders 55 (Spring 2013).

Recent Peer Reviewed Book Chapters:
In Press
2021  “Mirror Scene: Transgender Aesthetics in The Matrix and Boys Don’t Cry.” In The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema. Eds. Ronald Gregg and Amy Villarejo (Oxford: Oxford UP).

Published
2020  “Transgender Studies, or How to Do Things with Trans*.” In The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies. Ed. Siobhan B. Somerville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 66-78.

2017  “Nothing to Hide: Selfies, Sex, and the Visibility Dilemma in Trans Male Online Cultures.” Co-authored with T. Raun. In Sex in the Digital Age. Eds. Paul G. Nixon and Isabel K. Dusterhoft (New York: Routledge, 2017), 89-100.

2015  “California and the Queer Utopian Imagination." In A History of California Literature. Ed. Blake Allmendinger (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), 327-42.

Essays, Reviews, and Roundtables:
In Press
2021  “Phenomenology.” The SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies, eds. Genny Beemyn and Abbie Goldberg.

2020  “Against Queer Theory.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 7.3.                          

2020  “Trans*.” In Keywords for Comics Studies, Eds. Ramzi Fawaz, Shelley Streeby, and Deborah Whaley (New York: NYU Press).

2020  “In Praise of the Bad Transgender Object: Sleepaway Camp.” FLOW: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture 27.0.

Published
2020  “In Praise of the Bad Transgender Object: The Silence of the Lambs.” FLOW: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture 26.8 (May 2020).

2019  “In Praise of the Bad Transgender Object: Rocky Horror.” FLOW: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture 26.3 (November 2019).

2019  Review of Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58.4 (July 2019): 183-86.

2018  “Ecstatic Passages: Transgender Sensation in The Matrix.” In Z Filmtidsskrift, special issue, “TranZ.” Ed. Gunnar Iverson.

2018  “Cinematic/Trans*/Bodies Now (And Then, and To Come).” With Laura Horak and Eliza Steinbock. Somatechnics 8.1 (March 2018): 1-13.

2017  “Sense8 Roundtable.” With Moya Bailey, micha cárdenas, Laura Horak, Lokeilani Kaimana, Genevieve Newman, Roxanne Samer, Raffi Sarkissian. Spectator 37.2 (Fall 2017): 74-88.

2016  “Junk Politics: The Representational Economy of Trans Male Genitalia.” In Below the Belt: Genital Talk by Men of Trans Experience. Ed. Trystan T. Cotten. Transgress Press, 2016. 1-13.

2016  “Tongues Without Bodies: The Wachowskis’ Sense8.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3.3-4 (Fall 2016). 605-10.

2015  “Looking Transparent.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 16.2 (May 2015): 137-8.

2015  “Horizontal Inheritance: Orphan Black’s Transgender Genealogy.” InMediaRes. April 15, 2015.