Queerness on the Move: Tracing Black Trans Histories

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Thursday, October 29th, 2026 | 7:00 PM EST

Join us on the evening of October 29th for our 2026 Charlotte Cushman Society Lecture, featuring Candice Lyons.

Throughout the era of U.S. chattel slavery, bondspeople consistently subverted enslavers’ expectations, laying claim to their own labor, movement, bodies, and genders. Many of these figures formulated and executed elaborate plans to evade bondage, at times utilizing cross gender modes of escape in order to do so. In her talk, Dr. Candice
Lyons maps these histories of defiance, drawing on the archives of runaway slave advertisements published in Southern newspapers prior to Emancipation. These notices document the unsanctioned mobility of enslaved people and offer insight into the multiple ways Black gender was created and expressed in the years preceding the conclusion of the American Civil War. Lyons invites us to reframe self-emancipation as more than a rejection of captivity, but also a rejection of slavery’s imposed gender norms.

Candice Lyons is the Black Star Assistant Professor in Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her forthcoming manuscript, tentatively titled Archival Shouts: Queer Re-Examinations of U.S. Chattel Slavery, traces the queer gender and sexual practices of enslaved and free Black people living in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century United States. Her 2021 Feminist Studies article “Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space” is the winner of the 2020 Feminist Studies Graduate Student Award, and her work has also been published in The Journal of Southern History, Souls, and the public history site Not Even Past.

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