Dr. Lieks Hettinga is an Assistant Professor in Gender Studies at Utrecht University. Their research is situated at intersections of transgender studies, disability studies, critical theory, and visual culture. Their research interests include trans-crip affinities in critiques of (neo)liberalism and debates about how race and disability mediate and/or trouble contemporary Western consolidations of ‘transgender’ as an identity category. 

They are currently preparing a monograph titled Appearing Differently: Trans-Crip Aesthetics of Refusal. The monograph traces minoritarian aesthetic practices that refuse the ‘evidentiary’ function of the body. Thinking through various aesthetic practices, including sculpture, video, performance, photography, and installation, the monograph scrutinizes how twenty-first century artists and activists across Euro-American contexts move away from historically constituted medicalized or fetishized ways of seeing transgender and disabled bodies. Faced with the precaritization of livelihood and neoliberal fictions of diversity, contemporary transgender and disability politics has a vexed relationship to visibility. The artistic and activist practices under review here refuse cultural representation as a site of emancipatory politics and instead mobilize aesthetic strategies that require us to attend to trans/crip embodiment in more nuanced ways. By mobilizing an optic of trans-crip critique, the monograph works against the disavowal of disability within transgender studies, and shows how aesthetic practices theorize the mediation of transness by disability. 

Lieks Hettinga is developing a new research project titled ‘Trans Against Common Sense’, which analyzes the political struggle over transgender liberation in the context of anti-gender movements, rising fascisms, and liberal eugenics. Drawing on trans theory, materialist aesthetic theory and feminist affect theory, the project examines ‘common sense’ as an aesthetic-political terrain that negotiates gender, disability, health, and racial nationhood, and explores how artists and activists develop alternative grammars of liberation. The project focusses on the context of the Netherlands from a transnational perspective.