Amy Marvin
LightNews LightNews
amymarvin.bsky.social
Amy Marvin
@amymarvin.bsky.social
1.3K followers 660 following 670 posts
fascinating philosopher & lgbtq studies prof / writing a book on ruinous obsessions with trans people (under contract w/ Oxford University Press)

essays: https://philpeople.org/profiles/amy-marvin/
Posts Replies Media Videos
amymarvin.bsky.social
Morning view from my office. Guess this is my new “sunny weather”
College campus in the snow with pathways, a stone building, and fall trees
November 11, 2025 at 1:22 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
Excited that Google AI has decided to memorialize my status as a quiz show host
Text from Google AI: Academic and writer: Marvin holds a PhD in feminist philosophy and has published in journals such as Transgender Studies Quarterly, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, and Hypatia. Her poetry has appeared in Prolit, Wax Nine, and Protean. Social media presence: She is active on Twitter as @amyrmarv. Cultural commentary: She gained wider recognition for a viral meme she created that used an anime image to comment on the backlash against transgender visibility. Other work: Marvin has held various jobs, including serving as an adjunct professor, librarian, and quiz show host.
November 8, 2025 at 5:15 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
Excited that the local library had this one on display for Halloween while I’m in the middle of planning for a Queer & Trans Fiction class
Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin
October 30, 2025 at 9:28 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
Excited to participate in some trans thinking across Buffalo and Syracuse this week!
https://thebuffalohive.com/event/buffalo-film-i-saw-the-tv-glow-screening-talkback-at-hallwalls/
October 26, 2025 at 12:58 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
Pulled out this record to celebrate finally watching Tár
Record: Mahler is Heavy, featuring Mahler’s 7th and 4th. Has a cool psychedelic owl for some reason
October 5, 2025 at 7:24 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
@echosequence.space playing a live score for the silent film Metropolis! (sound on)
July 27, 2025 at 2:32 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
Today in the archives: article about a trans woman and a trans man who wanted to get married in 1973 but couldn’t!
Aug 1973 article: Sex change patients in love, can’t wed
July 4, 2025 at 11:09 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
read a positive feature article by NYT about a trans woman today (it was from 1974)
Feature from NYT in 1974 titled “James and Jan: A remarkable explorer in the passage from one sex to another.”
July 4, 2025 at 12:29 AM
amymarvin.bsky.social
From the archive today: Viviane Namaste on trans visibility from 2014
Poster: Our existence isn’t visible. There is no trans visibility. Most of the ones who manage to get through well end up disappearing into anonymity. And so there was no one. Visibility is a rite of passage. In other words, the more we are visible, the more we can respond, the more we are diverse, the better we can explain and the more we can move forward.
July 3, 2025 at 11:48 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
Here’s a sample article from 1972 courtesy Reed Erickson news clippings
Article: Is Sex-Changed Teacher Harmful to Pupils?
July 2, 2025 at 9:16 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
Visiting the X Mansion today
At the Hatley Castle
July 1, 2025 at 9:50 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
just received an extremely rude Zillow email
Zillow email saying “A Syracuse home for you: 235 Male Ave.”
June 25, 2025 at 1:41 AM
amymarvin.bsky.social
We conclude that trans cinema as a collective practice produces spaces that push back against efforts by cis society to destroy trans lives. This is something we experienced when co-hosting the films in our local community and during our collaborative writing process!
By encoding tactical interventions against pervasive atmospheres of conversion, trans films such as I Saw the TV Glow and The People’s Joker reveal those cracks in cis-hegemonic structures of gender surveillance and control wherein trans space and sociality are made possible. Vera Drew emphasizes that the production of The People’s Joker opened up a space of performance beyond self-hatred and “irony poisoning” to include community and friendship (Drew 2024). Jack Haven, who played Maddy in I Saw the TV Glow, likewise found that its production fostered trans sociality beyond the film. They remark that to be trans in this world, “You just have to be around people who remind you that your reality is real or otherwise you go crazy, and your lips get chapped.” Haven even recited the planetarium speech while starting to take T. (Schoenbrun and Haven 2024). Creating and sharing trans films has been an ongoing collective project for decades (Horak 2021). Crafting these films not only throws cis atmospheres of conversion into relief but also becomes a way for trans people to find each other and dissolve the Silenic imperative together. We write this essay to you now through the spaces enabled by these films. Trans films offer an opportunity to program, screen, hold discussions, and co-write in a way that contests a space of cinema where reductive trans lives are reduced to a predictable cycle of commodification, praise, and backlash à la Emilia Perez.
June 18, 2025 at 5:29 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
Isobel draws from practice theory to argue that I Saw the TV Glow & The People's Joker stage anti-trans technocracy and social tactics against it! In this section we also discuss failures of t4t as staged in both films - trans sociality opens up options for the characters and creates new problems.
Within the narrative of The People’s Joker, the strictly gender-policed structure of comedy and of the city itself, maintained by Batman’s panoptic network of surveillance drones, represents a clear relationship between the deployment of institutional strategies and the maintenance of a totalizing atmosphere of conversion. It is only within the space of the anti-comedy club, itself a temporal rupture within Batman’s otherwise complete control of the city’s geographic and conceptual space, that Joker is initially able to practice comedy as a woman and as a clown. Her life as a trans woman is made possible through the tactical exploitation of a crack within Batman’s strategic surveillance network, and by leveraging that possibility she can become Joker the Harlequin, contest Batman’s power, and ultimately disperse the atmosphere of conversion that suffuses Gotham. In I Saw the TV Glow, the suburbs function as a panoptic space of control that mirrors the Gotham of The People’s Joker. Instead of drones, Mr. Melancholy has placed Owen and Maddy within a snow globe that is constantly under his surveillance. Owen and Maddy’s lives in the suburbs are constrained by normative structures that exude pervasive atmospheres of conversion. In escaping the suburbia, Maddy recognizes it as a repressive Midnight Realm controlled by the villainous Mr. Melancholy, hiding the true reality of The Pink Opaque behind a projection of Mr. Melancholy’s power. They can only introduce this truth by bringing Owen to the Double Lunch, a music venue on the outskirts of town that, like the anti-comedy club of The People’s Joker, serves as a counter-hegemonic trans space that exists temporarily outside of cis atmospheres of conversion. In contrast to Joker the Harlequin, Owen rejects the possibility of trans life that is presented to them and returns to the Midnight Realm of the suburbs.
June 18, 2025 at 5:16 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
We point to The People's Joker & I Saw the TV Glow as films that directly grapple with the systematic effort by cis society to destroy trans lives. Both films also stand out by pointing out that this is not inevitable! One thing I love about this essay is that we also discuss music in the films.
In contrast with Joker the Harlequin’s ironic dissociation, which ultimately leads her to scorn the world in the guise of the explosive trans woman critic, Owen repeatedly attempts to forget that they could pierce the fog of the cis suburbs. Once Owen has abandoned escaping with Maddy, their only options are screaming, apologizing, and cutting open their own chest to become temporarily mesmerized by the static glow within. The horror of cis society is living within a life that is not really your life, sapped of all that could make life worth living and blocked from all meaningful connections. The soundtrack repeats, “It's the end of the world / And I'm riding around” (Florist 2024). In one film, the detachment from cis society caused by its atmosphere becomes a way to encounter it as laughable. In another, the horror of cis society clouds out the kinds of thinking, acting, and connecting with others that would make life livable. And yet, the atmospheres of conversion that make up the worlds of The People’s Joker and I Saw the TV Glow reveal that they are not totalizing, even as their reach is horrifying and capable of ruining lives.
June 18, 2025 at 5:10 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
We start by arguing that a core imperative of cis society is (1) trans people should not exist and (2) trans people should stop existing as soon as possible. We then expand on work by @floralashes.bsky.social to argue that anti-trans conversion practices are part of the atmosphere of cis society!
For trans people, the Silenus problem is mundane. Trans life should be capable of flourishing. Yet the world responds to trans life with hostility while trans people are systematically discouraged from transitioning and coerced into the closet. Cis civil society is structured around the maxim that it is best to not be trans, and second best to cease being trans as soon as possible. This decree is not an echo upon the woodland winds. It is instilled in the practice of everyday life, including its norms, laws, and public policies. We propose that anti-trans conversion is not only a set of distinct clinical and religious practices targeting individuals, but also part of the structure of cis civil society as it is buttressed upon the denial, degradation, and expulsion of trans life. While discrete practices are harmful and can mark escalation against trans lives when tolerated by state and professional organizations, they are a manifestation of deeper social tendencies towards anti-trans conversion.
June 18, 2025 at 5:04 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
New essay: "Atmospheres of Conversion" - We argue that trans films (The People's Joker & I Saw the TV Glow) frame anti-trans conversion as central to cis society and that creating trans art spaces is one way to fight back! Written with @echosequence.space Preprint here: philpapers.org/rec/MARAOC-16
Atmospheres of Conversion: Trans Cinema, Tactics, and t4t Sociality Amy Marvin and Isobel Bess Author preprint. Forthcoming in philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Transcontinental Feminism. Please cite the final published version when available. Abstract: This essay draws from recent trans films to map a social atmosphere of anti-trans conversion beyond the discrete set of social, medical, and psychiatric practices normally discussed in this context. To explain this phenomenon, we introduce a permeating organizational maxim of cis society we refer to as the Silenic imperative: that it is best to not live as trans, and second best to cease living as trans as soon as possible. The People’s Joker and I Saw the TV Glow depict this permeating atmosphere of conversion within mass culture, constituted by and constitutive of spaces in which trans existence is systematically threatened and repressed. By staging atmospheres of conversion, both films likewise stage tactics of trans resistance that open new spaces for trans sociality. We consider how these films frame attempts to navigate and resist atmospheres of conversion, considering trans-for-trans (t4t) sociality as a site of both escape and failure. We conclude by considering trans cinema itself as a site of tactics against atmospheres of anti-trans conversion in our own world and as a source for life-sustaining sociality. This is especially important within the contemporary atmosphere of cis society and its attempts to suffuse and snuff out all trans life. Keywords: Atmospheres; Conversion Therapy; Queer and Trans Film; Practice Theory; t4t “This isn’t the Midnight Realm, Maddy, it’s just the suburbs.” -Owen, I Saw the TV Glow
June 18, 2025 at 4:58 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
the works cited list for this essay is very powerful
Works cited list Works cited list Works cited list Works cited list
June 12, 2025 at 9:48 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
having a blast with Silksong this summer, my pick for game of the year
CD case for SimAnt
June 11, 2025 at 12:52 AM
amymarvin.bsky.social
Excited about having a physical copy of Gendertrash from Hell!! The book is a larger size which works great with the zine illustrations.
Gendertrash from Hell edited by Mirha-Soleil Ross
May 31, 2025 at 9:32 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
Excited to be part of this published conversation on feminist philosophy and film in the context of Taylor Rogers's work! I focus on feminist clowning: www.pdcnet.org/symposium/co...
Text: Amy Marvin (AM): While watching NOA I was most drawn to the sections featuring performer Pam Chermansky, who I later found out is trained in miming and clowning. While humour studies often gets stuck on disembodied analyses of joke texts and scripts, some scholars highlight the use of bodily movement as part of the art of jest, including embodied intelligence, excessive materiality, and unruly gendered performance. More recently, practising clowns and scholars such as Margaret J. Irving and Jacqueline Russell have discussed the embodied practice of clowns as capable of disrupting sexist standards in public while putting the gendered body in play as a “site of agency and experimentation.” I think clowning, while undertheorized within the Venn diagram of philosophy and feminist theory, represents an exciting area for thinking about the body, relationality, and the larger structures these are embedded within— and NOA distinctly brings this front and centre. We open with Chermansky in her home, alone, engaged in the motions of everyday living: washing the utensils, watering her beautifully tended plants, resting, taking notes, and picking up the newspaper. During her bubble bath, the foam becomes a beard. She then faces the camera, cycling through emotions at a slower and then more rapid pace: triumph or joy or joviality, an attempt to fly that is held back by collapse or breakage, a posture of defiance or anger, and then one of fear or self-protection. The music is grief-stricken, with a song about breaking down transitioning into slow, sombre cello phrases played by Shannon Hayden, which fade out as Chermansky kneels upon her floor. Photo of a woman clown with a mustache made of bubbles. We revisit Chermansky several tracks later beneath a blue sky wearing her patchwork clown outfit beset by woven butterflies, vines, a tiny snake, and flowers, with a cap resembling a non -human animal’s ears and horns. Her motions are repeated, but different. We are not stepping in the same river twice. The flapping motions do not break—they stay cheerful, lofty, and light. She pins a flower on you and brings the collaborators, along with the viewer, to a collective dance. I’d like to know more about these dynamics. How do you under- stand this repetition of Chermansky’s motions across such a diverse range of activities and affects? What were your thoughts on staging grief alongside comic practices? How do you think this impacts the kinds of relationality and world-travelling you explore in the film?
May 21, 2025 at 6:23 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
just found out about the octobass
guy playing an octobass; it is very large
May 20, 2025 at 9:26 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
open for business
large red pitcher plant pitcher surrounded by older pitchers
May 14, 2025 at 4:59 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
currently reading
Book: Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation by Juliana Gleeson
May 8, 2025 at 10:46 PM
amymarvin.bsky.social
left my final comment in the Daily Nous as a professional philosopher
Meletus: I think there’s another layer that hasn’t been considered about why we might want to mistrust Byrne’s involvement (if that is confirmed). We’re assuming that there is a category of person called “philosopher” such that they should be formally recognized as having prestige or knowledge. However, the ontological status of “philosopher” seems like quite an assumption and means so many things that I’m not sure it would hold up to scrutiny! I also hear that they are sometimes a threat to students so we may not want to trust their motives, and it seems to me that there is not any established evidence as to whether they live happy, healthy, and productive lives. Sometimes philosophers will respond that they have existed for a long time, but it doesn’t seem obvious to me because the definition is always changing and we can’t just say talking to others in Ancient Greece is the same thing as typing an “analytic” essay on your computer! I should add, it is apparent a lot of philosophy-identified professors have developed arm, neck, and back pain due to their choice to pursue such a lifestyle. Meletus: I’m hoping that after this report is finalized HHS runs another report to see if we should continue sanctioning this philosopher movement. Just to clarify, I don’t think that it should be illegal to call yourself a philosopher! I just don’t think we should socially formalize such a practice and push this self-identification on other people (and especially not on impressionable young people). I admit that Republicans in the United States do seem to occasionally say inflammatory things about philosophers, but that doesn’t mean we should just ignore an objective review even if it suggests they should become welders instead! You couldn’t fault a proper Sociologist if they participated in the report because we need experts to collaborate with the Trump administration and make sure it doesn’t get too biased. I know that this goes against the usual echo chamber, but I think it’s due time someone asked real questions about this recent social phenomenon.
May 7, 2025 at 12:21 PM