The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto In 1983 Stone befriended cultural theorist
Donna Haraway, a faculty member in the
History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz; Haraway was in the process of writing the watershed essay "
A Cyborg Manifesto." Stone was a student in the program from 1987-1993 and produced "The
Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto" as a first-year project.
Susan Stryker and
Stephen Whittle situate Stone's work in the turbulent events of the time as a response to Raymond's attack: Stone exacts her revenge more than a decade later, not by waging an anti-feminist counterattack on Raymond, but by undermining the foundationalist assumptions that support Raymond's narrower concept of womanhood, and by claiming a speaking position for transsexuals that cannot be automatically dismissed as damaged, deluded, second-rate, or somehow inherently compromised. An important point of the essay was that transgender persons were ill-served by hiding their status, and that coming out—which Stone called "reading oneself aloud"—would inevitably lead to self-empowerment. Thus "The
Empire Strikes Back" re-articulated what was at the time a radical gay-lesbian political statement into a transgender voice. During this period, mainstream gay and lesbian activists generally suppressed
transgender issues and visible transgender activists, fearing that they would frighten the uncertain and still shaky liberal base during a delicate period of consolidation. "The
Empire Strikes Back" galvanized young transgender scholars and focused their attention on the need for self-assertion within a largely reactionary institutional structure. "The
Empire Strikes Back" later became the center of an extensive citation network of transgender academics and a foundational work for transgender researchers and theorists. Stryker and Whittle, writing in
The Transgender Studies Reader, refer to "The
Empire Strikes Back" as: the protean text from which contemporary transgender studies emerged ... In the wake of (the) article, a gradual but steady body of new academic and creative work by transgender people has gradually taken shape, which has enriched virtually every academic and artistic discipline with new critical perspectives on gender.
Graduate school and dissertation At Haraway's suggestion, Stone visited
University of California, San Diego campus as an exchange student in the newly formed Science Studies program. Following a dispute between progressive and conservative faculty factions, Stone was offered a job as Instructor in the Department of Sociology, teaching courses in sociology, anthropology, political science, English, communications, and the experimental program "The Making of the Modern World." Stone received her doctorate in 1993. Her dissertation, "Presence", which Haraway supervised, was published in 1995 by
MIT Press as
The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Stone described the work as "creat(ing) a discourse which contains all the elements of the original discourse but which is quite different from it ... remember that at heart I am a narrator, a shameless teller of stories."
UT Austin In 1992, she took an appointment as an assistant professor at the
University of Texas, Austin. While professor at UT Austin, she concurrently served as the Wolfgang Kohler Professor of Media and Performance at the
European Graduate School EGS, a senior artist at the
Banff Centre, and Humanities Research Institute Fellow at the
University of California, Irvine.
ACTLab Beginning in 1993, Stone established the New Media program she named ACTLab (Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory) in the Radio-Television-Film department. This work, and research in virtual communities, social software, and novel methods of presenting academic topics, drew wide attention, and contributed to the establishment and legitimation of what is now generally called New Media Art.
Protests against Stone & post-tenure conditions Stone's work and presence in the RTF department has been bitterly contested by powerful conservative faculty members, who have repeatedly tried to remove or marginalize her. In 1998 this small but vocal group issued a negative departmental report recommending that Stone be denied tenure. The university overruled this report, citing Stone's contributions to multiple fields and reaffirming its commitment to original or unusual scholarship. Granting Stone tenure had the negative effect of provoking attacks on her work and credibility by powerful conservative faculty within the RTF department, which for years has responded to inquiries with the statement that there is no New Media program or program called ACTLab within the department. (Based on university course listings and rosters, as of 2007 there were approximately 70 ACTLab students in active courses, 400 former students, and 2500 student webpages on the ACTLab website. The program attracts students from a broad range of departments and from other institutions.) In a 2006 talk at Arizona State University, Stone compared the RTF department's attempts to erase her work and presence to previous efforts by conservative administrators to deny voice to any unfamiliar or emergent disciplines or unusual people, and said it was merely to be expected. In the 1990s she gave several highly publicized interviews during which she suggested that the era of academic scholarship, as the term was generally understood, was over: I think that in most ways the university as we now know it is already dead. But the present university system has a nervous system like a dinosaur -- when you chop off the tail it takes awhile for the head to realize that something's gone wrong. In 1999, through electronic media such as the Web, a great deal of information is available through other sources than books. Universities can go on pretending for a long time that they are still the major sources of knowledge in our culture because in a sense they are the final arbiters of what the contents of books mean - even though most people are getting their information from somewhere else, and assigning their own meanings to what they read and see. Since that time, although Stone continued to tour extensively, to present "theoryperformances" and formal theatrical performances, and to address her work to a wide variety of audiences across broad sampling of disciplines and skills, she has published less and less in print journals. This reached the extent that a group of her students took up the practice of recording, transcribing and printing her in-class lectures for their own use.
Retirement from academia In 2010 Stone retired from her position at the University of Texas, becoming Professor Emerita and continuing her ACTLab work outside of UT Austin by launching several programs based on the ACTLab model, most notably the ACTLab@EGS program at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. The ACTLab pedagogical model brought her international recognition; subsequently the ACTLab framework for education in the arts and technology has been adopted by many other programs such as the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the New Media Innovation Lab at Arizona State University at Tempe.
Performance art, theater, and film In 1999, she appeared in
Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities, a film by
Monika Treut featuring Texas Tomboy,
Susan Stryker, and
Hida Viloria, a group of artists in
San Francisco who live between the poles of conventional gender identities. In 2006, Stone began touring a theatrical performance titled
The Neovagina Monologues, modeled on the work of
Spalding Gray, although the title is a tribute to a work by
Eve Ensler. == Influence ==