Triangulating Trans Tidalectics: Decolonizing gendered Embodiment in Chantal Spitz'S "Joséphine"

Eric J. Disbro (he/they || il/iel) is Assistant Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. An interdisciplinary comparatist of global francophone island regions, their primary areas of research and teaching interest include literatures of the Western Indian Ocean, Oceania, and the Caribbean as well as transnational queer and trans studies, maritime ecocriticism, care ethics, theories of creolization, and decoloniality. Their current book project, Terraqueous Intimacies: Queer and Trans Crosscurrents in Francophone Archipelagic Literatures, examines queer and trans representation in Indian Ocean and Oceanian literatures for the ways queer and trans resilience draws strength from symbiotic care webs found in nature and offers coalitional models of intimate community politics for an Anthropocentric world.

Dr. Disbro’s work has been published or is forthcoming from journals including Women in French Studies, The French Review, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, ASAP/Journal, Interculturel Francophonies, and the Australian Journal of French Studies on topics as varied as the overlap between coral reef ecology and transfeminine embodiment, trans-inclusive literary pedagogy, the literary oeuvre of francophone writers Ananda Devi and Chantal T. Spitz, creolization’s effects on the processes of writing and art-making, and interviews with practicing authors and artists. His forthcoming book chapter “Francophone Trans of Color Critique is an Archipelago,” features in the volume Women, Theory, Praxis, Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements (ed. J. Couti & A.-D. Curtius, Liverpool UP, 2025) and outlines some transoceanic foundations for linking the francophone philosophical origins in trans of color studies with the contemporary archives of queer and trans creations from the various regions of the French empire.

Among Dr. Disbro’s works-in-progress are papers on the transfeminine photography and portraiture of artists Kehinde Wiley, Namsa Leuba, Yuki Kihara, and Kama La Mackerel for their resistant aesthetics against hydrocolonial regimes of gender in visual media as they have been cemented by canonical artists such as Paul Gaugin, and, most recently, reflections on the media rage incited by the gender-critical movement around Algerian boxer Imane Khelif as evidence of the ever-commanding civilizing arm of French colonialism.

Prior to their arrival at Duke, Dr. Disbro was Visiting Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Williams College. They received their dual-title Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the Pennsylvania State University in 2023.