Vital Perspectives with Mary Zaborskis: Queer Childhoods

The Vital Perspectives on Healthcare and Science series engages with some of the most pressing public health issues of our time, in a regular public forum catalyzed by a book. For the November edition, we are thrilled to feature Dr. Mary Zaborskis, author of Queer Childhoods: Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability, in conversation with Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson.
Mary Zaborskis is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Gender Studies at Penn State Harrisburg. She received her PhD in English with a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the community at Penn State Harrisburg, she was a Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Mary works at the intersections of queer, critical race, and childhood studies in twentieth-century and contemporary American literature and culture. Her book, Queer Childhoods: Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability (New York University Press, 2024) explores how children’s genders and sexualities were managed in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century boarding schools for marginalized populations. She was the recipient of Penn State's Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity 2022 Academic Achievement Award and Harrisburg's 2023 Faculty Diversity Award.
Mary’s work has appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, WSQ, Journal of Homosexuality, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her work on Native American boarding schools, published in the special "Child Now" issue of GLQ, received the Crompton-Noll Prize for Best Article in LGBTQ Studies at the 2019 Modern Language Association convention. She serves on the Executive Committee of the Childhood and Youth Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association and is chair of the National Women’s Studies Association’s Feminist Pedagogy Interest Group. Mary is a series editor at Public Books, where she edits the “Shoptalk” and “Quizzical” features. She also serves on the Steering Committee of the LGBT Center of Central PA's History Project. Her teaching interests include queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, Native American studies, ethnic U.S. literature, media studies, and popular culture.

Jules Gill-Peterson is a scholar of transgender history and the history of sexuality, focusing on racial histories of sex, gender, and trans embodiment spanning both institutional and vernacular science and medicine.
Gill-Peterson is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), recipient of a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and the Children’s Literature Association Book Award. The book was the first to challenge the myth that transgender children are a new phenomenon in the twenty-first century. Drawing on a century’s worth of medical archival evidence, Histories of the Transgender Child establishes not just that trans children have a verifiable history, but that their presumed gender plasticity was in fact central to the development and racialization of transgender medicine. Gill-Peterson has been featured and written about the histories comprising the book in The New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post’s The Lily, and CNN.
She is currently at work on a book project entitled “A Trans History of DIY” that reframes post-1945 transgender history by strategically foregoing the medical archive, turning to the “do-it-yourself” (DIY) to illuminate long illegible trans histories at the margins of the social, without institutional medicine, legality, or state recognition. While DIY has been the primary way that most trans people have transitioned since the mid twentieth century, it has received almost no scholarly attention, in part because it lacks the status of expert knowledge. The book takes an expansive approach to the concept as a vernacular science of gender, reconstructing a range of individual and collective forms of survival and transition in the United States from the 1940s to 1990s.
Gill-Peterson serves as a General Co-Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. She is the recipient of research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chair in Transgender Studies at the University of Victoria, and the Kinsey Institute for Sexological Research. She was awarded a Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award from the University of Pittsburgh in 2020.

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