Myrl Beam
Associate Professor and Chair, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Queer and trans social movements, critical race theory, affect, political economy, oral history, and feminist and queer theory
Old Main 310
[email protected]
Myrl Beam is an Associate Professor and Chair of the WGSS Department at Macalester College. Beam was an Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, on Scholarly Leave from 2019-2021 while he serves as the Oral History Fellow at the Tretter Trans Oral History Project, a program of the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota Andersen Special Collection Library. Beam received his PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2014. His work focuses on queer and trans movements, racialized projects of inclusion and normativity, and the affective economies of neoliberal capitalism. He is the author of Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Most recently, his work has appeared in the edited volume Queer Activism After Marriage Equality (Routledge, 2019). Beam also co-hosts, with writer and activist Andrea Jenkins, the podcast Transcripts, which shares the stories collected by the Tretter Trans Oral History Project with a wider audience. In addition to his scholarly work, Beam is active in queer and trans left movements, specifically around issues of prison abolition, homelessness, and supporting the leadership of trans youth in movements for justice.