About

Erica Rand is Professor of Art and Visual Culture and of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College, with a focus in queer and trans studies, and was the inaugural Faculty Fellow at the Center for Inclusive Teaching and Learning (CITL). She is the author of Barbie’s Queer Accessories, The Ellis Island Snow Globe, Red Nails Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice, and The Small Book of Hip Checks On Queer Gender, Race, and Writing. She has served on the editorial boards of Radical Teacher and Salacious and co-edits the series Writing Matters! for Duke University Press. In a piece for Global Sports Matters called “Skating Out of the Binary” and in “At the Ice Rink, My Feet End in Knives,” she describes training in a gender non-conforming adult figure skating pairs team, with pairs partner Anna Kellar of the Future of Figure Skating podcast, as they participate in growing efforts to expand inclusion in the sport—a sport mired in racialized heteronormativity that is also being transformed through critically engaged practice and institutional change.

That skating, writing, and activism feed into Skating Away From the Binary, a new book of short essays and exercises coming out this fall in the Forerunners series at the University of Minnesota press. Grounded in lively descriptions of the pair’s training, the book invites readers to think about both big-picture forces and the devil in the details, about both the ingredients of gender traditionalism and the pleasures of moving otherwise. It makes a compelling case for transforming figure skating in particular, for fighting exclusionary, including trans-hostile, practices in sport, and for working toward a world where all people can move with joy in the skins, bodies, and identities we inhabit.