Allucquére Rosanne "Sandy" Stone (born )Date of birth is disputed. Encyclopedia of New Media gives 1957. In 1995, Stone told Artforum that as of 1988, "I actually have three ages: 12, 30, and 50." is an American academic theorist, media theorist, author, and performance artist. She is an Associate Professor Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin where she was the Founding Director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) and the New Media Initiative in the department of Radio-TV-Film. Stone has worked in and written about film, music, experimental neurology, writing, engineering, and computer programming.
Stone is transgender and is considered a founder of the academic discipline of transgender studies. On March 5, 2024, she became the first openly transgender woman inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, in a ceremony in New York City. In Stone's acceptance speech she spoke of "Trans vision: To learn to see, and then to be a light by which others can see."
Early life and career
Stone was born in Jersey City, New Jersey around 1936. She is Jewish, descended from European immigrants.Cusset, François (2008). French theory: how Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. transformed the intellectual life of the United States, p. 256. University of Minnesota Press,
Stone has stated that she disliked formal education and preferred auditing classes with university professors whose work she admired. She graduated early from high school and took classes at MIT and worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where she worked on touch-tone system projects. She later graduated from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, receiving a B.A. in 1965.Graduation year is disputed. 1965 in Stone's self-published c.v. ; 1964 in Jones, Steve (2003). Encyclopedia of new media: an essential reference to communication and technology. SAGE,
Recording engineer, science fiction, and computing
In the late 1960s Stone moved to New York City and embarked on a career as a recording engineer, initially at the Record Plant, where she was first hired to repair equipment. Some of Stone's recording work is credited under pseudonyms Sandy Fisher or Doc Storch, including work with Mississippi John Hurt, The Byrds, Van Morrison, and Graham Nash. In 1969, Stone wrote about an April 7 recording session at Record Plant Studios with Jimi Hendrix for Zygote magazine.Shapiro, Harry; Glebbeek, Caesar (1995). Jimi Hendrix, Electric Gypsy. Macmillan, According to journalist David S. Bennahum, Stone "used to wear a long black cape and full beard."Bennahum, David S. (February 1997). Just Gaming: Three Days in the Desert with Jean Baudrillard, DJ Spooky, and the Chance Band. Lingua Franca 7(2):59-63
Beginning transition In 1969, she moved to the West Coast, where she continued to work as a recording engineer for artists including the Grateful Dead.
She also began trying to get information about gender transition. She says that she understood herself to be a girl from a young age, but she did not see Christine Jorgensen as a model. Once in California, seeking resources, she was referred to the National Transsexual Counseling Unit of the San Francisco Police Department. There, a peer counselor named Jan Maxwell, took Stone around the Tenderloin to show her the trans women who "had gotten stuck, people with bad surgery, electrolysis-scarred faces. People who had dead-ended, gone crazy. Unbelievable poverty, despair," then took her back to her office and said "'You still want to do that?'". She did, but a car accident delayed her transition.
In the early 1970s, Stone published several science fiction pieces under the pen name Sandy Fisher in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction.
In 1974 Stone withdrew from mainstream recording, settled in Santa Cruz, California, and publicly transitioned, beginning estrogen and undergoing electrolysis. The name "Allucquére" comes from a character in her friend Robert A. Heinlein's novel, The Puppet Masters (1951). She worked repairing stereos and, after being fired for disclosing her transition, eventually opening her own repair shop, Wizard of Aud. She was recruited to the Olivia Records collective, a popular women's music label, on the recommendation of Leslie Ann Jones.She was Olivia's sound engineer from ca. 1974-1978, recording and mixing all Olivia product during this period.
Attacks by Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire and surgical transition In 1976, the group received a letter from the lesbian feminist scholar Janice Raymond, then a Ph.D. student at Boston College, supervised by Mary Daly. Raymond had sent a draft of a dissertation chapter attacking Stone to the collective "for comment," apparently in anticipation of outing Stone. Raymond appeared unaware that Stone had informed the collective of her transgender status before agreeing to join. The collective did return comments to Raymond, suggesting that her description of transgender people and of Stone's place in and effect on the collective was at odds with the reality of the collective's interaction with Stone. They also defended Stone in feminist publications, writing in an open letter to Sister magazine, “Sandy Stone is a person, not an issue."
Following the book's publication, a group of Chicago-based feminists came to confront the Olivia collective at a community meeting in San Francisco. At the time, no one knew that Stone had not yet had surgery. In the wake of that meeting, the group provided funding so that she could have surgery secretly, immediately before the label began a West Coast tour. She underwent gender reassignment with Donald Laub at the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Program in Palo Alto, though the surgery was conducted at San Mateo General Hospital because of a lawsuit that had stopped gender confirmation surgeries at Stanford Hospital. Stone was forced to stay in the hospital's prison ward.Levy, Dawn (May 3, 2000). Two transsexuals reflect on university's pioneering gender dysphoria program. Stanford Report
On tour, however, Stone received death threats from members of the lesbian separatist group the Gorgons, who came armed to a Seattle concert, though they were stopped by security. Following the threat of a boycott of the label, Stone decided to leave the collective in 1978 and return to Santa Cruz.
Raymond's The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-MaleRaymond, Janice (1979). The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. page 51, Teachers College Press, was published in 1979. Raymond accused Stone by name of plotting to destroy the Olivia Records collective and womanhood in general with "male energy." The book dramatically increased her transphobic attack on Stone: Masculine behavior is notably obtrusive. It is significant that transsexually constructed lesbian feminists have inserted themselves into positions of importance and/or performance in the feminist community. Sandy Stone, the transsexual engineer with Olivia Records, an "all-women" recording company, illustrates this well. Stone is not only crucial to the Olivia enterprise but plays a very dominant role there. The ... visibility he [she] achieved in the aftermath of the Olivia controversy ... only serves to enhance his [her] previously dominant role and to divide women, as men frequently do, when they make their presence necessary and vital to women. As one woman wrote: "I feel raped when Olivia passes off Sandy ... as a real woman. After all his [her] male privilege, is he [she] going to cash in on lesbian feminist culture too?"
In the early 1980s, Stone built a small computer, taught herself programming, and became a freelance coder, eventually becoming recognized as a computer expert.Ulmer, Gregory L. (2005). Electronic monuments. University of Minnesota Press,
Academic career
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. The work was influenced by early versions of Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" and by the turbulent political foment in cultural feminism of that period. It was presented at a conference in 1988, where, Stone recalled, "People stood up and were cheering. I hadn’t seen anything like that, or expected it.” "Empire" was first published in 1991. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle situate Stone's work in the turbulent events of the time as a response to Raymond's attack:Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, op. cit.
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.Carol Riddell's "Divided Sisterhood: A Critical Review of Janice Raymond's The Transsexual Empire, reprinted in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, The Transgender Studies Reader, New York: Routledge 2006. 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."