Sandy Stone (artist)

Allucquére Rosanne "Sandy" Stone (born c. 1936 ) is an American academic theorist, media theorist, author, and performance artist.

She is an Associate Professor Emeritus 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.

Stone was born in Jersey City, New Jersey around 1936 with the Hebrew name of Zelig Ben-Nausaan Cohen.

Stone is Jewish, descended from European immigrants.

Stone has stated that she disliked formal education and preferred auditing classes with university professors whose work she admired.

She has stated she worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, then worked odd jobs to support her own research.

The name "Allucquére" comes from a character in her friend Robert A. Heinlein's novel, The Puppet Masters (1951).

Later she became a member of the Olivia Records collective, a popular women's music label, and began collaboration within lesbian feminist circles.

In the late 1960s Stone moved to New York City and embarked on a career as a recording engineer, initially on the East Coast, and later on the West Coast.

She later graduated from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, receiving a B.A. in 1965.

In 1969, Stone wrote about an April 7 recording session at Record Plant Studios with Jimi Hendrix for Zygote magazine.

According to journalist David S. Bennahum, Stone "used to wear a long black cape and full beard."

In the early 1970s, Stone published several science fiction pieces under the pen name Sandy Fisher in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy magazine.

In 1974 Stone withdrew from mainstream recording, settled in Santa Cruz, California, and underwent gender reassignment with Donald Laub at the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Program in Palo Alto.

She was Olivia's sound engineer from ca. 1974-1978, recording and mixing all Olivia product during this period.

In 1976, prior to publication, Raymond had sent a draft of the chapter attacking Stone to the Olivia 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 and of Stone's place in and effect on the collective was at odds with the reality of the collective's interaction with Stone.

Raymond responded by increasing the virulence of her transphobic attack on Stone in the published version of the manuscript:

"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 [sic] achieved in the aftermath of the Olivia controversy ... only serves to enhance his [sic] 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 [sic] male privilege, is he [sic] going to cash in on lesbian feminist culture too?'"

The collective responded in turn by publicly defending Stone in various feminist publications of the time.

In 1979, the lesbian feminist scholar Janice Raymond mounted an ad hominem attack on Stone in The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male.

Raymond accused Stone by name of plotting to destroy the Olivia Records collective and womanhood in general with "male energy."

Stone continued as a member of the collective and continued to record Olivia artists until political dissension over her transgender status, exacerbated by Raymond's book, culminated in 1979 in the threat of a boycott of Olivia products.

After long debate, Stone left the collective and returned to Santa Cruz.

In the early 1980s, Stone built a small computer, taught herself programming, and became a freelance coder, eventually becoming recognized as a computer expert.

In 1983 Stone befriended cultural theorist Donna Haraway, a faculty member in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Haraway was in the process of writing the watershed essay "A Cyborg Manifesto".

While Stone was studying for her doctorate with Haraway and James Clifford, she produced the 1987 essay "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto".

The work was influenced by early versions of Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" and first published in Social Text, and by the turbulent political foment in cultural feminism of that period.

Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle situate Stone's work in the turbulent events of the time as a response to Raymond's attack:

"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" rearticulated 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.

Stryker and Whittle, writing in The Transgender Studies Reader, refer to "The Empire Strikes Back" as