Interview with Beau Larsen

An interview with Beau Larsen, a white trans educator, scholar, and forensics coach based in St. Paul, Minnesota. At the time of this interview, they were the Director of Forensics at Macalester College, where they directed and coached the mock trial, ethics bowl, and debate teams. Prior to their work at Macalester, Larsen was a graduate student and debate coach at Wake Forest University, having previously been an adjunct debate coach at the University of Puget Sound and a member of the University of Southern California's undergraduate debate team. In this oral history interview with Macalester College students Maddie Rodriguez and Ruben Schneiderman, Larsen discusses their entry into forensics through high school debate, their time competing in undergraduate debate at USC with Aron Berger, their current forensics work at Macalester, and their political, theoretical, and scholarly interests and influences at length, as well as the impacts of those political theories on debate itself. Specifically, they discuss their engagements with queer theory, trans theory, sex work theory, and Black feminism and Afropessimism and how those strands have impacted the world of competitive debate, their thoughts on their mentors, being non-binary and trans in the debate world, and the interactions between queer and trans theory and sex work, and their master's thesis and upcoming book project.

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Item Information:

Identifier: bv73c0801
Collection: Audio and Video Clips and Transcripts
Institution: Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection, University of Minnesota
Creator(s): Larsen, Beau
Contributor(s): Billund-Phibbs, Myra
Rodriguez, Maddie
Schneiderman, Ruben
Publisher: University of Minnesota Minneapolis Libraries
Date Created: Nov. 20, 2021
Genre: Oral Histories
Transcriptions
Subject(s): ONE Archives
Places: Minnesota > Ramsey County > City of Saint Paul > Saint Paul
Topic(s): Feminism
Femmes
Forensics (Public speaking)
Genderqueer people
Non-binary people
Queer theory
Sex work
White transgender people
Resource Type: Moving image
Text
Language: English
Rights: Copyright undetermined
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