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 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. As of 2007, "The Empire Strikes Back" had been translated into twenty-seven languages and had been cited in hundreds of publications. In 2011, Indiana University Bloomington hosted a conference honoring the twentieth anniversary of the publication of "The Empire Strikes Back". Stone was guest of honor, and while onstage commented "Last year I was invited to a conference about my work