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This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, "Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies," revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.

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This PDF contains the complete Keywords section of

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Volume 1, Numbers 1–2.

TSQ

Published by Duke University Press

KEYWORDS

Abstract This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue

of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly . Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and

senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, ''Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-

First-Century Transgender Studies,'' revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some con-

tributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from

another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender stud-

ies. While far from providing a complete picture of the ﬁeld, these keywords begin to elucidate a

conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient

resistance to the entire project of mapping the ﬁeld terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized

critical potentials for the ﬁeld; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop

the signiﬁcance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and

demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues

play out in various ﬁelds; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other

interdisciplines.

Abjection

ROBERT PHILLIPS

Abjection refers to the vague sense of horror that permeates the boundary between

the self and the other. In a broader sense, the term refers to the process by which

identiﬁcatory regimes exclude subjects that they render unintelligible or beyond

classiﬁcation. As such, the abjection of others serves to maintain or reinforce

boundaries that are threatened.

This term can be used to think of the instability of gendered and/or sexed

bodies—especially those occupied by transgender individuals—which are at the

center of academic debates surrounding queer, feminist, and trans subjectivity.

Drawing on a psychoanalytic reading of subjective identity as a defensive con-

struction and on the French literary obsession with monsters, psychoanalyst and

linguist Julia Kristeva develops the term abjection in Powers of Horror: An Essay on

Abjection (1982).

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ª2014 Duke University Press

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Published by Duke University Press

Abjection literally means ''to cast out,'' yet Kristeva's theorization plays

with this deﬁnition by recognizing that in the context of marginalized subjects,

abjection goes beyond ''casting out'' and becomes a more interactive process

through which the boundaries of the self are protected by rejecting whatever ''does

not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the com-

posite'' (4). In other words, it renders problematic any assumption regarding the

ﬁxity of the borders separating subjects from objects and self from other.

Abjection, as Kristeva describes it, ''disturbs identity, system, order'' (ibid.)

and encompasses a kind of borderline uncertainty —ambiguous, horrifying, and

polluting. Transgendered bodies, then, especially when viewed as physical bodies

in transition, defy the borders of systemic order by refusing to adhere to clear

deﬁnitions of sex and gender. The abject can thus serve as a cleaving point of

abstruseness and unease — separating, pathologizing, and psychologizing trans

subjectivity. The anxiety at the root of this unease with transgender subjectivity

can be traced back, in part, to a fear of the ambiguous.

Judith Butler employs Kristeva's concept of abjection to discuss the often

problematic embodiment of sexuality and gender. Speciﬁcally, Butler explores

how normative heterosexual identities are circumscribed via a process that rejects

and excludes ''ﬁgures of homosexual abjection'' (1993: 103). Like homosexual

subjectivities, transgender subjectivities challenge heteronormative understand-

ings of gender, sex, bodies, embodiment, and (dis)ability. Heteronormative sub-

jects, then, can come to feel threatened, because in order to maintain their own

tenuous subjectivity, they must simultaneously identify with the abject others

whom they are also required to reject (ibid.: 113). In a similar manner, Nico

Besnier (2004) draws on Kristeva's formulation of abjection in his analysis of

transgender Tongan men whose gender practices make them socially illegible.

Despite the strategic negotiation of social relations with their fellow Tongans,

many transgender Tongan men found themselves excluded from the multitude of

mainstream social relationships that would usually afford them protection.

While historically the term has had a negative connotation, groups that

have traditionally been thought of as marginal are reclaiming their difference

and embracing their abjection. Trans activists have taken up abjection as a con-

structive political strategy, which can disrupt and confound long-standing sys-

tems of power that are sustained by the methodical exclusion, repression, and

silencing of certain others. Abjection, Kristeva wrote, ''draws me toward the place

where meaning collapses'' (1982: 2). It is in this liminal space where the subject

experiences a crisis of meaning in which transformation is possible—the dif-

ference between internal and external becomes unclear, and in the process,

conditional identity is stripped away to reveal a queer object. In this sense the

20 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

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notion of embracing abjection is epitomized by Susan Stryker's essay ''My Words

to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender

Rage'' (1994), in which she connects her own transsexual body with the ﬁgure of

Frankenstein's monster. Stryker acknowledges and welcomes her abjection when

she declares, ''I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster'' (240). Through

this declaration, she is reclaiming the word monster in order to relieve it of its

power; but more importantly, abjection becomes a tool with which to further

challenge and problematize conventions of socially constructed gender categories.

In David Halperin's formulation of abjection (2007), the promiscuous

behavior of some gay men has come to threaten the ''normalization'' of ''gayness''

and alienate the concomitant goal of equality. While Halperin speciﬁcally

addresses gay men, his ideas may also be applied to trans subjects. He argues that

it is becoming increasingly commonplace for many gay men to mimic a desex-

ualized heterosexual existence consisting of married, monogamous couplings and

to emphasize their normativity in order to appear acceptable to others. Yet, as

Halperin argues, by acknowledging and welcoming the abjection that accom-

panies their subjectivity and subsequently taking advantage of the moments when

meaning collapses, marginalized subjects (including transgender individuals and

gay men) can question the hegemonic forces that seek their oppression and in the

process regain control of the signiﬁcation of their subjectivity.

In modern literature, the abject is a prominent feature in the work of

writers such as Jean Genet and Marcel Jouhandeau.

Robert Phillips lectures on anthropology and women's and gender studies at the University

of Manitoba. His book Little Pink Dot: Technology, Sexuality, and the Nation in Singapore is

forthcoming.

References

Besnier, Nico. 2004. ''The Social Production of Abjection: Desire and Silencing among Trans-

gender Tongans.'' Social Anthropology 12, no. 3: 301–23.

Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ''Sex.'' New York: Routledge.

Halperin, David. 2007. What Do Gay Men Want? Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New

York: Columbia University Press.

Stryker, Susan. 1994. ''My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Per-

forming Transgender Rage.'' GLQ 1, no. 3: 237–54.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399470

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Adolescence

GABRIELLE OWEN

The idea of adolescence is a relatively recent social category, emerging in the late

nineteenth century alongside medicolegal notions of homosexuality and the

concept of inversion, which conﬂates gay or lesbian desire with trans phenomena.

While the word adolescence dates back to the ﬁfteenth century in English and can

be found to designate a stage of human life through the seventeenth and eigh-

teenth centuries, adolescence begins to function later in medical discourse and

early psychology as a type of person, one who can be shaped and directed away

from perceived social ills, such as homosexuality and prostitution, and toward

social aims such as marriage and reproduction. By the turn of the century,

G. Stanley Hall's Adolescence (1904) claimed that adolescence was the key to the

advancement of civilization, the developmental moment of state intervention that

would propel humankind into the next stage of evolutionary history.

We might understand the idea of adolescence as a mechanism of Fou-

cault's biopower, a technology of self put into the service of the nation-state. One

of the ways in which biopower regulates and disciplines trans phenomena is

by locating them in the presumably pliable stage of adolescence, where state

intervention appears to be developmentally natural and necessary. In the mid-

nineteenth century, both childhood and adolescence became intense sites of disci-

plinary anxiety and control (Foucault 1978). Parents, doctors, and teachers were

instructed to watch for the warning signs of degeneracy, disease, mental illness,

and criminal tendencies. Emerging institutions of medicine, psychology, and edu-

cation deployed childhood and adolescence to construct institutional knowledge and

to establish authority and expertise. For example, it is adolescence that allows Freud

to claim ''complete certainty'' about the cause of homosexuality in a young woman

(1955: 147), and Krafft-Ebing similarly uses childhood and adolescent behavior to

explain various kinds of trans phenomena in Psychopathia Sexualis (1894). In these

contexts, adolescence serves a narrative function. It becomes the moment of

subjective ﬂuctuation before the presumed stability of adulthood (Kristeva 1995);

and as such, it constructs the narrative inevitability of a normative adulthood.

Adolescence constructs and reiﬁes adulthood as the stage of life when

selfhood is ﬁnal, established, known. And so the idea of adolescence contains

transition, movement, and change in which the perceived turbulence of puberty is

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loaded with meanings about the discovery of self. Adolescence is constructed as

the moment that gendered becoming occurs. And yet this developmental narrative

is one we impose on experience, locating moments of transition, change, and

rebellion in adolescence and locating moments of arrival, stability, and confor-

mity in adulthood. Transgender phenomena suggest a much more varied and

complex range of possibilities for bodily experience and gendered subjectivity,

drawing our attention to the contingency of any subjective arrival whether it be

normative or trans-identiﬁed.

Transgender and queer perspectives put pressure on the developmental

narrative of adolescence, speaking instead of the queer child who might grow

sideways (Stockton 2009), or of the reordering or rejection of developmental

sequence itself (Halberstam 2005), or of the liberatory potential for naming

the self at any point in the prescribed sequence (Bornstein 1995, 2006). Trans

embodiment disrupts and denaturalizes the developmental narrative of adoles-

cence, revealing it for what it is— sometimes a story we have been told and some-

times a story of our own making. And yet adolescence persists as the ideological

container for the trans phenomena that permeate all human experience. Ado-

lescence functions simultaneously as a site of discovery and disavowal, sustain-

ing assumptions about what childhood was and what adulthood should be,

manufacturing narrative coherence for moments of arrival, and creating distance

for moments of contradiction, contingency, or change. The work of transgender

theory unravels adolescence along with ﬁxed notions of gender identity, sexuality,

and selfhood. But trans embodiment suggests also the possibility of reconstruc-

tion, revision, and remaking outside the developmental imperative.

Gabrielle Owen teaches gender studies and children's literature at the University of Nebraska–

Lincoln. Recent publications include ''Queer Theory Wrestles the 'Real' Child: Impossibility,

Identity, and Language in Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan '' ( Children's Literature

Association Quarterly, fall 2010).

References

Bornstein, Kate. 1995. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us . New York: Vintage.

———. 2006. Hello Cruel World: One-Hundred and One Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks,

and Other Outlaws. New York: Seven Stories.

Foucault, Michel. 1978. An Introduction . Vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality . Translated by Robert

Hurley. New York: Vintage.

Freud, Sigmund. 1955. ''The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman.'' In The

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, ed. and

translated by James Strachey, 145–72. London: Hogarth.

OWEN * Adolescence * Keywords 23

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Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives .New

York: New York University Press.

Hall, G. Stanley. 1904. Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology,

Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. 2 vols. New York: Appleton.

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. 1894. Psychopathia Sexualis . Translated by Charles Gilbert Chaddock.

Philadelphia: Davis.

Kristeva, Julia. 1995. New Maladies of the Soul . New York: Columbia University Press.

Stockton, Kathryn Bond. 2009. The Queer Child; or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399479

Related Health Problems

JUSTUS EISFELD

The International Statistical Classiﬁcation of Diseases and Related Health Problems

(ICD ) is, as the name states, a collection of diseases and health problems compiled

by the World Health Organization (2012). At the same time, it is also the basis for

payments for health care in virtually all countries in the world. And therein lies

the problem for trans* people.

The current edition, ICD -10, lists ''Gender Identity Disorders'' in the

section covering ''Disorders of Adult Personality and Behaviour,'' in the chapter

''Mental and Behavioural Disorders.'' Other disorders that can affect trans* people

and that are listed in the same section are ''Disorders of Sexual Preference'' and

''Psychological and Behavioural Disorders Associated with Sexual Development

and Orientation.'' As many trans* activists have pointed out, trans* people's

identities are not diseases and should not be pathologized (GATE 2012a; Winters

2008, 2012a, 2012b; STP, International Campaign Stop Trans Pathologization

2012). At the same time, some trans* people want and need access to trans*-

speciﬁc healthcare. This is one issue that comes up again and again in research on

problems faced by trans* people: access to healthcare, and especially access to

transition-related healthcare (Winter 2012; Grant et al. 2011; Council of Europe

2011; Motmans 2009; Kisia and Wahu 2010; Whittle, Turner, and Al-Alami 2007;

Keuzenkamp 2012; Bones Rocha et al. 2009; Alisheva, Aleshkina, and Buhuceanu

2007; Human Rights Commission Te Ka

¯hui Tika Tangata 2007).

These needs are a seeming contradiction; the ICD is a gateway for some

trans* people to access rights such as funded transition-related healthcare, which

relies on an ICD code, while preventing others (or even the same people) from

accessing other rights, because the ICD acts as a gatekeeper, such as with access to

legal gender recognition, which is often dependent on a diagnosis of gender identity

disorder (Balzer and Hutta 2012, Transgender Europe 2012). A best-practice model

solving the seeming contradiction at the national level is the Argentinian Gender

Identity Law, especially Articles 4 and 11.

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On top of that is the critique of the view of trans* people's transition-

related healthcare needs as a disorder versus a variation of the human race that

may or may not need medical attention. As large parts of the medical ﬁeld are

based on the assumption of disorder (as the International Classiﬁcation of

Disorders certainly is), this is a continuing ideological struggle between, on one

hand, the label ''disorder'' with the usual power imbalance that accompanies it

(doctors get to put the label of disorder on patients, for example—and never

the other way around), and on the other hand, criticism of that imbalance from

critical health care voices and users of health services.

The current diagnostic codes used for trans* people are also subject to abuse:

in some countries (for example, Norway [Helsedirektoratet 2012]), only trans* peo-

ple diagnosed with the code F64.0, ''Transsexualism,'' are allowed to access treat-

ment, while others (for example, people diagnosed with F64.8 — ''Other Gender

Identity Disorders'') are not. The diagnosis itself can take bizarre forms; for example,

a month-long hospitalization in a mental health hospital (Insight NGO 2010).

One of the most challenging issues is the very need to include trans* health

issues in the next ICD edition, ICD -11. That inclusion must be a reference or a set

of references not based in illness and, at the same time, able to create a path to

health care, public or private insurance coverage, and legal recognition of trans*

people's identities.

Taking into account this last and seemingly unavoidable connection

between diagnosis and health care coverage, other questions arise: what kind of

diagnosis would be needed?

There are several, sometimes conﬂicting, demands on what a future ICD

code must be able to achieve. On one hand, it must be phrased in neutral language

to be usable in places where transphobia in health cost reimbursements is ram-

pant, where any reference to trans* issues could lead to an automatic exclusion of

the procedure or the person from coverage. On the other hand, in other places,

trans*-speciﬁc codes are either needed for legal gender recognition or could be

useful for scientiﬁc purposes (i.e., research into side effects or long-term effects of

hormone use). A code must be broad enough to cover those trans* people who

need access to speciﬁc services while procedures get reﬁned and needs may change

over time, yet it must not be so broad as to cover all trans* people irrespective of

their actual need for health care. Some codes also need to give clues for treatment

to those doctors who are willing to help trans* people but do not know how.

In order to fulﬁll all these requirements, GATE (Global Action for Trans*

Equality) proposed what we called a starﬁsh model, which we described as a

decentralized system of codes that can be used together or independently,

depending on the local situation (GATE 2012a). We named it for the starﬁsh,

which has a decentralized nervous system. Essentially, a trans*-speciﬁc code would

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be placed in a section of the ICD that also houses uncomplicated pregnancy and

other factors inﬂuencing health and health status. This code would then refer out to

other, non–trans*-speciﬁc codes in, for example, the endocrinologic and genito-

urinary parts of the ICD , codes that could be used for trans* people but also for

other patients. One example would be ''Testosterone Deﬁciency'' or ''Absence/Pre-

sence of Vagina.'' These nonspeciﬁc codes could be used either as stand-alone codes

or in combination with the trans* speciﬁer, depending on the local conditions.

Justus Eisfeld is a codirector of GATE—Global Action for Trans* Equality. He is coauthor of

The State of Trans* and Intersex Organizing: A Case for Increased Support for Growing but Under-

Funded Movements for Human Rights (2013).

Notes

I would like to acknowledge the work of GATE's codirector Mauro Cabral in developing

many of the concepts on which this text is based as well as his help in drafting this text and

his leadership in GATE's work on the ICD reform. Furthermore, I would like to thank the

members of GATE's ICD working group for their critical thinking and input in GATE's work.

1. The international trans* organization Global Action for Trans* Equality (GATE) uses the

term trans* to name those people who identify themselves in a different gender than that

assigned to them at birth and/or those people who feel they have to, prefer to, or choose to

present themselves differently from the expectations associated with the gender role

assigned to them at birth—whether by clothing, accessories, cosmetics, or body modiﬁ-

cation. This includes, among many others, people who identify as transsexual and trans-

gender, transvestite, travesti, hijra, cross-dresser, fa'afaﬁne, two-spirit, no gender, third

sex, or genderqueer. The term trans* should be understood as a political umbrella term

that encompasses many different and culturally speciﬁc experiences of embodiment,

identity, and expression. The asterisk aims to make its open-ended character explicit.

2. A translation of the law was provided by GATE (2012b).

References

Alisheva, Djamilya, Julia Aleshkina, and Florin Buhuceanu. 2007. Access to Health Care for LGBT

People in Kyrgyzstan. New York: Open Society Institute.

Balzer, Carsten, and Jan Simon Hutta, eds. 2012. Transrespect versus Transphobia Worldwide: A

Comparative Review of the Human-Rights Situation of Gender-Variant/Trans people.

Berlin: Transgender Europe.

Bones Rocha, Ka

´tia, et al. 2009. ''La atencio

´n a la salud en Brasil a partir de la percepcio

´nde

travestis, transexuales y transge

´neros.'' Forum: Qualitative Social Research 10, no. 2, art.

28. nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0902281.

Council of Europe. 2011. Discrimination on Grounds of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in

Europe. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing.

EISFELD * International Classiﬁcation of Diseases * Keywords 109

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GATE—Global Action for Trans* Equality. 2012a. It's Time for Reform: Trans* Health Issues in the

International Classiﬁcation of Diseases. transactivists.org/2012/05/20/94 (accessed

December 10, 2012).

———. 2012b. ''English Translation of Argentina's Gender Identity Law as Approved by the Senate

of Argentina on May 8, 2012.'' globaltransaction.ﬁles.wordpress.com/2012/05/argentina

-gender-identity-law.pdf (accessed September 6, 2013).

Grant, Jaime M., et al. 2011. Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Dis-

crimination Survey. Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality and

National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Helsedirektoratet. 2012. Gjennomgang av behandlingstilbudet til transseksuelle og transpersoner.

Letter to Helse- og omsorgsdepartementet. October 1.

Human Rights Commission Te Ka

¯hui Tika Tangata. 2007. To Be Who I Am: Report of the Inquiry

into Discrimination Experienced by Transgender People / Kia noho au ki to

¯ku ano

¯ao: He

¯rongo mo

¯te Uiuitanga mo

¯Aukatitanga e Pa

¯ngia ana e nga

¯Ta

¯ngata Whakawhitiira.

Auckland: Human Rights Commission Te Ka

¯hui Tika Tangata.

Insight NGO. 2010. ''Situation of Transgender Persons in Ukraine.'' Kiev: Insight NGO.

Keuzenkamp, Saskia. 2012. Worden wie je bent. Het leven van transgenders in Nederland. The

Hague: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau.

Kisia, Andiah, and Milka Wahu. 2010. A People Condemned—The Human Rights Status of Lesbians,

Gays, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex Persons in East Africa 2009–2010. Nairobi: UHAI.

Motmans, Joz. 2009. Being Transgender in Belgium: Mapping the Social and Legal Situation of

Transgender People. Brussels: Institute for the Equality of Women and Men.

STP, International Campaign Stop Trans Pathologization. 2012. ''Manifesto.'' stp2012.info/old/en

/manifesto (accessed December 10, 2012).

Transgender Europe. 2012. ''First Mapping of Legal and Health Care Situation of Trans People

in 58 Countries.'' www.transrespect-transphobia.org/en_US/mapping.htm (accessed

December 10, 2012).

Whittle, Stephen, Lewis Turner, and Maryam Al-Alami. 2007. Engendered Penalties: Transgender

and Transsexual People's Experiences of Inequality and Discrimination. Wetherby, UK:

Communities and Local Government.

Winter, Sam. 2012. Lost in Transition: Transgender People, Rights, and HIV Vulnerability in the

Asia-Paciﬁc Region. Bangkok: UNDP.

Winters, Kelley. 2008. Gender Madness in American Psychiatry: Essays from the Struggle for Dignity.

Dillon, CO: Booksurge.

———. 2012a. ''Third Swing: My Comments to the APA for a Less Harmful Gender Dysphoria

Category in the DSM-5.'' GID Reform Weblog. gidreform.wordpress.com/2012/06/19

/third-swing-my-comments-to-the-apa-for-a-less-harmful-gender-dysphoria-category

-in-the-dsm-5 (accessed December 10, 2012).

———. 2012b. ''An Update on Gender Diagnoses, as the DSM-V Goes to Press.'' GID Reform

Weblog. gidreform.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/an-update-on-gender-diagnoses-as-the

-dsm-5-goes-to-press (accessed December 10, 2012).

World Health Organization. 2012. ''ICD -10 Version:2010.'' International Statistical Classiﬁcation of

Diseases and Related Health Problems. apps.who.int/classiﬁcations/icd10/browse/2010/en

(accessed December 10, 2012).

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399740

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Intersex

IAIN MORLAND

Sometimes individuals are born with genital, genetic, or hormonal characteristics

that some people ﬁnd confusing. From this phenomenon of ''intersex,'' a range of

claims and counterclaims have ﬂowed regarding sexual difference, medicine,

gender, and identity.

Intersex was coined in 1915 by the zoologist Richard Goldschmidt to

describe moths with atypical sex characteristics (Stern 1967: 156). The deﬁnition

was soon extended to encompass several types of human ''hermaphroditism,'' but

the latter word remained in circulation as a medical diagnosis throughout the

twentieth century. Intersex is often popularly conﬂated with ambiguous genita-

lia—external sexual anatomy that cannot be easily described as entirely female or

male, such as a larger-than-typical clitoris. However, for clinicians, an intersex

diagnosis can refer also to attributes that are not apparent on the body's surface,

including XXY sex chromosomes or indifference to the hormones that produce

effects connotative of masculinity. What such intersex diagnoses have in common

is the medicalization of a failure to classify the body as one of two sexes. That such

a failure would be problematic is not obvious, nor is its medicalization; none-

theless, medical treatment of intersex is standard practice in the West. Treatment

typically begins in childhood, even in infancy. It can extend over a lifetime in the

case of hormonal interventions or repeated genital surgeries, despite assurances

from generations of clinicians that the latest medical techniques will eradicate

intersex before an individual is aware of it.

Within the last decade, medical guidelines have shifted to recommend

psychological support and disclosure by default (Hughes et al. 2006: 154), but the

extent to which these guidelines have been put into practice remains disap-

pointingly unclear. After all, seminal clinical protocols from the 1950s made

similar recommendations, yet led to decades of secrecy toward patients. The older

protocols fostered a tenacious belief among many doctors and parents that genital

surgery is a kind of preemptive psychological treatment, on the grounds that an

individual's sense of gender will follow from the experience of having a dichoto-

mously sexed anatomy. Several assumptions were implicit in this belief— that

having an unambiguous and univalent gender is desirable; that it is better not

to reﬂect consciously on the formation of one's gender; and, in turn, that early

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medical treatment can promote healthy gender development by averting conscious

reﬂection on the formation of one's gender and its relationship (if any) to one's

sexual anatomy. Taking these assumptions to their extreme, some clinicians have

even argued that parents who fail to arrange early genital surgery for their sexually

ambiguous offspring are guilty of child neglect (Rossiter and Diehl 1998: 61).

The architect of the traditional treatment protocols, psychologist John

Money, was also an inﬂuential advocate of elective genital surgery for transsexual

individuals. Consequently, an unresolved contradiction existed between Money's

insistence that gender always develops in response to one's sex anatomy during

childhood and his recognition that for transsexual individuals, gender develops

divergently from the expectations set by one's anatomy (Diamond 1999: 1022).

This contradiction facilitated the emergence during the late 1950s and early 1960s

of a medical consensus over intersex treatment, for it gave Money's gender theory

the fashionable appearance of being ''interactional'' in its refusal to polarize

nature and nurture. Really, it was a theory composed of irreconcilable proposi-

tions (Downing, Morland, and Sullivan, forthcoming).

Nevertheless, the signiﬁcance of Money's theory and its implications for

clinical practice cannot be overstated, because the term gender itself was coined by

him. It was a response to learning about an individual whose genital appearance

was ''feminine'' due to intersex development and who was a doctor, husband, and

father by adoption (Money 1973: 397). The ostensible discrepancy between this

individual's masculine position in language and his sexual anatomy inspired

Money to ﬁnd a word for the former that reﬂected its difference from the latter.

Money chose gender because the word connoted the arbitrariness of sexed pro-

nouns in linguistics. Strangely, though, in the very article in which Money ﬁrst

used gender in its new sense, he also unveiled his signature recommendation that

the treatment of intersex should eliminate any such discrepancy between an

individual's gender and genitalia (1955: 254, 257).

Of course, one need not choose between an account of gender as deter-

mined by genital appearance and gender as an effect of language. I would say,

following Michel Foucault's analysis of sexuality (1978: 155), that gender names

one of many ways in which power — including medical power — grips bodies to

produce individuals who are at once constrained and enabled by norms. To claim

to belong (or not) to a gender is to orient oneself normatively in relation to others,

seeking recognition for behaviors, attributes, and sensations that one regards as

important, rather than to make a descriptive claim about one's genitalia. How-

ever, Money neither liked nor understood Foucault's work (Money 1998: 106–7),

and to this day, medical sexology remains largely disengaged from relevant

debates in the humanities over gender and the constitution of the self.

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For instance, one large clinical team has asserted that medicine's task during

the neonatal period is ''to select a gender able to match the individual identity (II)

of the child (which is invisible during this period), the social identity (SI) (which is

the way 'society' looks at the individual and the only tangible identity approachable

after birth) and the behavioural identity (BI), which is not formed yet'' (Vidal et al.

2010: 312). This vague enterprise — where something invisible is aligned with

something unformed in order to match something social (and where the enclosure

of ''society'' in quotation marks suggests a lack of precision around that term

too)—is not an acceptable rationale for medical treatment, especially where such

treatment is irreversible. It is unscientiﬁc also, insofar as its success cannot be

measured, merely inferred from the retrospective presumption that treatment has

foreclosed ''unbearable situations for the parents and the child'' (ibid.).

I recognize that some parents of intersex infants are anxious to prevent,

for example, people peering over their shoulders at their child's genitalia during

diaper changing (Gough et al. 2008: 500). Yet it is surely never appropriate to

scrutinize the genitalia of another person's child. The way to stop such behavior is

to shame those who do it rather than to perform surgery. Treatment shames the

child by suggesting that the problem is not the uninvited act of looking but the

anatomy that is seen. Here is another key reason why the medicalization of

intersex is a fundamentally erroneous project: it mistakes social norms and their

transgression for properties of bodies, which can be modiﬁed or disambiguated

through clinical interventions. But ambiguity is an interpretation, not a trait; and

one cannot do surgery on a norm.

Further, the efforts by clinicians and families to eliminate intersex have

traditionally entailed the strenuous production of silences—about hospital visits,

scars, parental fears, injections, and even years of childhood — that actively create

intersex as a state of strangeness rather than securing its removal from discourse.

The experience of treatment as simultaneously objectionable and ineffective has

been a central complaint of the intersex rights movement since its inception in the

early 1990s (Chase 1998: 197–203). Consequently, activists have reappropriated

intersex as an identity. To identify as intersex is to assert both that treatment does

not work, insofar as medical interventions amplify the strangeness of one's

intersex attributes, and that treatment should not be done at all, insofar as it

discriminates against individuals on the basis of immutable characteristics. Such

activism reveals that power never wholly grips or disciplines the body but pro-

duces opportunities for resistance to medicalization.

A collaborative effort in 2005 by patient advocates and clinicians to replace

the medical terms intersex and hermaphrodite with disorders of sex develop-

ment has highlighted the inseparability of power and resistance. To some com-

mentators, the new nomenclature has usefully refocused doctors' attention on

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those phenomena that, unlike gender, can beneﬁt demonstratively from medical

intervention—such as a reduction in the risk of gonadal tumors or the facilitation

of fertility. To others, the phrase disorders of sex development has nulliﬁed the

advances made in the name of intersex activism and cast as disordered or disabled

those individuals for whom intersex remains an identity (Reis 2007: 538). These

contrasting outcomes are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, intersex continues to

circulate among patient activists and humanities scholars. To exaggerate the capac-

ity of medicine to determine the meaning of sexual atypicality would amplify

medical power even while seeking to resist it.

In the context of trans studies, both intersex and transsexuality raise the

question of what kind of body one needs to have in order to claim membership in

a gender and whether a person's sense of belonging to a gender is colored by the

experience of living in a body that has been touched by medical technology.

Sometimes intersex and transsexuality have been construed as complementary

examples of gender's construction— where the former shows gender's assemblage

by force, and the latter its alteration by free will. But that analysis assumes the

success of most intersex treatment and fails to account for the continuity of

identity experienced by many trans individuals before and after medical treat-

ment. Encounters with medicine neither cause trans people to change gender nor

cause intersex individuals to acquire gender in the ﬁrst place. Future scholarship

might situate medical claims to treat intersex within the emerging canon of failure

studies and help to divert academic and activist critiques of intersex medicine

from that same disillusioning destination.

Iain Morland, PhD, has published more than a dozen scholarly essays on the ethics, psy-

chology, and politics of intersex. He edited the GLQ issue ''Intersex and After'' (2009) and is

coauthor with Lisa Downing and Nikki Sullivan of Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money's

Diagnostic Concepts (forthcoming).

References

Chase, Cheryl. 1998. ''Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political

Activism.'' GLQ 4, no. 2: 189–211.

Diamond, Milton. 1999. ''Pediatric Management of Ambiguous and Traumatized Genitalia.''

Journal of Urology 162, no. 3: 1021–28.

Downing, Lisa, Iain Morland, and Nikki Sullivan. Forthcoming. Fuckology: Critical Essays on John

Money's Diagnostic Concepts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1978. The Will to Knowledge . Vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality . Translated by

Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Gough, Brendan, et al. 2008. '''They Did Not Have a Word': The Parental Quest to Locate a 'True

Sex' for Their Intersex Children.'' Psychology and Health 23, no. 4: 493–507.

114 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

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Hughes, Ieuan A., et al. 2006. ''Consensus Statement on Management of Intersex Disorders.''

Journal of Pediatric Urology 2, no. 3: 148–62.

Money, John. 1955. ''Hermaphroditism, Gender, and Precocity in Hyperadrenocorticism: Psy-

chologic Findings.'' Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital 96, no. 6: 253–64.

———. 1973. ''Gender Role, Gender Identity, Core Gender Identity: Usage and Deﬁnition of

Terms.'' Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 1, no. 4: 397–402.

———. 1998. Sin, Science, and the Sex Police: Essays on Sexology and Sexosophy . Amherst, NY:

Prometheus.

Reis, Elizabeth. 2007. ''Divergence or Disorder? The Politics of Naming Intersex.'' Perspectives in

Biology and Medicine 50, no. 4: 535–43.

Rossiter, Katherine, and Shonna Diehl. 1998. ''Gender Reassignment in Children: Ethical Conﬂicts

in Surrogate Decision Making.'' Pediatric Nursing 24, no. 1: 59–62.

Stern, Curt. 1967. Richard Benedict Goldschmidt, 1878–1958 . Washington, DC: National Academy

of Sciences.

Vidal, Isabelle, et al. 2010. ''Surgical Options in Disorders of Sex Development (DSD) with

Ambiguous Genitalia.'' Best Practice and Research Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism

24, no. 2: 311–24.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399758

Islam and Islamophobia

¨STEM ERTUG

˘ALTINAY

In the Qur'an, the rules of permissible social conduct are organized according to a

dimorphic gender paradigm. The only verse that references nonnormative gender

is in a passage regulating Muslim women's social encounters with men (Qur'an

24:31). The verse states that women need not follow the usual rules of modesty

when in the presence of male attendants who are free of sexual desires and who

employ bodily and linguistic codes generally associated with women (Haneef 2011:

101). Female-to-male transgenderism is mentioned only in the hadith (sayings

and acts ascribed to the prophet Mohammad), which contains several examples of

transphobia, such as: ''Narrated by Abu Hurairah: The Apostle of Allah cursed the

man who dressed like a woman and the woman who dressed like a man'' (Imam

Abu Dawud, bk. 027, no. 4087).

Feminist and queer interpretations of Islam counter such transphobic,

homophobic, and patriarchal elements in the hadith by contesting its reliability

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as a source of Islamic knowledge and jurisprudence. Some scholars attempt to

resolve the conﬂict between what has been interpreted as the acceptance of

transgender people in the Qur'an versus the explicit transphobia of the hadith by

attributing different motivations to transgender expression: on one hand, it may

be possible simply to acknowledge an innate (God-given) gender identity, while

on the other hand it may be necessary to condemn a deliberate deviation from

gender norms for the purpose of transgressi ng Islamic rules of conduct— particularly

for engaging in forbidden sexual behavior (Haneef 2011: 101). Accordingly, while a

desexualized transgender subject may enjoy a certain level of social acceptance, those

who express a purportedly deviant sexual desire are highly stigmatized, particularly

if they engage in what is perceived as same-sex intercourse. It is worth noting that

male and female same-sex desires and practices have different historical genealogies

in Islam (Najmabadi 2011: 536–37), and in most sociohistorical contexts male same-

sex practices have been stigmatized and criminalized more severely. As Afsaneh

Najmabadi argues for the case of contemporary Iran, this stigma also affects many

transwomen's lives (ibid.: 536).

Unlike sex assignment operations for congenital intersex conditions, which

are generally considered to be legitimate, sex reassignment operations for trans-

gender people are more controversial in Islam. In Islamic bioethics, persons have

only limited autonomy over their own bodies, which are understood to have been

given to them in trust by their creator, Allah. Within this paradigm, sex reas-

signment operations are forbidden to the extent that they are framed as self-

inﬂicted physical injuries or unnecessary cosmetic procedures that have long-

term negative effects on the patient's physical and psychological well-being. The

main opponents of reassignment procedures are Sunni jurists who argue that

such operations amount to a repudiation of Allah's will and that they constitute a

form of deceit (Haneef 2011: 102–3). The proponents of the procedure, primarily

Shi'ah imams and a minority of Sunni jurists, emphasize the Islamic principle

that ''necessity overrides prohibition'' (ibid.). These proponents typically employ

a pathologizing discourse to argue that sex reassignment operations are not

cosmetic procedures but, rather, necessary treatments to cure a legitimate medical

condition. This framework has been particularly inﬂuential in Shi'ah-dominated

Iran, where medical sex reassignment is subsidized by the state and bears a

complex relationship to the heteronormalization of people with same-sex desires

and practices (Najmabadi 2011: 534–35).

Transsexuality's complicated status in Iran is frequently represented in the

West by the reductive caricature of a Muslim fundamentalism that forces gays to

change sex; it thereby offers a prime example of the orientalism and Islamo-

phobia, so prevalent among Western LGBT communities, against which many

Muslim trans and queer people have to contend. Nationalist discourses that frame

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Islam and Islamicate societies as uniquely transphobic, homophobic, ignorant,

and backward serve the myth of Western exceptionalism and legitimize various

forms of violence and oppression —from military intervention in the Middle East

to racial proﬁling of Arabs and Muslims in Europe and the United States.

Similar Islamophobic discourses also exist in the Middle East and its dias-

pora, particularly among secularist and/or non-Muslim communities. The most

debated example of the phenomenon is the practice of ''pink-washing'' in Israel.

Israel maintains relatively LGBT-friendly social policies, which it advertises inter-

nationally toproject an image of itself as a liberal haven ina Middle East dominated

by phobic and reactionary Islamic forces. This tolerant, democratic, and pro-

gressive image is then used to counter criticism of Israel's repressive actions toward

Palestine (Puar 2011). As a result, the problems experienced by LGBT people living

in Islamicate contexts become instrumentalized to serve their oppression.

Leftist activist, academic, and public debates on LGBT normativity, nation-

alism, and conservatism tend to focus on Israeli pink-washing, post-9/11 border

securitization and surveillance in the United States, and antimigrant sentiment in

Europe, in order to rhetorically mobilize Muslim LGBT people as the victims of

these practices and policies. Nevertheless, conservative discourses also exist in

various forms among Muslim LGBT communities, ranging from anti-Semitism

and sectarianism to militarism and ultranationalism. As demonstrated by the case

of Bulent Ersoy, the popular Turkish trans diva whose public acceptability has

been predicated on her embrace of conservative notions of Muslim Turkish

womanhood, Muslim trans identities and subjectivities emerge within complex

sociopolitical dynamics. As is the case elsewhere, they may operate on one level as

a strategy for surviving a phobic context, while on another level they perpetuate

forms of oppression at the expense of other individuals and communities (Altınay

2008).

Gender and sexuality play central regulatory roles in everyday life in Islam,

including the embodied codes of worship. Hence, having a trans subjectiv-

ity necessarily shapes the experience of Islam for trans people. To gain insights

into this dynamic experience, it is important to acknowledge the intersectional

diversity inherent in the category of the Muslim transgender subject. Under-

standing Islam and Islamophobia in the context of transgender studies requires us

to analyze how new subject positions emerge and how they become available

to trans bodies under speciﬁc sociohistorical and political circumstances. It is

necessary not simply to understand Islam but to understand Islam within broader

matrices of power, in entanglement with other disciplinary mechanisms and

meaning-making paradigms.

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¨stem Ertug

˘Altınay is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at

New York University. His articles on gender, sexuality, and the politics of embodiment in Turkey

have been published in various peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.

References

Altınay, Ru

¨stem Ertug

˘. 2008. ''Reconstructing the Transgendered Self as a Muslim, Nationalist,

Upper-Class Woman: The Case of Bulent Ersoy.'' Women's Studies Quarterly 36, no. 3–4:

210–29.

Haneef, Sayed Sikandar Shah. 2011. ''Sex Reassignment in Islamic Law: The Dilemma of Trans-

sexuals.'' International Journal of Business, Humanities, and Technology 1, no. 1: 98–107.

Imam Abu Dawud. 1990. Sunan Abu Dawud . Translated by Ahmad Hasan. New Delhi: Kitab

Bhavan.

Najmabadi, Afsaneh. 2011. ''Verdicts of Science, Rulings of Faith: Transgender/Sexuality in Con-

temporary Iran.'' Social Research 78, no. 2: 533–56.

Puar, Jasbir. 2011. ''Citation and Censorship: The Politics of Talking about the Sexual Politics of

Israel.'' Feminist Legal Studies 19, no. 2: 133–42.

The Qur'an. 2005. Translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399767

LGBT

ZEIN MURIB

The ubiquitous use of the LGBT initialism across various social, academic, and

political discursive contexts in the United States suggests that the constitutive

categories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender are equivalent, informed by

similar experiences, and, as such, appropriate to collapse into a single category:

LGBT. This brief analysis of LGBT, or what Dean Spade (2004: 53) incisively dubs

''LGB-fake-T,'' highlights the ways in which its consolidation and subsequent

circulation produce troubling exclusions and marginalizations when it is taken to

represent a cohesive collection of identities and political interests.

Denaturalizing the presumed coherence of LGBT requires attention to

how the constitutive categories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender have

been linked to concepts of gender and sexuality. Joanne J. Meyerowitz (2002), in

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her history of transsexuality in the United States, traces the processes through

which doctors after World War II began to theorize sex as biological, gender as

socially shaped, and sexuality as desire.

Nan Boyd's 2003 history of queer San

Francisco furnishes a useful analysis of how these theoretical distinctions between

gender and sexuality later inﬂuenced assimilationist lesbian and gay political

groups, some of which made concerted efforts to align their respective identities

exclusively with private expressions of same-sex desire (i.e., sexuality) and away

from public expressions of nonnormative gender. The emergence of a seemingly

bounded transgender category in the 1990s that attends these increasingly rigid

conceptualizations of gay and lesbian categories is compellingly argued by David

Valentine (2007) to enable imagining gender variance outside the categories of

lesbian and gay, the result of which was the construction of white, gender-nor-

mative lesbian and gay subjects, a construction that poses transgender people,

butches, queens, cross-dressers, working-class bar-goers, queer people of color,

and all combinations thereof as deviant, or other.

It is from this brief overview that the question of how LGBT began to

circulate arises. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, some transgender activists in

the United States argued that they ought to be included in the mobilizations of

mainstream lesbian and gay political groups. They cited the policing of normative

femininity and masculinity as the roots of the discrimination that they were ﬁghting,

the violence of which is equally directed at transgender people, lesbian women, and

gay men. In response, and perhaps seeing the value of demonstrating a commitment

to diversity and inclusion within a liberal, rights-based political context, various

lesbian and gay groups amended their titles and mission statements to claim that

they serve the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, or LGBT, communities.

Though some consider LGBT utopian in its commitment to inclusion and

representation, its widespread use has also been subject to strong critiques that

depart from the position that listing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender

identities in the LGBT initialism poses them as discrete, ordered categories. For

instance, Susan Stryker (2008: 148) argues that listing ''T'' with ''LGB''—and at the

end, no less—locates transgender as an orientation. In other words, LGBT priv-

ileges the expression of sexual identity over gender identity, the result of which is

the conﬂation of transgender with desire rather than with expressions of gender

that inﬂect sexuality. The paradox of LGBT, then, is that although the inclusion of

transgender alongside lesbian, gay, and bisexual opened up new political alliances

across these groups, it also closed off possibilities for coalitions with different

political groups—such as activists ﬁghting for immigrant rights who face con-

cerns over documentation that are similar to those of transgender people — by

naturalizing sexuality as the similarity that binds lesbian, gay, bisexual, and

transgender groups together.

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Zein Murib is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Minnesota whose

dissertation traces the historical and political processes through which ''LGBT'' evolved as a

political identity category in the United States between 1970 and 2010.

Note

1. The relationship of sexuality to gender has been actively taken up by feminists and queer

theorists as well. See Judith Butler's ''Against Proper Objects'' (1994) and ''GLQ Forum:

Thinking Sex/Thinking Gender'' (2004).

References

Boyd, Nan Alamilla. 2003. Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 . Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Butler, Judith. 1994. ''Against Proper Objects.'' differences 6, no 2: 1–26.

''The GLQ Forum: Thinking Sex/Thinking Gender.'' 2004. GLQ 10, no. 2: 211–312.

Meyerowitz, Joanne J. 2002. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Spade, Dean. 2004. ''Fighting to Win.'' In That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assim-

ilation, ed. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, 47–53. Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull.

Stryker, Susan. 2008. ''Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity.'' Radical

History Review, no. 100: 145–57.

Valentine, David. 2007. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category . Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399776

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Lines of Flight

MATT FOURNIER

Line of ﬂight, a term developed by Gilles Deleuze and Fe

´lix Guattari in A Thousand

Plateaus (1987), designates an inﬁnitesimal possibility of escape; it is the elusive

moment when change happens, as it was bound to, when a threshold between two

paradigms is crossed. ''Line of ﬂight'' is Brian Massumi's English translation of the

French ''ligne de fuite,'' where ''fuite'' means the act of ﬂeeing or eluding but also

ﬂowing, leaking (1987: xvii). Gender dysphoria is one such moment of leak-

age, when the face you see in the mirror is not a face for you anymore, when a

supposedly familiar landscape is blurred by the transposition of gender-signif ying

marks from one millieu to another, when the socially determined coordinates

of familiarity-identity-gender no longer add up to a legible (legitimate) pattern,

when materiality itself escapes the frame of representation, because this frame is

built on gender binarism.

The philosophy at work in A Thousand Plateaus is, according to Deleuze

and Guattari, a ''geophilosophy'': a system with no verticality, no transcendence,

and, most of all, no binarism — only space, a perpetually redesigned space,

structured by various and contingent power apparatuses (13–15). Applied to the

gender/transgender spectrum, their perspective allows us to navigate gender as a

geography, as a landscape, with its gridded plains, its wastelands, its hidden

underground; and to percieve gender transition as a move—that is, as a political

move, a strategic or tactical move, a move in a game-space—and as movement

itself, a displacement between the established plateaus of gender. Even though

Deleuze and Guattari never frontally addressed the possibility of apprehending

gender and sexuality in terms of geophilosophy, their understanding of spatiality,

with its ability to describe and to critique power apparatuses, may prove pro-

ductive in regard to gender politics. In Tendencies (1993), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

reasserts the kinship between queer and transitivity: etymologically, ''queer'' means

''across,'' ''oblique''; it seems crucial for ''trans'' to maintain the same disruptive

impact.

The endless process described by Deleuze and Guattari as territorialization

(where power apparatuses stabilize and encode planes of consistencies), derri-

torialization (disruption and transcoding of these planes of consistencies), and

reterritorialization (such as the emergence of a new state after a revolution) offer a

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useful model for thinking about gender. In contemporary paradigms, both gen-

der and ''gender identity'' are understood (and tested) as planes of consistencies;

that is, as stable dispositives or ''plateaus.'' The maleness or femaleness of indi-

vidual bodies is measured through scales and ranges: your testosterone level

places you among men or women, as do the answers you provide to multiple-

choice tests. Gender is a question of numbers — though of course these numbers

are inscribed in a discourse relying on ''nature,'' so that uncommon ranges are

labeled ''unnatural.'' Wrong numbers have to be corrected so that the individual

(the subject?) can reenter the ranges of normality — a process similar to the

''coding'' inherent to territorialization. Coding, in Deleuze and Guattari's per-

spective, is always ''trans-coded,'' that is, deviated from its recurring schemes, its

territory, and carried away toward a line of ﬂight.

Gender disruptions open up the space between plateaus, the uncodiﬁed

smooth space where affective intensities, not language, matter. Trans people know

very well how aleatory it is to pass, how random the reading of the signs can be: a

few more facial hairs, a shirt more or less open, a slightly uncontrolled voice, and

you are on the other side. The product of particular intensities — your body

processing hormones, clothing, surgery, moods, environnement — becomes a

pattern of signs, read through social patterns re/territorializing transgender

bodies. Though Massumi insists that a line of ﬂight ''has no relation to ﬂying,'' its

English translation nevertheless suggests an Icarian fugue, an escape too glorious

to have already happened but still there, open, somewhere between ''right now''

and the closest future.

Matt Fournier is a teaching associate in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell Uni-

versity and a PhD candidate at the University of Vincennes-Saint-Denis. His recent publications

include ''Wendy Delorme's War Machines'' (L'Esprit Cre

´ateur, Spring 2013) and ''Another Map on

the Wall: Deleuze, Guattari, and Freeman at the Iron Curtain'' (Journal of Postcolonial Writing,

Spring 2014).

References

Deleuze, Gilles, and Fe

´lix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Massumi, Brian. 1987. ''Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments.'' In Deleuze and Guat-

tari, A Thousand Plateaus , xvii–xx.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Tendencies . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399785

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La Loca

MELISSA M. GONZA

´LEZ

Loca, possibly derived from the classical Arabic word for ''stupid,'' means ''crazy''

when used as an adjective in Spanish. The feminine noun la loca can describe not

only a crazy woman but also a gender-nonconforming homosexual man. While

the noun loca is roughly analogous to terms like sissy or (ﬂaming) queen ,and

Spanish speakers use it transnationally to describe particularly ''effeminate''

homosexual men, different regions also employ other meanings. Speciﬁcally,

Argentines and Uruguayans sometimes use the term to describe trans- or cis-

women sex workers, while Cubans sometimes use it to describe promiscuous

ciswomen.

Regardless of its speciﬁc application, the term consistently signals

some form of feminine gender nonnormativity and can be used in a derogatory

sense. Scholars of gender and sexuality in the West and its colonies will note how

the term loca reﬂects parallels in the biopolitical management of both craziness

and homosexuality, two subjectivities that have been historically relegated to a

position of otherness. On the other hand, joining the long list of terms that

began as insults but have been re-signiﬁed by minorities, the noun loca is used

not only for but also by gender-nonconforming homosexual people born as

men. The various meanings of loca are of particular importance for transgender

studies, especially when considering newer iterations of the term in Latin

America that expand its usual usage, bringing it closer in meaning to something

like the term genderqueer .

Translating la loca poses noteworthy challenges. On one hand, it is crucial

when dealing with transnational phenomena to respect the untranslatability of

some dimensions of local difference and to avoid Anglocentricity. On the other

hand, translations can not only aid cross-cultural understanding but also help us

perceive some commonalities in gender and sexuality enabled by globalized

capitalism. In the late twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst centuries, for example,

global capitalism has enabled the inclusion of white (and criollo [of European

descent] in Latin America), masculine, bourgeois gay men in the imagined

communities of many nations as rights-bearing citizen-consumers. Meanwhile,

although nonnormatively gendered and transgender subjects have still been pre-

dominantly treated as spectacles of otherness, abject subjects, and/or victims of

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violence, there have also been increasing opportunities for transgender norma-

tivity via state and legal recognition —as with Argentina's Gender Identity Law.

Nonnormatively gendered subjects who resist or fail at homo- and gender-nor-

mative assimilation, however, are still excluded from the imagined community of

the nation and are both less visible and more vulnerable to erasure.

Pedro Lemebel, a Chilean author and performance artist who identiﬁes as

aloca , has become famous for making perspicacious and scathing critiques of the

contemporary, homonormative forms of gayness that cast nonnormative femi-

ninity as shameful. Lemebel's usage of the term loca describes homosexual people

whose femininity crosses the boundaries of their assigned male gender because

they wear makeup and/or accessories traditionally reserved for women— such as

shawls and heels—and interchangeably use both masculine and feminine pro-

nouns. While some people in Latin America self-identify as or equate terms like

trans and loca, a few others, like Lemebel, identify primarily as loca, and not as

trans,transexual,travesti,trava,ortransge

´nero (the latter being a direct transla-

tion of the English term transgender , a term that is increasingly used in Latin

America, mostly in academic and legal conversations).

In a 2000 interview, Lemebel describes the vulnerability of a marginalized

loca identity in a capitalist context: ''I think that in the future homosexuality will

be a practice between men; as for that technicolor, that iridescence that holds in its

symbolic wings the thinking of oneself as loca , it will disappear, only to fall into

that neo-fascist concept of macho with macho. In that sense there will be a tri-

umph of capitalist homosexuality'' (Lemebel 2000; my translation). The ability to

conceive of oneself as loca , Lemebel asserts, will inevitably fall prey to an all-

consuming capitalist homosexuality that suppresses gender nonnormativity.

Although Lemebel has championed the speciﬁcity of a loca identity, his interviews

and other writings make very clear his nonessentialist and strategic view of

identity as well as his melancholic embrace of its temporality.

Melissa M. Gonza

´lez is an assistant professor of Hispanic studies at Davidson College. Her most

recent article is the coauthored ''Orthodox Transgressions: The Ideology of Cross-Species,

Cross-Class, and Inter-racial Queerness in Lucı

´a Puenzo's Novel El nin˜o pez ( The Fish Child)''

(American Quarterly , September 2013).

Note

1. Diccionario de la lengua espan

˜ola, s.v. ''loco,'' lema.rae.es/drae/?val = loca (accessed

October 26, 2013).

124 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

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Reference

Lemebel, Pedro. 2000. ''Entrevista a Pedro Lemebel.'' By Andrea Jeftanovic. Revista Lucero . www

.letras.s5.com/archivolemebel.htm (accessed November 15, 2012).

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399794

Medieval

KARL WHITTINGTON

Medieval conjures multiple meanings for contemporary readers: an outmoded

or unenlightened viewpoint, a realm of fantasy fairytales, or the medieval S/M

aesthetic of torture, dungeons, and chains. Academic scholars of medieval culture

(here deﬁned as Europe between 500 and 1400 CE) balance such associations

carefully, often relying on the period's otherness to draw readers in but then

endeavoring to reverse the readers' expectations. Any characterization of a single

gender politics of medieval Europe would necessarily be reductive, ironing out the

tensions and contradictions inherent in any historical period. But too few scholars

are aware of the rich range of materials that medieval studies can offer to

transgender history, from the usual twin poles of feminist inquiry (understanding

the roots and mechanisms of oppression but also the moments when it was fought

or overcome) to everything in between.

The Middle Ages offers neither an entirely retrograde comparison to our

own politics (despite its characterization by the Bilerico Project, a prominent

blog, as the period of ''The Rise of Hatred'' [Allen 2008]) nor an alternative

cultural model to strive for. For some scholars, the Middle Ages were a time

when anatomical sex was largely disconnected from gender; Thomas Laqueur's

''one-sex'' model is the most famous instance, arguing that premodern phi-

losophers posited variations on a single sex rather than a binary system, a char-

acterization that could theoretically be formulated as more progressive than our

own (Laqueur 1990).

But for the most part, the violent realities of life as a gender-

nonconforming person dominate trans histories of the medieval world. I will

brieﬂy sketch a few of the most interesting recent trends in medieval studies that

can contribute to transgender histories and point to directions of possible future

research. Because sources pointing to ''life on the ground'' are so difﬁcult to ﬁnd,

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in this essay I focus largely on broader theoretical or conceptual issues. An effort

will be made to introduce period terms that relate to transgender studies, but I will

also use modern terminology that can help identif y and explain practices and

ideas that certainly existed, though by other names.

Since the concept of the transgender person did not exist in the Middle

Ages, scholars instead investigate concrete medieval subjects that relate to the

issue, such as intersexuality, cross-dressing, and the medical alteration of the

sexed body, all of which are discussed in primary sources. Early Christian exegetes

read a hermaphroditic subtext in the biblical creation of man and woman both

''in God's image'' and in the creation of the female body out of the male (DeVun

2008). That these ideas were later refuted throughout the Middle Ages only

suggests that they remained powerful. But the ﬁrst centuries of Christianity also

provide extensive accounts of medieval people leading actual transgender lives.

Numerous records describe medieval holy women ''becoming male'' (apandro in

Greek) both in appearance and ''in soul,'' sometimes in secret and other times

quite openly (Anson 1974: 7, 8).

Medieval conceptions of gender necessitated that

such crossings were possible only for women; in becoming male, these women

were moving closer to an ideal that was always masculine, while any instances of

men becoming women were condemned or met with confusion (Bullough 1999).

Most scholars focus on the social, material, or spiritual gains for women who

lived as men, but this ignores the accounts' possible transgender subtext; many

Christian women would have wanted to climb to higher (male) spiritual and

social spheres, but only a few actually donned male clothing, entered monasteries,

or married other women. Medieval texts offer admiring accounts of these women

(passing FTM [female-to-male] cross-dressers, in modern terms), and these texts

constitute one of the most concrete possibilities for seeing the subjectivity and

desires of actual medieval transgender people in action. In contrast, such stories in

the later Middle Ages were primarily the domain of ﬁction; the thirteenth-century

Roman de Silence tells the story of Silence, a girl raised as a boy so that she could

inherit her family's estate (Lurkhur 2010). In a deliciously modern twist, the

allegorical characters of ''nature'' and ''nurture'' ﬁght for control of her mind

and body; she ultimately is revealed as a woman and marries a king (but only after

she is seduced by the former queen, who took her for a man). Silence's strug-

gle over her identity offers to the modern reader the possibility of glimpsing

''what concepts of transsexuality remain when the surgeon and clinician are

eliminated'' — a kind of John/Joan case without the doctors and therapists (221).

Anatomical intersexuality was another major interest of medieval phi-

losophers, medical writers, and theologians (who called it ''hermaphroditism''

in the Ovidian tradition, Hermaphroditus being the mythical child of Hermes

and Aphrodite). In some of these texts we ﬁnd discussions of intersexuality

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that appear morally neutral, for instance in anatomical descriptions of women's

''seven-lobed uterus,'' where the three ''cells'' on the right create boys, the three on

the left girls, and the one in the center intersex persons (Cadden 1993: 202–3; see

also Jacquart and Thomasset 1988: 22–29; Rubin 1994). Other medieval medical

theorists explained the creation of a ''masculine woman'' or ''effeminate man''

(femina virago or vir effeminatus ) in terms of the relative strength of the male and

female seeds that came together at conception (Cadden 1993). But while medical

writers often adopted neutral language in describing intersexuality, legal and

theological writers were preoccupied with ﬁnding ways to assign such people to a

discrete gender. Interestingly, intersex persons were sometimes allowed to decide

for themselves which sexual/marital role to adopt; the crucial point was that such

decisions could not be unmade—the sin was in deviation from or inversion of

one's gender, whether it was clear from birth or chosen later (Nederman and True

1996: 513; see also Olsen 2011).

Beyond these practical or medical contexts of intersexuality, medieval

authors were also fascinated with an abstract or allegorical sphere, with theorizing

a body that is ''not only a midpoint between opposites, but . . . holds contraries in

stasis and conversation'' (DeVun 2008). The hermaphrodite, alternately described

as a true fusion of male and female or as a ''doubling'' of two people in one body,

was used as a metaphor for all kinds of philosophical processes of change,

transition, or fusion (most interestingly, perhaps, in writings on alchemy). Such

texts return us to a core issue of the historical study of sexual difference —the split

between theory and practice. The celebration of ﬂuidly sexual or sexually fused

bodies in an alchemical treatise, or the admiration of a religious woman who

''became male,'' may tell us little about the actual lives of people whose genital sex

was either ambiguous or did not align with their gender identity. But these texts

are nonetheless a vital record of transgender ideas circulating in the past; we must

not conﬂate them with the experience of actual bodies, but the historical realm of

ﬁction and fantasy is also the domain of contemporary transgender studies.

We have only scratched the surface of the possibilities for a medieval

transgender studies — other subjects under investigation include ﬁgures like Joan

of Arc, fascination with bearded female saints, cross-dressing in the theater,

eunuchs, intersexual grammar and language, the gender-crossings of the carnival,

and the complex queerness of the Christic body (see Feinberg 1996; Warner 1981;

Kueﬂer 1999; Lochrie 1997). Discussions of the ''medieval'' can also extend beyond

Europe; while the term originated in Europe, one increasingly reads and hears

about histories of ''medieval Islam'' or ''medieval Japan,'' for example. It is not

always clear how many of the rich variety of connotations that the word carries are

brought along into these new contexts, but in many cases it is applied to cultural

moments that are conceived of as somehow culturally analogous to ''medieval''

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Europe; it is not a purely temporal designation. Future research should continue

to ﬂesh out these views of medieval worlds rife with contradiction — between

theory and practice, fantasy and reality, violence and play.

Karl Whittington is assistant professor of art history at the Ohio State University, where he

teaches European medieval art and architecture. His articles have appeared in Gesta , Different

Visions,Kunstlicht, and Studies in Iconography, and his ﬁrst book, Body-Worlds: Opicinus de

Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination (2014), was recently published by the

Pontiﬁcal Institute of Mediaeval Studies.

Notes

1. A number of books have taken up Laqueur's theory, both in support and criticism. The

most well-known critiques are Joan Cadden 1993 and Katharine Park and Robert Nye

1991.

2. The key source on the subject is still John Anson 1974. See also Valerie Hotchkiss 1996,

Elizabeth Castelli 1991, Margaret Miles 1991 (esp. chap. 2), and Kari Vogt 1993.

References

Allen, Mercedes. 2008. ''The Rise of Hatred (the Middle Ages).'' The Bilerico Project (blog). www

.bilerico.com/2008/02/transgender_history_the_rise_of_hatred_t.php (accessed Decem-

ber 9, 2013).

Anson, John. 1974. ''The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism.'' Viator , no. 5: 1–32.

Bullough, Vern. 1999. ''Cross Dressing and Gender Role Change in the Later Middle Ages.'' In The

Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern Bullough and James Brundage, 223–42. New

York: Routledge.

Cadden, Joan. 1993. Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages . Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press.

Castelli, Elizabeth. 1991. ''I Will Make Mary Male: Pieties of the Body and Gender Transformation

of Christian Women in Late Antiquity.'' In Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender

Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, 29–49. New York: Routledge.

DeVun, Leah. 2008. ''The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Eur-

ope.'' Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2: 193–218.

Feinberg, Leslie. 1996. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul . Boston:

Beacon.

Hotchkiss, Valerie. 1996. Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe .New

York: Garland.

Jacquart, Danielle, and Claude Thomasset. 1988. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages.

Cambridge: Polity.

Kueﬂer, Matthew. 1999. ''Castration and Eunuchism in the Middle Ages.'' In Bullough and

Brundage, Handbook of Medieval Sexuality , 279–306.

Laqueur, Thomas. 1990. Making Sex: Gender and the Body from the Greeks to Freud . Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.

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Lochrie, Karma. 1997. ''Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies.'' In Constructing Medieval Sexuality , ed.

Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James Schultz, 180–200. Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press.

Lurkhur, Karen. 2010. ''Medieval Silence and Modern Transsexuality.'' Studies in Gender and

Sexuality 11, no. 4: 220–38.

Miles, Margaret. 1991. Carnal Knowing . New York: Vintage.

Nederman, Cary, and Jacqui True. 1996. ''The Third Sex: The Idea of the Hermaphrodite in

Twelfth-Century Europe.'' Journal of the History of Sexuality 6, no. 4: 497–517.

Olsen, Glenn. 2011. Of Sodomites, Effeminates, Hermaphrodites, and Androgynes: Sodomy in the Age

of Peter Damian. Toronto: Pontiﬁcal Institute.

Park, Katharine, and Robert Nye. 1991. ''Destiny is Anatomy.'' New Republic , February 18.

Rubin, Miri. 1994. ''The Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily Order.'' In Framing

Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, 100–22. Manchester, UK: Manchester

University Press.

Vogt, Kari. 1993. ''Becoming Male: A Gnostic, Early Christia n, and Islamic Metaphor.'' In Women's

Studies of the Christian and Islamic Traditions, ed. Kari Elisabeth Børresen and Kari Vogt,

217–42. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.

Warner, Marina. 1981. Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism . Berkeley: University of California

Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399803

Microaggressions

SONNY NORDMARKEN

Microaggressions are commonplace, interpersonally communicated, ''othering''

messages related to a person's perceived marginalized status (Pierce et al. 1977; Sue

2010). These denigrations are often active manifestations of derogatory stereo-

types. Invisible to many deliverers and recipients, they reproduce oppression on

the interpersonal level. Examining microaggressions lays bare distinct ways in

which gender as a dynamic system of power takes shape in trans and gender-

nonconforming people's everyday lives.

Microaggressions are routine in social interaction; all social actors deliver

them. These often unconscious and unintentional messages manifest as brief,

unthinking slights, snubs, insults, or other indignities, frequently embedded

within a stream of communication (Sue 2010). They are verbal, nonverbal, and

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environmental, and they can appear in facial expressions, body language, ter-

minology, representation, or remarks. Microaggressions can be confusing to

receive, difﬁcult to notice, pinpoint, or recognize, and particularly challenging to

address (ibid.). Recipients feel microaggressions' cumulative impact in stress and

somatic effects comparable to those caused by a catastrophically traumatic event

(ibid.). Some common effects are: chronic health problems and persistent feelings

of alienation, anxiety, anger, depression, fear, hypervigilance, fatigue, hopeless-

ness and/or suicidality (Goldblum et al. 2012; Grossman and D'Augelli 2007;

Kosciw et al. 2010; Pauly 1990; Schrock, Boyd, and Leaf 2009).

Trans and gender-nonconforming people encounter microaggressions

in a number of realms in their everyday lives, such as workplaces and public

restrooms, and from family members, friends, therapists, medical providers,

security workers, and strangers (Kidd and Witten 2008). Microaggressors express

a perception of otherness, which they may associate with one or more char-

acteristics such as disability, race, gender, or class. Some microaggressions are

related to a perceived transness or gender nonconformity. For instance, micro-

agressors scrutinize, exoticize, sexualize, or fetishize trans people (Nadal, Skolnik,

and Wong 2012; Serano 2007), using such terms as ''tranny,'' ''she-male,'' ''he-she,''

or ''chicks with dicks''; asking gender- and sex-related questions about a person's

body, genitalia, identity, or history; expressing concern about a trans person

interacting with children; implying that gender-afﬁrmation surgeries constitute

''mutilation'' or that trans people are ''mentally ill'' or ''freakish''; approaching

non–sex-worker trans women for paid sex; offering intended compliments such

as ''you turned out so cute'' or ''I never would have known''; evaluating a person's

gender presentation; exposing a person's trans identity (Nordmarken 2012). Many

of these actions reﬂect erroneous, dehumanizing stereotypes about trans people

that are represented in news stories, ﬁlms, and other media (Serano 2007). Thus

microaggressions maintain cis-sexism, or the idea that trans people are inferior to

and less authentic than cisgender (non-trans) people (ibid.).

Besides manifesting stereotypes, many microaggressions targeting trans

and gender-nonconforming people are active manifestations of conventional

ways of thinking about gender. Due to the dearth of accurate information on

transgender phenomena in public circulation, microaggressors misunderstand or

misinterpret trans and gender-nonconforming people's gender identities, inva-

lidating their experiences of reality and at times conﬂating sexual nonnormativity

with gender nonnormativity. Microaggressors address trans people with incorrect

gender pronouns, call them by former names, inquire about their ''real'' identity,

ask them to explain their gender identity, and deny or fail to acknowledge their

pronouns, name, or identity (Nadal, Skolnik, and Wong 2012; Nordmarken 2012;

Nordmarken and Kelly, forthcoming). This ''misgendering'' takes place because

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microaggressors assume that they have the ability to know a trans person's ''true''

identity and that their perception of a trans person is more valid than the

trans person's own self-knowledge—what Julia Serano calls ''gender entitlement''

(2007: 9). Gender entitlement and the cultural conﬂation of sexed anatomy and

gender identity result in a rhetoric of deception, where microaggressors cast trans

people as ''deceivers'' or ''pretenders'' who ''hide'' what microaggressors imagine

are trans people's ''true selves'' (Bettcher 2007). Some microaggressors intend to

legitimate trans people's identities but, problematically, assume that all trans

people are the same (Nadal, Skolnik, and Wong 2012). They might apply the

''wrong body'' narrative to those who do not experience their gender in such a

way (Nordmarken and Kelly, forthcoming).

Microaggressors may communicate disgust, dismissal, apprehension, con-

fusion, shock, surprise, skepticism, disbelief, agitation, or other discomfort when

noticing or being alerted to a person's transness. They can become defensive

when corrected or reminded about their misuse of pronouns (Nadal, Rivera,

and Corpus 2010). They may stare, do double takes, avoid eye contact or prox-

imity, look away, laugh, or become silent (Nordmarken 2012, 2014; Nordmarken

and Kelly, forthcoming). They may make excuses for or apologize excessively

for misgendering, drawing more attention to and drawing out the uncomfortable

interaction (Nordmarken 2012); conversely, they may deny that they have com-

municated something cis-sexist or transphobic or they may deny that cis-sexism

and transphobia exist (Nadal, Skolnik, and Wong 2012). Regardless of intention,

microaggressive behaviors often indicate that individuals perceive difference,

communicating othering messages.

Although many trans people encounter microaggressions, they have var-

ied experiences. Various institutionalized oppression systems, such as sexism,

racism, poverty, and ageism exacerbate the impact of transphobia. Across

trans populations, multiply marginalized groups encounter the most discrimi-

nation. Socioeconomically disadvantaged trans people experience the highest

rates of discrimination and violence (Lombardi et al. 2001). Trans people of color

encounter more discrimination than white trans people, and African Ameri-

can trans people encounter the most of all racial groups (Grant et al. 2011). Trans

women and other trans-feminine people contend with trans-misogyny, or a

combination of transphobia, cis-sexism, and misogyny (Serano 2007). They thus

encounter particular kinds of gendered microaggressions that certain trans men

and trans-masculine people avoid. For example, in the workplace, employers tend

to demote or ﬁre transitioning trans women or dock their pay, while they tend to

support transitioning trans men, incorporating them into patriarchal social

hierarchies (Schilt 2010; Schilt and Wiswall 2008). Ageism also intensiﬁes trans

people's vulnerabilities. Trans youth and elders whose families reject them face

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homelessness and/or abuse at the hands of their caregivers (Denny 2007; Witten

and Eyler 1999; Witten and Whittle 2005).

The translation of stereotype into action can have far-reaching, overtly

oppressive, systemic effects, from pathologization to murder. A complete picture

of the subjugation trans people contend with is beyond the scope of this article, but

a brief overview follows. The idea that trans people are mentally ill is institution-

alized in psychiatric texts such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders (American Psychiatric Association 2013) and thus also in medical and

legal transition routes. Many social institutions and sites of social life, such as

medical systems, workplaces, families, and religious communities openly exclude

trans people (Flynn 2006; Grant et al. 2011). State programs and institutions, such as

public medical systems, prisons, and immigration detention centers, host regular

harassment and abuse, refuse trans people services, and, at times, host violence

(Benson 2008–9; Gehi and Arkles 2007; Howe, Zaraysky, and Lorentzen 2008;

Namaste 2000; O'Day-Senior 2008; Spade 2011). In addition, trans individuals face

harassment, threats, and violence on the street and in other public spaces (Kidd and

Witten 2008). While overt denigrations are not microaggressions, they represent

the systemic effects of unacknowledged injustice, maintaining an institution of

cis-sexism and a cis-normative culture that privileges and normalizes cisgender

experiences. Thus the invisibility of microaggressions and other cis-sexist actions

plays a signiﬁcant role in maintaining the power of the dominant gender system.

Sonny Nordmarken is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Massachusetts,

Amherst. His dissertation examines affect and power in trans people's everyday interactions.

He is author of ''Becoming Ever More Monstrous: Feeling Transgender In-Betweenness'' (Qua-

litative Inquiry, January 2014) and, with Reese C. Kelly, ''Limiting Transgender Health:

Administrative Violence and Microaggressions in Healthcare Systems'' in Left Out: Health Care

Issues Facing LGBT People (forthcoming).

References

American Psychiatric Association. 2013. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

5th ed. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing.

Benson, Christi Jo. 2008–9. ''Crossing Borders: A Focus on Treatment of Transgender Individuals

in U.S. Asylum Law and Society.'' Whittier Law Review 30, no. 1: 41–66.

Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2007. ''Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the

Politics of Illusion.'' Hypatia 22, no. 3: 43–65.

Denny, Dallas. 2007. ''Transgender Identities and Bisexual Expression: Implications for Coun-

selors.'' In Becoming Visible: Counseling Bisexuals across the Lifespan, ed. B. Firestein,

268–84. New York: Columbia University Press.

132 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

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Flynn, Taylor. 2006. ''The Ties That [Don't] Bind: Transgender Family Law and the Unmaking of

Families.'' In Transgender Rights , ed. Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon P.

Minter, 32–50. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gehi, Pooja S., and Gabriel Arkles. 2007. ''Unraveling Injustice: Race and Class Impact of Med-

icaid Exclusions of Transition-Related Health Care for Transgender People.'' Sexuality

Research and Social Policy: Journal of NSRC 4, no. 4: 7–35.

Goldblum, Peter, et al. 2012. ''The Relationship between Gender-Based Victimization and Suicide

Attempts in Transgender People.'' Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 43, no. 5:

468–75.

Grant, Jaime M., et al. 2011. ''Executive Summary: Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National

Transgender Discrimination Survey.'' Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender

Equality and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. www.thetaskforce.org/reports

_and_research/ntds (accessed August 22, 2013).

Grossman, A. H., and A. R. D'Augelli. 2007. ''Transgender Youth and Life-Threatening Behaviors.''

Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 37, no. 5: 527–37.

Howe, C., S. Zaraysky, and L. Lorentzen. 2008. ''Transgender Sex Workers and Sexual Transmi-

gration between Guadalajara and San Francisco.'' Latin American Perspectives 35, no. 1:

31–50.

Kidd, Jeremy, and Tarynn Witten. 2008. ''Transgender and Transsexual Identities: The Next

Strange Fruit—Hate Crimes, Violence, and Genocide against the Global Trans-

Communities.'' Journal of Hate Studies 6, no. 1: 31–63.

Kosciw, J. G., et al. 2010. The 2009 National School Climate Survey: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay,

Bisexual, and Transgender Youth in Our Nation's Schools. New York: GLSEN.

Lombardi, Emilia L., et al. 2001. ''Gender Violence.'' Journal of Homosexuality 42, no. 1: 89–101.

Nadal, Kevin L., David Rivera, and Melissa Corpus. 2010. ''Sexual Orientation and Transgender

Microaggressions: Implications for Mental Health and Counseling.'' In Microaggressions

and Marginality: Manifestation, Dynamics, and Impact, ed. Derald Wing Sue, 217–40. New

Jersey: Wiley.

Nadal, Kevin L., Avy Skolnik, and Yinglee Wong. 2012. ''Interpersonal and Systemic Micro-

aggressions toward Transgender People: Implications for Counseling.'' Journal of LBGT

Issues in Counseling 6, no. 1: 55–82.

Namaste, Viviane. 2000. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgender People.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nordmarken, Sonny. 2012. ''Everyday Transgender Emotional Inequality: Microaggressions,

Micropolitics, and Minority Emotional Work.'' Paper presented at the annual meeting of

the American Sociological Association, Denver, August 20.

———. 2014. ''Becoming Ever More Monstrous: Feeling Transgender In-Betweenness.'' Quali-

tative Inquiry 20, no. 1: 37–50.

Nordmarken, Sonny, and Reese Kelly. Forthcoming. ''Limiting Transgender Health: Adminis-

trative Violence and Microaggressions in Healthcare Systems.'' In Left Out: Health Care

Issues Facing LGBT People, ed. Vickie Harvey and Teresa Housel. Lanham, MD: Lex-

ington Books.

O'Day-Senior, Dana. 2008. ''The Forgotten Frontier? Healthcare for Transgender Detainees in

Immigration and CustomsEnforcement Detention.'' Hastings Law Journal 60, no. 2: 453–77.

Pauly, Ira B. 1990. ''Gender Identity Disorders: Evaluation and Treatment.'' Journal of Sex Edu-

cation and Therapy 16, no. 1: 2–24.

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Pierce, Chester M., et al. 1977. ''An Experiment in Racism: TVCommercials.'' Education and Urban

Society 10, no. 1: 61–87.

Schilt, Kristen. 2010. Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender

Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schilt, Kristen, and Matthew Wiswall. 2008. ''Before and After: Gender Transitions, Human

Capital, and Workplace Experiences.'' B.E. Journal of Economics and Policy 8, no. 1: 1–26.

Schrock, Douglas, Emily M. Boyd, and Margaret Leaf. 2009. ''Emotion Work in the Public Per-

formances of Male-to-Female Transsexuals.'' Archives of Sexual Behavior 38, no. 5: 702–12.

Serano, Julia. 2007. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of

Femininity. Emeryville, CA: Seal.

Spade, Dean. 2011. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of

Law. Brooklyn, NY: South End.

Sue, Derald Wing. 2010. Microaggressions and Marginality: Manifestation, Dynamics, and Impact.

Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Witten, T. M., and Stephen Whittle. 2005. ''TransPanthers: The Graying of Transgender and the

Law.'' Deakin Law Review 9, no. 2: 503–22.

Witten, T. M., and A. E. Eyler. 1999. ''Hate Crimes and Violence against the Transgendered.'' Peace

Review 11, no. 3: 461–68.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399812

Monster

ANSON KOCH-REIN

The monster is an ambivalent ﬁgure recurring in trans* discourse. When trans*

people are cast as less than human, the monster (and the creature from Mary

Shelley's Frankenstein in particular) is often the metaphor of choice. 1970s separatist

feminist Mary Daly (1978) and Janice G. Raymond (1979) used the image of Fran-

kenstein's monster to depict trans* women's surgically modiﬁed bodies as danger-

ous and unnatural; similar depictions circulate in crime shows (''Ch-Ch-Changes ''

2004) and Hollywood ﬁlms (TheSilenceoftheLambs[dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991]).

The varied transphobic uses of the monster trope often draw on ideas of physical

monstrosity to uphold their naturalization of binary sex and gender.

In a world where the monster is circulating as metaphoric violence against

trans* people, reclaiming such a ﬁgure faces the difﬁculty of formulating resis-

tance in the same metaphorical language as the transphobic attack. Moreover, as

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a ﬁgure of difference, the monster appears in racist, ableist, homophobic, and

sexist discourses, making its use especially fraught. Still, we cannot simply dismiss

the monster for its history or injurious potential. It is precisely the monster's

ambivalent ability to speak to oppression and negative affect that appeals to trans*

people reclaiming the monster for their own voices.

Trans* metaphorizations of the monster draw from implications of mon-

strosity way beyond the idea of monstrous bodies. Sometimes trans* authors

describe the embodiment before a desired medical transition as a monstrous

experience. More often, however, trans* references to the monster are a way of

addressing feelings of gender dysphoria and alienation rather than characteristics

of a body. In addition, the trans* monster is claimed as a site of agency that

negotiates a queerly complex relationship to nature, origin narratives, and lan-

guage. In her seminal piece ''My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of

Chamounix,'' Susan Stryker ([1994] 2006) uses the eloquent monster of Fran-

kenstein to interpret trans* embodiment and rage against a culture that natu-

ralizes the sexual binarism and denies gendered recognition to trans* people.

Transgender studies, rather than refuting the attribution of monstrosity, has

called for its embrace to restructure the world in such a way that it makes livable

what is now deemed monstrous gender (see, e.g., Hale 1998).

The monster, then, is a central ﬁgure in representations of trans*, serving

widely divergent narratives of transphobic insult and trans* resistance alike.

Anson Koch-Rein is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory

University. His dissertation, ''Mirrors, Monsters, Metaphors: Transgender Rhetorics and Dys-

phoric Knowledge,'' is scheduled for completion in spring 2014.

References

''Ch-Ch-Changes.'' 2004. Episode of CSI , dir. Richard J. Lewis. Paramount. November 18.

Daly, Mary. 1978. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism . Boston: Beacon.

Hale, C. Jacob. 1998. ''Tracing a Ghostly Memory in My Throat: Reﬂections of Ftm Feminist Voice

and Agency.'' In Men Doing Feminism , ed. Tom Digby, 99–129. New York: Routledge.

Raymond, Janice G. 1979. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male . New York: Tea-

chers College Press.

Stryker, Susan. (1994) 2006. ''My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix:

Performing Transgender Rage.'' In The Transgender Studies Reader , ed. Susan Stryker and

Stephen Whittle, 244–56. New York: Routledge.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399821

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Nature

OLIVER BENDORF

I am driving across the tawny plains of Nebraska, imagining nature launching a

marketing campaign aimed at transgender folks. Nature: No Therapist's Letter or

Passport Required! I like to think that nature's marketing executive would pass over

trans metaphors that engage nature in cliche

´d ways: ''trapped,'' the metamorphic

butterﬂy, a rare bird. Talk to me about a winged rabbit or an eight-legged turtle or a

bucktoothed squirrel. Freaks of nature, biodiversity—I am thinking about what these

concepts really mean, how transgender studies and nature can begin to shed some light.

What is natural, anyway? Nature matters for transgender studies because

of how we map (and are mapped) along boundaries of inside and out, natural and

unnatural. Bats are a protected species, but that did not stop my landlord from

killing one when it would not ''stay outside where it belongs!'' Where do we belong?

Transgender studies can shepherd us beyond ''tired gendered portrayals of

earth-mother-goddess nature'' (Beyer 2010) and toward re-genderings of natural

space. It is Camp Ida, in Tennessee. It is in urban parks, like San Francisco. It is me

last summer, when I squatted to piss behind a log cabin and my packer fell on the

dirt. If a packer falls out in the forest and no one is around to see it, am I still trans?

Nature: The Original Gender-Neutral Bathroom.

What does a transgender pastoral look like? What does trans do to our

visions of country life and green space? A transgender pastoral may be verdant

and bucolic, but the reality is occasionally interrupted by transphobes, cunning or

dumb, who howl and leave their scat.

And yet my Google search for ''transgender pastoral'' yields only results

about ministry care for transgender folks. Nature, transgender, and this idea of

care: who is caring for whom? What will transgender studies do with the envi-

ronment, pumped up with chemicals these days, its roof on ﬁre? Nature: Not

Hormone Free, Either. I want to know what transgender studies will say on envi-

ronmental education research and vice versa.

I am still driving across Nebraska, thinking about trans ecologies. I am

watching a chain of geese across the sky, several V formations linked together, and

I think about all the trans people I know who have ﬂocked to San Francisco and those

who have not. Transgender studies might ﬁnd a bridge between critical theory,

landscape ecology, and animal behavior to think about how we form communities

and navigate vulnerability in metropolitan and rural areas (Ingram 2010). Nature: If

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You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Already. Transgender studies can create a discourse

inwhichnatureisnotthecisgenderspaceithasbeenmadeouttobe.Imeanlinks

between transgender and nature that are, for once, not just about our genitals, though

they can be about that too. I want theoretical critique and art and song about species

(McWhorter 2010) and biodiversity and evolution and instinct and habitat.

When was the ﬁrst time you saw nature and knew it as yourself ? In a tornado?

On the wings of a camouﬂaged moth? Nature is something the nimbus says to the

spotted cow, and we are trans inside of it. Nature: Relax, You'll Look Good Here. I

went into nature to try to ﬁnd the Bellbird (Anderson-Minshall 2012), but I only found

myself. The Bellbird has feather patterns deemed female but a distinctly masculine

call. I could say I know how it feels, but I do not, because trans is our species'

word, not the Bellbird's. We are wild animals still learning how to wield our tool of

language, sometimes too dull, sometimes too sharp. Nature is something the

blade of grass hollers up to Orion's Belt, and we are still trans inside of it.

I got tired of learning masculinity from humans, so I studied the male

wren, building his nest twig by twig, singing a sweet song to attract a mate, feeding

his young via beak. I studied the barred owl, solitary witness calling out to others

from his perch high up in an old burr oak, his hoot more oxygen than my bound

lungs are able to manage. I learned from three little dairy goat boys, castrated,

never to be angry bucks. My masculinity is a cross-species ''biomimicry,'' cherry-

picked day to day (Nature: There's Something for Everyone), and whether this

makes me natural or unnatural, I cannot say.

Oliver Bendorf is a master's degree candidate in library and information studies at the Uni-

versity of Wisconsin–Madison, where he recently earned his MFA in poetry. His book The

Spectral Wilderness was chosen for the 2013 Wick Poetry Prize and is forthcoming.

References

Anderson-Minshall, Diane. 2012. ''The World's First Transgender Bellbird Discovered in New

Zealand.'' Advocate , October 17. www.advocate.com/society/coming-out/2012/10/17/ﬁrst

-transgender-bellbird-discovered-new-zealand.

Beyer, Tamiko. 2010. ''Notes towards a Queer::Eco::Poetics.'' Doveglion Press. November 29. www

.doveglion.com/2010/11/notes-towards-a-queerecopoetics-by-tamiko-beyer.

Ingram, Gordon Brent. 2010. ''Fragments, Edges, and Matrices: Retheorizing the Formation of a

So-Called Gay Ghetto through Queering Landscape Ecology.'' In Queer Ecologies: Sex,

Nature, Politics, Desire, ed. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, 254–83.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

McWhorter, Ladelle. ''Enemy of the Species.'' In Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, Queer

Ecologies, 73–101.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399830

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Nomad Science

HILARY MALATINO

''Nomad science'' is a concept that appears in the twelfth plateau (''1227: Treatise

on Nomadology—the War Machine'') of Gilles Deleuze and Fe

´lix Guattari's A

Thousand Plateaus (1987: 361), counterposed to a companionate concept coined

''state science.'' These terms offer two distinct, incommensurable ways of thinking

about bodily matter and embodied form. Nomad science emphasizes the mal-

leable, ﬂuid, and metamorphic nature of being, while state science conceptualizes

being as solid, essential, and unchanging.Given the antiessentialist focus of nomad

science, it is a particularly helpful concept in thinking transgender, transsexual,

and gender-nonconforming modes of embodiment, particularly those that exceed

or actively contest medical understandings of trans* identity. Conversely, state

science is a useful heuristic for considering the medical and psychiatric patholo-

gization of trans* and gender-nonconforming subjects.

Nomad science is in dense dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari's theori-

zation of nomadology. Nomadology is the study of wandering subjectivities, of

beings that drift from predetermined or normative paths, particularly those paths

determined and regulated by apparatuses of the state. For Deleuze and Guattari,

nomadism is a form of life that is shaped by continual embarkation on lines of

ﬂight—that is, modes of escape, moments of transformation, ways of becoming

other-than-normative, and ways of acting in excess of, or insubordinately in rela-

tionship to, repressive forces. Lines of ﬂight have the capacity to deterritorialize,

to undo, to free up, to break out of a system or situation of control, ﬁxity, or

repression.

Nomad science, by extension, concerns itself with experiments and

inventions that are fundamentally deterritorializing, while state science is, by

counterpoint, fundamentally reterritorializing . To territorialize an entity is to set

and deﬁne its limits, to organize component parts into a coherent whole deter-

mined by a speciﬁc end. Deleuze and Guattari write that ''state science continually

imposes its form of sovereignity on the inventions of nomad science'' (1987: 365);

in other words, state science imposes a particular logic of organization on nomadic

beings, curtailing and taming the creative inventiveness of these beings.

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Deleuze and Guattari outline the salient aspects of this imposition: state

science privileges the ﬁxed over the metamorphic; it seeks to establish transhis-

torical, universally true theories rather than exploring speciﬁc, singular instances;

in doing so, it fetishizes the eternal, the stable, and the constant, and it thus

develops ﬁxed, immutable, and essential understandings of being. State science is

incapable of conceptualizing beings as they are caught up in ﬂuid processes of

becoming.

Fluids are known for their malleability, their capacity for transformation,

their capacity to adjust and recalibrate at the molecular level; when one investi-

gates ﬂuid phenomena, one asks what a ﬂuid is doing in a given situation, inter-

action, or milieu. That is, one focuses on the hows and whys of transforma-

tion. When investigating solids, on the other hand, very different properties are

assumed, and these assumed properties generate very different sets of questions.

Solids are ﬁrmly delimited entities. They have stable boundaries rather than

blurred or porous ones; they exist as beings unto themselves. Thus a science

concerned with solids tends to also be concerned with establishing the charac-

teristics that make delimited entities what they are . Unlike dealing with ﬂuids,

where the emphasis is on transformation, with solids the emphasis falls on

questions of essence that seek to establish attributes that render a solid what it is

through contradistinction with what is not.

It is important to bear in mind that Deleuze and Guattari insist on under-

standing this alternative view of materiality as a science. This is because they

propose a formal conceptual system consisting of a set of theorems that help

elicit a different understanding of embodiment. They propose a series of rules

of thumb (rather than laws—eschewing the juridical language of conventional

scientiﬁc practice) that enable one to encounter the physical world anew, and to

counter the hidebound cognition of materiality enforced by state science.

The tactic of establishing essence through contradistinction is central to

the medical pathologization of trans* and gender-nonconforming subjects, which

utilizes this tactic to produce gender stereotypes used in the diagnoses of gender

identity disorder and gender dysphoria. These stereotypes are necessary to the

functioning of the state science of diagnosing gender difference; they are utilized

to establish dyadic essences of gender that are then codiﬁed within diagnos-

tic criteria. Although the medicalization of gender nonconformance has led to

development of guidelines and protocols for transition and would thus seem to be

linked to a more ﬂuid conception of gender, these practical protocols are nev-

ertheless built upon conservative typologies of maleness and femaleness. They are

not concerned with transition as a (potentially always unﬁnished) process but

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rather with the creation and suturing of ﬁrmly delimited, discrete, and binarily

gendered entities. A nomad science of transition, however, would focus on the

speciﬁc, resistant, and creative ways in which trans* and gender-nonconforming

subjects reinvent and reconstruct themselves in manners irreducible to the

medical logic of transition.

We can track a resonant preoccupation with thinking embodiment beyond

static, dimorphic understandings of gender in a number of foundational texts in

trans* studies. Susan Stryker asserts, early in her career, that trans* bodies should

be understood as in excess of what is commonly understood as natural and that

they therefore destabilize ''the foundational presupposition of ﬁxed genders upon

which a politics of personal identity depends'' (1994: 238). Sandy Stone, similarly,

takes issue with the narrative of transsexuality offered by clinicians and calls for a

counternarrative of embodiment, writing that ''for a transsexual, as a transsexual,

to generate a true, effective and representational counterdiscourse is to speak from

outside the boundaries of gender, beyond the constructed oppositional nodes

which have been predeﬁned as the only positions from which discourse is possible''

(1991: 300). This shared conception of trans* embodiment as in excess of con-

ventional understandings of materiality has its afterlives in contemporary criti-

cisms of the regulatory mechanisms of trans* diagnosis and medical treatment.

Dean Spade has written extensively on this topic (2003, 2006, 2011), as has Lucas

Cassidy Crawford, who utilizes the conceptual vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari

to think about trans embodiment as a kind of ''affective deterritorialization'' rather

than a way of ''coming home'' to one of two ideal gender types (2008: 134).

Hilary Malatino is the assistant director of women's studies at East Tennessee State University.

Her recent publications include ''The Waiting Room: Ontological Homelessness, Sexual

Synecdoche, and Queer Becoming'' (Journal of Medical Humanities , June 2013) and ''Utopian

Pragmatics: Bash Back! and the Temporality of Radical Queer Action,'' in A Critical Inquiry into

Queer Utopias (2013).

References

Crawford, Lucas Cassidy. 2008. ''Transgender without Organs? Mobilizing a Geo-affective Theory

of Gender Modiﬁcation.'' Women's Studies Quarterly 36, no. 3–4: 127–43.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Fe

´lix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus . Minneapolis: University of Min-

nesota Press.

Spade, Dean. 2003. ''Resisting Medicine/Remodeling Gender.'' Berkeley Women's Law Journal 15,

no. 1: 15–37.

———. 2006. ''Mutilating Gender.'' In The Transgender Studies Reader , ed. Susan Stryker and

Stephen Whittle, 315–32. New York: Routledge.

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———. 2011. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law.

Boston: South End.

Stone, Sandy. 1991. ''The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.'' In Body Guards: The

Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, 280–304. New

York: Routledge.

Stryker, Susan. 1994. ''My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Per-

forming Transgender Rage.'' GLQ 1, no. 3: 237–54.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399839

Normal

ELIZABETH STEPHENS

Unlike other key terms in transgender studies, there is no comprehensive criti-

cal genealogy of the concept of ''normal'' or ''normality.'' Recently, a number of

studies have examined particular episodes in this history: Creadick (2010) and

Adams (1997) have looked at the postwar years, while Warner (1999) has examined

the late twentieth century. Despite the lack of a long history of normality, how-

ever, critiques of normality occupy a central position in many areas of critical

theory, which have examined the way the ''regime of the normal'' (Warner 1999)

has come to shape the lives of those whose sexualities, genders, and/or bodies do

not conform to normative assumptions about them. Beginning with Michael

Warner's landmark identiﬁcation of queer as that which opposes ''not just the

normal behavior of the social but the idea of normal behavior'' (1993: xxvii),

critiques of the normal and of normativity have occupied a central position in

queer studies (e.g., Halperin 1997; Halberstam 2005), critical disability studies

(e.g., Garland Thomson 1996; Davis 1995), studies of bodily difference (e.g.,

Dreger 2004), gender variance (e.g., Halberstam 2012), transgender studies (e.g.,

Spade 2011), and postcolonialism (e.g., Carter 2007). The ongoing proliferation of

such critiques is a reﬂection of how privileged the idea of normality remains. For

Warner, the desire for normality is one of the deﬁnitive characteristics of the late

twentieth century: ''Everyone, it seems, wants to be normal. . . . What immortality

was to the Greeks, what virtu

`was to Machiavelli's prince, what faith was to the

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martyrs, what honor was to the slave owners, what glamor is to drag queens,

normalcy is to the contemporary American'' (1999: 53).

Given its cultural ubiquity and its centrality to contemporary studies of

embodiment, it is curious that the term normal and the history of which it is a part

have been subject to so little critical interrogation. What has been overlooked,

in consequence, is that the history of the normal is much more recent, and its

meaning much more unstable, than generally recognized. The word normal ﬁrst

appears in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1848. However, at the end of the

century its meaning is still so unfamiliar that it is described in the Grand Larousse

du XIXe sie

´cle as ''new in the language,'' and requiring ''from the person who hears

it for the ﬁrst time a certain effort of attention'' (quoted in Warman 2010: 203).

Etymological antecedents of the nineteenth-century normal can be dated to the

mid-eighteenth century, when the word ﬁrst appeared in two highly specialized

and apparently distinct discursive locations: geometry, in which it was used as a

less common synonym for a perpendicular line; and, second, anatomy, in which

it was paired with, and used in opposition to, the ''pathological.'' What these

instances have in common is an association of the normal with the regular: it is

''that which conforms to the rule (norma )'' (Canguilhem 1991: 125), and that which

is seen to be morally as well as geometrically upright (Warman 2010: 206–7).

For Georges Canguilhem: ''To set a norm (normer ), to normalise, is to

impose a requirement on an existence'' (1991: 239), and it is this the understanding

of the normal that informs Michel Foucault's inﬂuential theory of normalization

in Discipline and Punish . Foucault describes normalization as a practice of stan-

dardization and identiﬁes it as ''one of the great instruments of power at the end

of the classical age'' (1991: 184). Like all forms of power, Foucault argues, nor-

malization is both repressive and productive: while it ''imposes homogeneity''

(184), it is also that which constitutes the modern subject as an ''individual''

(170). Normalization does this not simply by moving subjects toward a norm —

by making them more normal — but by measuring the gaps and differences by

which they deviate from that norm. The purpose of the norm is thus to serve as an

ideal that can never be embodied but around which minutely differentiated

distances can be charted: ''When one wishes to individualise the healthy, normal

and law-abiding adult, it is always by asking him how much of the child he has in

him, what secret madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt

of committing'' (Foucault 1991: 193).

Although Foucault dates the end of the eighteenth century as the period in

which ''the power of the Norm becomes the new law of modern society'' (1991:

184), it should be remembered that the word normal is still so unfamiliar a century

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later that it is identiﬁed as linguistically new and conceptually difﬁcult, and the

concept of ''a norm'' itself did not yet exist. The term norm dates only from the

very end of the nineteenth century, emerging subsequent to the theory of ''normal

distribution'' in statistics, which is usually attributed to Francis Galton (Kevles

1985; Porter 1986). Normal distribution describes the mathematical law in which

the greater the variance from a given mean, the lower the frequency with which

it will occur (Galton 1869). Galton's statistical research was undertaken in con-

junction with his work on eugenics: biological evolution, he argued, was like

numerical variation in that it ''follows certain statistical laws, of which the best

known is the Normal Law of Frequency'' (Galton 1909: 3). For Galton, the normal

is what is both statistically most common and socially preferable; it is the average

and also an ideal.

This is the double meaning of the normal that Canguilhem examines in

The Normal and the Pathological, which focuses on the conceptual incoherence of

this term. In biology, Canguilhem notes: ''the normal state designates'' both ''the

habitual state'' of the body and its ''ideal'' (1991: 152). Canguilhem's great con-

tribution to a critical genealogy of normality — one that is of great potential

application to transgender studies—is to see the normal as a dynamic relation

rather than a static quality: ''The living being and its environment are not nor-

mal,'' he argues; ''it is their relationship that makes them such'' (143). In conse-

quence: ''There is no fact which is normal or pathological in itself. An anomaly

or a mutation is not in itself pathological. These two express other possible norms

of life'' (144).

We might bear this in mind when considering the context in which the

concept ''normal subject'' ﬁrst emerges: in and through the work of the biologist

and sexologist Alfred Kinsey (Igo 2007). A few short decades later, the idea of

''normal'' sexuality and gender occupy such a privileged role in John Money's

writing on gender roles and reassignment that it constitutes a form of paraphilia

itself, Lisa Downing argues, which we might term ''normophilia'' (Downing 2010).

This instability in the concept of the normal—in which it is both the average and

the ideal, a habitual state and the object of excess or obsession—underpins its

ambiguous role in contemporary studies of sexuality and gender, in which it

continues to mark an important fault line between queer and transgender studies

(Stryker 2004). For this reason, we might productively return to the apparently

obsolete original meaning of the normal in geometry: a perpendicular line. Here,

as in Canguilhem's critique of theories of biological normativity, the ''normal'' is

ontologically relational, describing not a ﬁxed thing but an orientation of one

thing in relation to another.

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Elizabeth Stephens is an ARC Senior Research Fellow and deputy director of the Centre for the

History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. Her publications include

Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present (2011 and 2013)

and Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet's Fiction (2009).

References

Adams, Mary Louise. 1997. The Trouble With Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Hetero-

sexuality. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Canguilhem, Georges. 1991. The Normal and the Pathological . With an introduction by Michel

Foucault. London: Zone.

Carter, Julian. 2007. The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Creadick, Anna. 2010. Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America . Amherst:

University of Massachusetts Press.

Davis, Lennard. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body . London: Verso.

Downing, Lisa. 2010. ''John Money's 'Normophilia': Diagnosing Sexual Normality in Late-

Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Sexology.'' Psychology and Sexuality 1, no. 3: 275–87.

Dreger, Alice Domurat. 2004. One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal . Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . London: Penguin.

Galton, Francis. 1869. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences . London:

Macmillan.

———. 1909. Essays in Eugenics . London: Eugenics Education Society.

Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. 1996. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in Amer-

ican Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.

Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives .New

York: New York University Press.

———. 2012. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal . Boston: Beacon.

Halperin, David. 1997. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography . New York: Oxford University

Press.

Igo, Sarah. 2007. The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kevles, Daniel. 1985. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity . Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Porter, Theodor. 1986. The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 . Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-

versity Press.

Spade, Dean. 2011. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of

Law. Brooklyn, NY: South End.

Susan Stryker. 2004. ''Transgender Studies: Queer Theory's Evil Twin.'' GLQ 10, no. 2: 212–15.

Warman, Caroline. 2010. ''From Pre-normal to Abnormal: The Emergence of a Concept in Late

Eighteenth-Century France.'' Psychology and Sexuality 1, no. 3: 200–213.

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Warner, Michael, ed. 1993. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory . Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

———. 1999. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and Ethics of Queer Life . Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399848

Pedagogy

FRANCISCO J. GALARTE

Pedagogy, narrowly construed, is the study of teaching and learning; more gen-

erally, it pertains to the social construction of knowledge, values, and experi-

ences. The common assumption that the classroom is the exclusive site where

pedagogy transpires is challenged by educational theorists such as Henry A.

Giroux (2004), Antonia Darder (2002), and bell hooks (1994), whose deﬁnitions

of pedagogy extend it beyond the classroom and who, like Paolo Freire, advance

a conception of pedagogy as a ''practice of freedom'' (Freire 2000: 80). Freire

similarly redeﬁnes ''educator'' to mean more than a mere classroom instructor;

for him, being an educator should encompass the multiple perspectives of

''border intellectual, social activist, critical researcher, moral agent, radical phi-

losopher, and political revolutionary'' (Darder 2002: 249). Pedagogy, broadly

deﬁned in this way, engages questions of teaching and learning with questions

of culture and power, of democracy and citizenship. It points to the multiplicity

of sites (corporeal, spatial, temporal, psychic) in which education takes place and

where, most importantly, knowledge is produced.

Transgender studies, as a framework or lens through which to theorize the

myriad ways in which people understand, name, experience, and claim gender

in relationship to such other processes as racialization, class, nationalism, and

globalization, needs to incorporate a critical pedagogical perspective. In the 2008

Women's Studies Quarterly special ''Trans-'' issue, Vic Mun

˜oz and Ednie Kaeh

Garrison coined the term transpedagogies (291), seeking a word to capture

the dialogic relationship between trans subjects and pedagogical practices. They

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envisioned the term as a ''coalitional concept'' that encompassed transsexual,

transgender, and gender/queer perspectives, through which an analysis of the

production of knowledge could be linked conceptually to varying experiences of

gender socialization or gender identity in diverse contexts.

What might such a transpedagogy encompass? A pedagogical perspective

on transgender studies should, at a minimum, note that teaching and learning

about transgender phenomena take place across a spectrum of social practices

and locations and that transpedagogies are part of a broader public politics

not solely limited to what goes on in schools. But more expansively, a pedagog-

ical perspective on transgender phenomena can also help unsettle historically

and contextually speciﬁc knowledge(s) that shape understandings of normative

gender. Transpedagogies should offer students the tools they need to participate

in the political and economic power structures that shape the boundaries of

gender categories, with the goal of changing those structures in ways that create

greater freedom. In a transpedagogical approach, processes of learning become

political mechanisms through which identities can be shaped and desires

mobilized and through which the experience of bodily materiality and everyday

life can take form and acquire meaning.

Transpedagogies supply a discursive mode of critique for challenging the

production of social hierarchies, identities, and ideologies across local and

national boundaries. They represent both a mode of cultural production and a

type of cultural criticism for questioning the conditions under which knowledge

of gendered embodiment is produced. They provide a space for affective engage-

ment, for the afﬁrmation or rejection of values, and for the inhabitation, nego-

tiation, or refusal of culturally prescribed gendered subject positions. Under-

standing pedagogy as a mode of cultural production in this way underscores its

performative nature. It is how theory becomes practice.

The proliferation of culture via new communication technologies and

social media further shifts the production, reception, and consumption of

knowledge about gender diversity. It allows for new and alternative modes of

access to knowledge and for fresh ways of knowing that purposefully resist

normative bodily comportment and that confound the boundaries of gender.

Such technologies of the self create a space for what Chela Sandoval has called

''differential maneuvering,'' where ''the transcultural, transgendered, transsexual,

transnational leaps necessary to the play of effective stratagems of oppositional

praxis'' can begin articulating themselves (2000: 63).

Stratagems of oppositional praxis are precisely what critical transpeda-

gogical practices should aim to produce: they must shift the framework avail-

able for understanding, describing, and addressing the multiple and varying

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vulnerabilities to violence faced by transgender subjects. As Dean Spade notes,

there is an uneven distribution of vulnerability and violence across trans popu-

lations, and such harms are not fully described or addressed by the single vector

of transphobia (2010: 447). Paying attention to the highly variable and sometimes

contradictory narratives that transgender subjects actually use to describe and

explain their experiences of classist, racist, sexist, and ableist exploitation is a

necessary pedagogical practice. It situates knowledge production in speciﬁc or

local ''acts of knowing.''

Centering the transgender body as a site of knowledge production is a

crucial transpedagogy. It creates new opportunities for teaching and learning by

working to understand how transfolk critically understand their places in the

world and tactically maneuver through it (i.e., how they negotiate relations of

power, privilege, and subordination) as well as how they actively participate in

the transformation of their world(s). This type of transpedagogy is radical to the

extent that it critiques, and can potentially transform, how power and authority

construct and organize knowledge — including knowledge of gendered desires,

values, and identities (Giroux 2004: 69). Transpedagogies are indeed ''practices

of freedom'' that can link teaching and learning to social change.

Transpedagogies must keep up with the continually shifting terms and

conditions through which gender is named, imagined, and theorized as well as

with the ongoing neoliberal depoliticization of public life and the impoverish-

ment of public discourse. Transpedagogical perspectives and approaches need to

ask how knowledge of transgender phenomena is constructed through this

absence as well as through its presence and circulation in the public sphere.

Proliferating trans-knowledges in the public sphere is only the ﬁrst step of a

radical educational agenda. The heart of effective transpedagogy, buttressed by

rigorous intellectual work and political courage, is to link theory and praxis to

create new modes of resistance and collective struggle.

Francisco J. Galarte is an assistant professor of gender and women's studies at the University

of Arizona, where he teaches Chicana/Latina studies and transgender studies.

References

Darder, Antonia. 2002. Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love . Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed . New York: Continuum.

Giroux, Henry A. 2004. ''Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellec-

tuals.'' Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 1: 59–79.

hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom . New York: Rout-

ledge.

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Mun

˜oz, Vic, and Ednie Kaeh Garrison, moderators. 2008. ''Transpedagogies: A Roundtable

Dialogue.'' Women's Studies Quarterly 36, no. 3–4: 288–308.

Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Spade, Dean. 2010. ''Introduction: Transgender Issues and the Law.'' Seattle Journal for Social

Justice 8, no. 2: 445–52.

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Performativity

KENDALL GERDES

In her 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , Judith Butler

connected the conceptual category of performativity to the formation of the

gendered subject. A performative , in its early usage by speech act theorist J. L.

Austin, names a type of utterance (such as ''I do'' or ''shame on you'') that, by

virtue of a felicitous context and relation to authority, accomplishes the action

that it also announces (Austin [1962] 1975; Felman 2003; Sedgwick 1993). In a

collection of lectures ﬁrst published in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words , the

terms of Austin's classifying system proliferate and repeatedly break down in a

demonstration of how even descriptive language's performativity—what it

does—calls into question its referentiality—what it seems to point to in the

world (Austin 1975). Gender Trouble braids speech act theory's insight into the

scandalous power of language to posit what it describes together with strands of

Lacanian psychoanalysis and poststructuralism that show that this positing power

belongs to language, to ''discourse'' in a Foucauldian register, and precisely not to

the authority of the intending subject employing language that Austin started with.

Yet a rhetoric of performativity has developed that strips it of this theo-

retical heritage and turns it into a tool for defending the power of the subject,

through the conscious presence of agential intention, to intervene in the discourse

of gender and so to free that discourse of its injurious potential. To paraphrase

the argument: ''Because I choose my gendered practices, I subvert their harmful

functions.''

This rhetoric of performativity is a much-weakened strain of the one

articulated in Gender Trouble and across Butler's subsequent work. In a sense, it

reduces performativity to performance : that is, it focuses on a single instance of a

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gendered practice and so forgets the historical chain of repetitions that makes

each instance possible. Moreover, this weakened rhetoric of performativity

allocates the positing power of the performative (whether speech act or gendering

practice) back to an impenetrable, invulnerable, and independent subject that

Butler went to psychoanalytic theory and deconstruction precisely to expose —as

already pierced, already vulnerable, and already conditioned by a linguistic and

therefore rhetorical relation. The subject does not wield the discursive power of

the performative. Discourse, language itself, ﬁrst en-genders the subject as an

effect of language's positing power.

Transgender studies is inextricably invested in the question of intention-

ality: is the subject of gender in charge or not? For some, to answer in the negative

runs the risk of also negating the ''experience of gender identity's profound

ontological claim . . . about the realness and inalienability of that identity'' (Stryker

and Whittle 2006: 183). And yet, as Sandy Stone argues in her 1987 ﬁeld-inaugu-

rating essay, ''The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,'' to treat

(trans)sexuality as an esse ntial component of one's being actually forecloses the

analysis of the complex and even contradictory ''chaos of lived gendered experi-

ence'' ([1987] 2006: 230). Treating sex or gender as if they were unalterable facts of

our being, or, on the other hand, treating them as if they were the radically alterable

selections of a freely choosing subject, or even treating them as the culturally

determined products of a socially constructed reality— each of these alternatives

misses the signiﬁcance of performativity for any theory of gender. The subject of

gender is not in charge, but exposed, addressed by the performative power of gender

rather than the addresser of it. Stone points our attention both beyond an essentialist

understanding of gender and directly at its lived embodiment. The performative

power of gender is its ceaseless materialization of gender in the ﬂesh. It is the power

not only to make bodies legible as having gendered characteristics but also to make

gender itself take place through bodies. Gender is performative because it inscribes

itself as a discourse each time it inscribes itself on a body, as a lived experience. As

Susan Stryker argues in a 1998 special transgender issue of GLQ , lived experience

''provide[s] a site for grappling with the problematic relation between principles of

performativity and a materiality that, while inescapable, deﬁes stable representa-

tion'' (147). Through the rich yield of lived experience, transgender studies must

pursue the question of performativity beyond representation. Transgender studies

is positioned, at the intersection of gender's discursivity and its materiality, to open

vital questions about the (re)formation of gender, subjectivity, bodies, and the

body. These questions demand a performative theory that can also account for the

unrepresentable experience of gender, of being addressed by gender, and so being

tossed into a rhetorical relation with it. Performativity is the connection between

gendered embodiment, gendered experience, and gender's discursive force.

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Kendall Gerdes is a PhD student in English with an emphasis in rhetoric at the University of

Texas at Austin. Her research interests include rhetorical theory, queer theory, feminisms, and

ethics; her work has been published in Kairos and in the E3W Review of Books.

Note

1. For two exemplary refutations of such claims, see J. Halberstam 1998 (303, 306) and 2011.

References

Austin, J. L. (1962) 1975. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. Edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina

Sbisa

`. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Butler, Judith. (1990) 2006. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . 2nd ed.

New York: Routledge.

Felman, Shoshana. 2003. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction

in Two Languages. Translated by Catherine Porter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press. Originally published as The Literary Speech Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1983).

Halberstam, J. 1998. ''Transgender Butch: Butch/FTM Border Wars and the Masculine Con-

tinuum.'' GLQ 4, no. 2: 287–310.

———. 2011. '' 'The Killer in Me Is the Killer in You': Homosexuality and Fascism.'' In The Queer

Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. ''Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel .'' GLQ 1,

no. 1: 1–16.

Stone, Sandy. (1987) 2006. ''The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.'' In Stryker and

Whittle, Transgender Studies Reader , 221–35.

Stryker, Susan. 1998. ''The Transgender Issue: An Introduction.'' GLQ 4, no. 2: 145–58.

Stryker, Susan, and Stephen Whittle, eds. 2006. The Transgender Studies Reader . New York:

Routledge.

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Perfume

LUCAS CRAWFORD

Transgender studies has ignored perfume—that simulation of ''essence,'' that

cheap man-musk that occupies busy-subway-space, that elixir that vaults old

lovers and dead grandmothers into the present — perhaps because of an occa-

sionally ''occularcentric'' approach (Prosser 1998: 43). To better sense that which

eludes vision, can we follow our noses with three pungent imperatives? First:

reclaim bodily decadence as a transing art of gender. Consider T. S. Eliot's forceful

association of perfume with wasteful confusion (2011: 86–89):

In vials of ivory and coloured glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused

And drowned the sense in odours

This admonishment of decadent artiﬁce is located in an open —''unstoppered'' —

vial of perfume, which Eliot describes disapprovingly as a genderqueer aesthetic

object: it revels in synthetics, de

´cor, and ﬂash, while its contents ''trouble,'' con-

fuse, and drown the habits of others. By reclaiming rather than refuting Eliot's

judgments, we can acknowledge the artiﬁce of olfactory norms and try to change

them. For instance, we can reject the sense of wealth that Eliot attributes to

perfume by revaluing the many perfumes of labour. We can eschew middle-class

norms of bodily control and hyper-hygiene in order to waft ourselves in uncon-

trollable trajectories toward the other.

Second: critique the centrality of pheromones to gender and desire. ''Super-

Primal Human Female Pheromones'' is a pheromone perfume marketed to

MTF (male-to-female) women. The website states: ''Pheromones deﬁne us to the

opposite sex. . . . Instinct tells another person that though everything looks ﬁne,

there is 'something' odd. It may be the male pheromone message the TG/CD is

radiating'' (''Female Pheromones''). Here, smell is the sensethat cannot be ''fooled.''

Even though research on human pheromones is preliminary at best, this adver-

tisement asserts that MTF women smell ''like men.'' The resultant binary economy

of smell implies that heterosexuality is hardwired, as if the role of perfume is to

solicit more heterosexual interaction through the sneaky manipulation of instinct.

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Finally, use fragrance to build a new praxis of connection and memory.

Against the binary economy described above, queer perfumer Christopher Bro-

sius has offered scents such as ''Faggot'' and ''Lipstick'' as well as a series called

''Metamorphosis.'' Brosius describes these scents as distilled motion that can be

reanimated by bodies: one scent, for instance, replicates ''the moment when one

simple beautiful gesture can transform an entire life'' (Brosius). To Brosius, the

perfumed body can activate memories that belong to others or are yet to happen

to us. The perfumative gesture can trigger such transformations of olfactory

expectation by turning time into vapor. Smells can even cloud and combine above

and around us, creating a smelled version of what Susan Stryker calls the non-

sovereign ''transsubjective ensemble'' (2008: 41). This is the transing potential of

perfume: it disrupts our sense that we live only in the present; it uses the body as

an archive that moves people; it clouds our separations; it communicates to those

who would never think of talking to us; it is gender in motion, midair and inhaled.

Lucas Crawford is Ruth Wynn Woodward Lecturer in Gender Studies at Simon Fraser University.

Lucas's poetry is forthcoming in Rattle , Rampike , PRISM International , and Between: New Gay

Poetry. Lucas's forthcoming scholarship includes articles in the Journal of Homosexualit y and

English Studies in Canada.

References

Brosius, Christopher. CB I Hate Perfume. www.cbihateperfume.com (accessed November 14,

2012).

Eliot, T. S. 2011. The Waste Land .InThe Waste Land and Other Poems, 63–83. Toronto: Broadview.

Female Pheromones. ''The Little Bit of Magic No Girl Can Be Without.'' www.thebreastformstore

.com/Pheromones.aspx (accessed November 15, 2012).

Prosser, Jay. 1998. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality . New York: Columbia

University Press.

Stryker, Susan. 2008. ''Dungeon Intimacies: The Poetics of Transsexual Sadomasochism.'' Parallax

14, no. 1: 36–47.

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Phenomenology

GAYLE SALAMON

Phenomenology is that branch of philosophy concerned with the way in which

things in the world give themselves to consciousness and with the structures

through which we experience that givenness. Phenomenological philosophy is

understood as originating with Edmund Husserl and developing throughout the

twentieth century, though as a movement in philosophy it is something more

diffuse than a coherent school of thought or an agreed-upon set of tenets, in no

small part because phenomenology was a reaction against philosophy's tradition

of grand system building. Phenomenology thus names a number of philoso-

phers concerned variously with the way in which the world presents itself to

consciousness, the fundamentally ambiguous nature of human existence and

meaning, and the shared nature of the lifeworld. It also includes branches in the

social sciences that emphasize the lifeworld in its externality and the speciﬁcity

of the social world in which individual experience is necessarily embedded,

focusing more squarely on social contexts and human relations, as in the work of

Alfred Schutz (1972). What might be said to unite these philosophers is a careful

attention to how the world appears to us and an endeavor to see anew that which

we move through everyday, a breaking out of our habitual and customary way of

perceiving, categorizing, and understanding our world. It is that endeavor to see

the familiar with new eyes—that phenomenological principle of holding in

abeyance what we know about any object, situation, or person in order to see it

freshly and more precisely — that offers itself as an incitement to reinterrogate

that which we think we know about gender and thus to radically open up the

traditional categories through which it is understood.

The preﬁx trans- has, within phenomenology, most often referred to

transcendental phenomenology, Husserl's endeavor to craft philosophy as a sci-

entiﬁc inquiry into phenomena and essences. But phenomenology can also be

understood as receptive to trans in its gendered sense, through insistence on the

importance of embodied experience to understanding the nature of self, others,

and the world. This emphasis on lived experience proves helpful in two ways. First

is the thesis that the body is fundamentally important to subjectivity, vital and

essential to it rather than a distraction from it. This might initially seem like a

position that is at odds with some variants of trans studies; one could imagine the

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objection that gender is precisely not found or determined at the level of the body.

But phenomenology offers an expansive conception of the body in which it is

more than merely its materiality, emphasizing the importance of how one feels in

and senses with and inhabits one's body. The phenomenological claim that the

body is not just something I have or use, not merely an object I haul around, but is

rather something that I am allows an understanding of the body as deﬁned and

constituted by what I feel and not simply what others see . In this phenomeno-

logical view, drawn largely from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, gender and sex can be

understood as delivered to the subject through a felt sense rather than determined

by the external contours of the body, thus circumventing a view of sex or gender

that understands either to be a matter of bodily morphology as given. Merleau-

Ponty (2010) spends little time ruminating on gender as such, and that within

a squarely normative framework. However, his account of gender, binary

and normative though it may be, understands it to be gestural rather than

morphological, an articulation that anticipates Judith Butler's account of gender

as performative.

Henry S. Rubin's foundational 1998 article ''Phenomenology as Method in

Trans Studies'' was the ﬁrst piece to explore the ways in which phenomenology

offered methodological resources to the newly emerging ﬁeld of trans studies.

Rubin argues that phenomenology is uniquely suited to the study of trans lives

because it privileges the unique perspective of subjects in describing their own

subjectivity. Rubin draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to argue that one's

own account of one's own positioning is more accurate exactly because one is the

only person who can inhabit that individual position. The enunciating subject's

own account, then, will be more precisely located than anyone else's ostensibly

more ''objective'' assessment, privileged rather than suspiciously subjective or

biased, as the traditional charge against such narratives would have it. In his

book Self-Made Men (2003), Rubin suggests that the phenomenologically groun-

ded ''I'' has a favored relation to truth.

Though Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the centrality of the corps propre to

subjectivity and relation has perhaps the most obvious connection with trans

studies, phenomenology has been drawn on otherwise and variously regarding trans

issues. Emmanuel Levinas has written on our necessarily ethical relation to the face

of the other, and Nikki Sullivan (2006) has drawn on a Levinasian ethics in her

concept of the transmogriﬁcation of the other. Heidegger, too, has been used as a

resource; Das Janssen (2011) has suggested that Heidegger's concept of Dasein can

be used as a resource for thinking about trans embodiment in a philosophical

context. Simone de Beauvoir's (1948) ethics of ambiguity and work on gender offers

another potentially fruitful philosophy of ethics for trans studies, and Frantz Fanon

(1967) has theorized the social consequences of racial difference and the perception

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and the effect of racism in phenomenological terms. Even Husserl, for all his

abstraction, has been usefully mobilized by Sarah Ahmed (2006) for queer studies, and

his concepts of internal and external horizons show future promise for trans studies.

Gayle Salamon is assistant professor of English and gender and sexuality studies at Princeton

University. She is the author of Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality

(2010), winner of the 2011 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies.

Note

1. For a more in-depth discussion of issues presented here, see ''The Sexual Schema:

Transposition and Transgender in Phenomenology of Perception '' in Assuming a Body:

Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (Salamon 2010).

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Beauvoir, Simone de. 1948. The Ethics of Ambiguity . Translated by Bernard Frechtman. Secaucus,

NJ: Citadel Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks . Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York:

Grove Weidenfeld.

Janssen, Das. 2011. ''Transgender Dasein: Stuck in the Wrong Theory of Embodiment,'' paper

presented at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy Annual

Meeting, Philadelphia, October 19.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2010. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Don Landes. New

York: Routledge.

Rubin, Henry S. 1998. ''Phenomenology as Method in Trans Studies.'' GLQ 4, no. 2: 263–81.

———. 2003. Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men . Nashville:

Vanderbilt University Press.

Salamon, Gayle. 2010. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality . New York:

Columbia University Press.

Schutz, Alfred. 1972. Phenomenology of the Social World . Chicago: Northwestern University Press.

Sullivan, Nikki. 2006. ''Transmogriﬁcation: (Un)becoming Other(s).'' In The Transgender Studies

Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 553–63. New York: Routledge.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399884

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Pornography

ELIZA STEINBOCK

Pornography was famously deﬁned by Judge Potter Stewart's maxim, ''I know it

when I see it'' (Jacobellis v. Ohio 1964, quoted in Williams 1999), highlighting its

subjective, visual status and its political kinship to obscenity. The production

and consumption of pornographic materials forms a major transnational econ-

omy, demonstrating capitalism's uneven development and circulation of images.

Porn in its various forms and niches can also be considered highly localized,

personalized even, as evidenced by speciﬁc mail-order and online digital cultures.

It signiﬁes the apotheosis of Western confession culture in which the declaration

of sexuality anchors the self in the social order (Foucault 1978).

My penis is like a wart. Trans bodies and identities are equally solicited to

participate in ''speaking sex.'' However, the sexological histories that preﬁgure the

sexual in a transsexual diagnosis (gender identity disorder, gender dysphoria)

fasten desire onto the transition itself. The criteria in the Diagnostic Standards

and Procedure Manual V seek statements of disgust with one's sexed embodiment.

Any potential eroticism of a trans body by and for the trans individual is sup-

planted by the necessity to state a desire to change one's genitals. The construction

of the monolithic transsexual reduces the heteroglossia of sexual experience to a

whisper of secrets (Stone [1991] 2006).

My sexuality is not dysfunctional. Popular pornographies of so-called

dysfunctional ''trans sexualities'' (Steinbock and Davy 2012) continue to involve

forced feminization narratives and tribadism. With mass video accessibility,

previously niche she-male/travestie fantasies entered the mainstream market. At

the same time, transwomen ﬁlmmakers like Mirah-Soliel Ross and Stephanie

Anne Lloyd as well as transmen Les Nichols and Chance Ryder began making

porn addressed to the emerging transgender community. These works challenge

the dominant imaginary by claiming erotic space and ﬂirting with becoming

fetishes for a cisgender or transgender gaze.

''Look! No, Don't!'' With the aspiration to appear in a sexual imaginary, but

not as a freak, came a community backlash. Feared repercussions for self-sex-

ualization were setbacks in the political gains of medical access and social tolerance.

Jamison Green describes this reﬂex in the phrase ''Look! No, Don't!'': to want

political recognition but not social scrutiny (1999). Sexual representation was a key

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problem for early trans activism; at issue was who would be a ''good representative''

for the community. Pornographic materials for trans communities, like for feminist

camps, ﬁgured large in the war of identity politics. Claims for and against porn

assume that the image transparently represents the real identity of the performer,

collapsing visual realism into a ''visual essentialism'' of identity (Steinbock 2013).

Hard core is hard work. The political strategy of countering stereotyped

images with more diverse images of trans sexuality has been championed by

various organizations: Adult Video News Awards acknowledged the pioneering

work of Buck Angel and Allanah Starr; the Feminist Porn Awards honors trans*

and genderqueer performers like Drew Deveaux and Jiz Lee; and the Berlin Porn

Film Festival actively supports trans (post)pornographies. Film directors focusing

on trans sexuality from within the community include Christopher Lee, Hans

Scheirl, Cary Cronenwett, Tobaron Waxman, Morty Diamond, T-wood team, and

Tobi Hill-Meyer.

We have hit the cotton ceiling. The new wave of queer pornography, cre-

ating a professional and accessible DVD and online alt.porn world, has swept

along trans sexualities. Notably, Courtney Trouble's ''Queer Porn.TV'' and Shine

Louise Houston's queer-lesbian ''Crash Pad Series'' regularly include trans per-

formers. However, the trans pornographic ideal appearing in most queer porn has

become mainly aligned with either transmasculine or post-operative transfemi-

nine bodies. The marginalization of transwomen in queer sex scenes echoes the

status of transfeminity in queer erotic communities, which has been dubbed the

''cotton ceiling.'' A new queer normativity set by porn conventions continues to

exclude certain forms of trans sexuality. The ''productive disruption of structured

sexuality and spectra of desire'' (Stone [1991] 2006: 231) engendered by trans

embodiments has yet to be fully explored in pornography.

Eliza Steinbock is lecturer in literature and art at the University of Maastricht. Her recent

publications include work featured in Journal of Homosexuality (2014), The Transgender Studies

Reader 2 (2013), Violence and Agency: Queer and Feminist Perspectives (2013), and Soma-

technics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies (2009).

Note

1. For trans porn, this means the major markets for sourcing she-male pornography for the

global North are in Latin America. The alternative community pornographies mainly

derive from the United Kingdom and North America. I have tried to indicate the

diversity of porn cultures through the examples given of cultural workers, which I

encourage the reader to explore further. For a post-Foucauldian analysis of pornogra-

phy's transnational ﬂows in relation to gender, see Beatriz Preciado 2008.

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References

Foucault, Michel. 1978. An Introduction . Vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality . Translated by Robert

Hurley. New York: Vintage.

Green, Jamison. 1999. ''Look! No, Don't! The Visibility Dilemma for Transsexual Men.'' In

Reclaiming Genders: Transsexual Grammars at the Fin de Sie

`cle, ed. Stephen Whittle and

Kate More, 117–31. London: Cassell.

Preciado, Beatriz. 2008. ''Pharmaco-pornographic Politics: Towards a New Gender Ecology.''

Parallax 14, no. 1: 105–17.

Steinbock, Eliza. 2013. '' 'Look!' but Also, 'Touch!': Theorizing Images of Tra ns-Eroticism beyond

a Politics of Visual Essentialism.'' In ''Porno-Graphics and Porno-Tactics: Desire, Affect,

and Representation in Pornography.'' Special issue, Re-public: Re-imagining Democracy.

www.re-public.gr/en/?p= 5514 (accessed October 28, 2013).

Steinbock, Eliza, and Zowie Davy. 2012. '''Sexing Up' Bodily Aesthetics: Notes towards Theorizing

Trans Sexuality.'' In Sexualities: Past Reﬂections and Future Directions , ed. Sally Hines and

Yvette Taylor, 266–85. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stone, Sandy. (1991) 2006. ''The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.'' In The

Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Stephen Whittle and Susan Stryker, 221–35. New York:

Routledge.

Williams, Linda. 1999. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ''Frenzy of the Visible.'' Berkeley:

University of California Press.

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Postmodernism

JAMES SARES

For Jean Baudrillard, transsexuality symbolizes alienating postmodern trans-

formations across economics, aesthetics, and politics. ''We are all transsexuals

symbolically,'' he argues, as the body is reduced to a mere canvas on which the

trafﬁc of gendered signs is grafted or torn in antipolitical play (2009: 23). Bau-

drillard understands the postmodern body as the extended site of integration

into networks and circuits of superﬁcial political action and cybernetic capitalist

complicity. Similarly to Fredric Jameson, he employs the spatial metaphors of

depthlessness and ﬂattening to emphasize the subject's reduction to artiﬁce. These

metaphors reveal postmodern cultural production as underpinned by the dis-

ruption of mere appearance from identity or inner desire. The disruptive element

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of postmodern aesthetics underlies the denaturalization of sign from referent,

such that the technologies of gendered and sexed transformation reveal the sym-

bolic systems through which categories of gender and sex gain meaning. Thus the

modernist aesthetic is put into crisis when the body, moving through time and

space, is no longer the site of a stable, natural, and objective referential truth of

gender or sex, despite the search for new relationalities constructed out of that

very ontological denaturalization (Stryker 1999: 170–71).

Baudrillard's analysis falls into unsubstantiated fatalism because he empha-

sizes meaning's liquidation, while postmodern aesthetics shifts the grounds for

understanding meaning through subjective rupture itself. The technologies and

discourses of transsexuality reveal the tensions of transforming the body and its

adornments across, between, or outside the policed conﬁnes of a gender/sex binary

whilealsobeingreinscribedintomultipledis courses of fractured referentiality. Some

discourses appeal to an unchanging sense of gender identity and relocate a ''truth'' of

gender to be revealed from within the body, while others emphasize dialectical

movements of identity and embodiment or otherwise challenge the ontologized

terms of gender identity and desire. Tensions among these multiple narratives are

salient in the uneven ethical-material topographies of corporeal transformation

across which conﬂicts of late capitalist modernity play out, including state and

medical apparatuses and other trans community spaces. In these spaces, the

boundaries of authentic transness are often policed by appeals to deep relationality

between materiality and inner desire or identity, regardless of its stasis or dynamism,

against merely superﬁcial drag or the unfettered play of gendered signs. Yet all of

these references to corporeal mutability emerge from particular conceptual con-

stellations that reveal sex/gender as regimes of coding and producing bodies. These

possibilities appear with the production of the subject as a form of rupture.

The postmodern aesthetic must be itself denaturalized as a particular

regime of meaning-production rather than as meaning's mere liquidation or as

the revelation of meaning's true form. The multiple articulations of subjective

rupture become myth when concepts are ontologically essentialized rather than

revealed as historical and social productions and abstractions that mediate each

other. The denaturalization of both sex and gender as social constructions offers

possibilities to reﬁgure embodiment, but the conceptual disjunctures between

materiality and symbolism, being and thinking, or body and desire threaten to

ontologize and reinscribe authenticity through rupture itself. The conceptual

mediation and latent unfolding of such categories denaturalizes rupture as a tenu-

ously policed construction between concepts: sex's referent as body meets the body's

materiality as symbolic, aesthetic, and interpersonal; gender's referent as social

action, role, or symbolism meets the materiality of these processes produced out of

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and on to the body; identity's referent as inner desire or mind meets these terms as

interpersonal and corporeal. Appeals to trans authenticity through statically con-

structed bounds of sex, gender identity, and gender performance thus encounter the

body as site and product of deep relationality and that relationality's own latent

unraveling. The deployments and subversions of these ontological layerings reveal

tensions in ascribing through them authenticity of corporeality and embodiment.

The production and unraveling of this relationality constitutes the dialectic

between nonconceptual materiality and its signiﬁcation into concepts. Bau-

drillard's reduction of transsexuality to the symbolic realm presumes appearance

as domineering the essence of the subject, such that the subject is hollowed of

authentic content. Yet Baudrillard produces the very meaninglessness he critiques

by hypostatizing the concept of the subject as form of rupture without reﬂexive

critique of its historical and social construction. He thus ignores, as Theodor

Adorno emphasizes throughout Negative Dialectics, the inadequacy of concepts in

fully capturing the nonconceptual experiences and materiality to which they refer.

The referents of concepts are irreducible to their conceptual signiﬁcation, as

concepts are abstracted moments of the dialectic of meaning-production; in self-

critique, the very concepts of concept and nonconceptual materiality pass into

each other rather than reduce to each other. Thus rather than being objective

descriptions or symbolic reﬂections of reality, concepts of gender, sex, and sub-

jective rupture are deployed as power-laced abstractions constituted through

various discourses and technologies. The struggle to produce meaning in the face

of meaning's own conceptual inadequacy and consequent mediated liquidation

engenders political confrontation around life as somatic/technological structure

and life as ethical question. Contrary to Baudrillard's lamentations, the ''deep''

political questions about meaning thrive through these tensions: What is the very

nature of being gendered/sexed? Should sex and gender remain categories through

which to classify and produce bodies? How do uneven conditions of meaning-

production open possibilities for resistance, change, or integration into various

political and economic apparatuses?

In imagining queered forms of labor, value, and materiality, it is necessary to

confront spatial metaphors of superﬁciality that continue to haunt analyses of

postmodernism. Thus far critical queer responses to the projects of Jameson and

Baudrillard have left these metaphors unchallenged, perhaps in fear of slipping back

into modernist aesthetics of authenticity based on the ''mimetic reproduction for

subjectivity of a stable, material objectivity that lies outside the subject'' (Stryker

1999: 164). The tension between critique and appropriation of postmodernism

synthesizes, in Jack Halberstam's work, as the reclamation of superﬁciality, which

he claims ''may not be a symptom of a diseased political culture but a marvelously

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ﬂat and uninhibited repudiation of the normativity inherent in 'deep' political pro-

jects'' (Halberstam 2005: 124). Halberstam explores two-dimensional transgender art

as anticapitalist resistance but, in assuming the unidirectional gaze of the surgeon or

the artist, ﬂattens the body to a mere mimetic canvas on which technologies operate.

He thus objectiﬁes and alienates representations of the body from the shifting acts of

embodiment and performance that catalyze conﬂict over the very terms and align-

ments of identity, aesthetics, and politics. Against such static analysis, it is necessary to

reveal the competing metaphysics of desire, ontological layering, and appeals to

authenticity that enable dynamic conﬂict over trans subjectivities. Moving forward,

we do not need to ''reclaim'' superﬁciality from such analysis as much as recognize

that depth has never left these struggles in the ﬁrst place, manifesting instead in the

debate over superﬁciality itself.

James Sares completed his AB degree from Harvard University in 2012.

References

Baudrillard, Jean. 2009. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena . New York: Verso.

Halberstam, Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.New

York: New York University Press.

Stryker, Susan. 1999. ''Christine Jorgensen's Atom Bomb: Transsexuality and the Emergence of

Postmodernity.'' In Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of

Assisted Reproduction, ed. E. Anne Kaplan and Susan Squier, 157–71. New Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers University Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399902

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Prison-Industrial Complex

in the United States

ELIAS WALKER VITULLI

One night in June 2011, as they walked through a South Minneapolis neighbor-

hood to the grocery store, CeCe McDonald, a young African American trans

woman, and a group of her friends, all also African American and queer, were

attacked by a group of white people who yelled racist and transphobic slurs at

them, including ''faggots,'' ''niggers,'' and ''chicks with dicks.'' When one of their

attackers smashed a glass into McDonald's face, the attack escalated into a physical

ﬁght, during which one of her attackers was fatally stabbed. When police arrived

on the scene, they arrested only McDonald.

McDonald was later charged with two counts of second-degree murder.

Initially, she was placed in solitary conﬁnement at the Hennepin County men's

jail, and she received insufﬁcient medical care for a serious cut on her face, which

eventually became infected. In May 2012, McDonald accepted a plea agreement in

which she pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to

prison for forty-one months. In June, she was transferred to the men's prison in

St. Cloud, Minnesota. In January 2014, McDonald was released from prison after

serving nineteen months.

McDonald's experiences stitch together a web of racialized, gendered, and

sexualized violence and criminalization that many trans people, especially trans

women of color, experience daily. Her story is emblematic of the experiences of

trans people whose lives come in contact with the prison-industrial complex.

Over the past decade, some scholars and activists have begun to use the term

prison-industrial complex to describe the mutually beneﬁcial and far-reaching

relationship between state and private interests that promotes the prison system

as a central response to social, economic, and racial problems (see, e.g., Davis

2003; Gilmore 2007; Rodrı

´guez 2006). The prison-industrial complex is a

dynamic and productive web of white supremacist, neoliberal, heteropatriarchal,

and gender-normative power that targets social deviance for criminalization and

imprisonment and secures normativity. In practice, certain populations marked

as racially, sexually, gender, and/or class deviant — such as low-income African

American men, trans women of color, and gender-nonconforming queer women

of color or aggressives—are criminalized, portrayed as suspicious and dangerous,

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disproportionately incarcerated, and subjected to violence, while whiteness,

heterosexuality, and non-trans status are de criminalized. In other words, polic-

ing, prisons, and punishment are organized by and help construct race, gender,

sexuality, and class in the United States.

While throughout its history the prison system has been a central site of

social, racial, gender, and sexual formation and control, it has taken on new

importance since the 1970s. Responding to the needs of globalization and dein-

dustrialization and as part of the backlash against racial justice movements of the

1950s to 1970s, the United States began to rapidly grow its prison population

from an average daily population of about 300,000 at the beginning of the 1970s

to nearly 2.3 million today. This rise in prison population has been fueled by

racialized law enforcement, prosecution, and sentencing that have produced a

prison population that is approximately 70 percent people of color. The new mass

scale of the prison system has been termed ''mass incarceration'' to mark how

certain populations are targeted for systematic imprisonment and to describe its

devastating impacts on targeted communities, most centrally low-income black

communities but also many trans and queer communities.

Law enforcement's targeting of queer, gender-nonconforming, and

transgender people is not new. The history of trans people in the United States has

been a history of criminalization. Throughout most of the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries, gender nonconformity, cross-dressing, and homosexuality

were criminalized through laws and policing practices. Susan Stryker (2008)

argues that trans communities and identities often formed and coalesced in

response to experiences of persistent police scrutiny, harassment, and violence.

This history produced what Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock

(2010) call ''queer criminal archetypes,'' which persist into the present.

Today, people who are visibly gender nonconforming, especially those

who are also marked as racially and/or economically deviant, are often viewed by

police as particularly suspicious and subject to intense surveillance, violence, and

arrest. Trans women often report being stopped by police under the suspicion

that they are sex workers, an experience so common it has been labeled ''walking

while trans.'' Queer criminal archetypes affect policing and also prosecution,

sentencing, and treatment within penal institutions. This criminalization, cou-

pled with endemic employment discrimination, poverty, homelessness, racism,

and family rejection, has led to the disproportionate incarceration of trans and

gender-nonconforming people. Within jails and prisons, trans people are almost

always placed in a sex-segregated institution based on their genitals and are

expected to conform to the norms of the sex of the institutions. Prison admin-

istrators often view gender-nonconforming and trans prisoners as security threats

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and subject them to increased surveillance and punishment, denial of medical

care and appropriately gendered clothing and grooming products, isolation in

segregation, and verbal, physical, and sexual harassment and assault.

Imprisoned trans and gender-nonconforming people, like McDonald,

have fought against their criminalization and the prison-industrial complex's

attacks on their gender identities and expressions for more than a century (Kunzel

2008; Stanley and Smith 2011). Yet their words, lives, and experiences are rarely

part of trans studies conversations. As criminalization and disproportionate

incarceration continue and as trans people continue to experience harassment

and violence throughout the prison-industrial complex, the experiences and life

chances of signiﬁcant segments of our communities will be intimately bound to

the prison-industrial complex.

Elias Walker Vitulli is a doctoral candidate in American studies at the University of Minnesota.

His dissertation examines the history of the incarceration of gender-nonconforming and trans

people in the United States. His article, '' 'A Means of Assuring the Safe and Efﬁcient Operation

of a Prison': Administrative Segregation, Security, and Gender Nonconformity,'' is forthcoming

in GLQ.

Note

1. For more on McDonald's case and to read some of her writing, go to supportcece

.wordpress.com.

References

Davis, Angela Y. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing

California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kunzel, Regina. 2008. Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American

Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mogul, Joey L., Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock. 2010. Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization

of LGBT People in the United States. Boston: Beacon.

Rodrı

´guez, Dylan. 2006. Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison

Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Stanley, Eric A., and Nat Smith, eds. 2011. Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison

Industrial Complex. Oakland, CA: AK.

Stryker, Susan. 2008. Transgender History . Berkeley, CA: Seal.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399911

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Psychoanalysis

PATRICIA ELLIOT

Psychoanalysis is a theory and practice of interpretation directed to making sense

of otherwise unconscious sexual desire, sexual pleasure, and the gender identities

of human beings. Neither a biological nor a social determinist theory, psycho-

analysis theorizes human subjects as psychic entities inscribed in language, dis-

course, and social relationships, all of which are primarily unconscious either

necessarily or through a process of repression. Despite its justiﬁably contested

history with regard to transsexuality, many psychoanalytic thinkers argue that

psychoanalysis offers tools for thinking about the complexity and particularly of

any subjectivity, including transsexual subjectivity (Elliot 2010). They do so in full

awareness that trans persons have been negatively affected by transphobic atti-

tudes and practices, especially when psychoanalysis adopts normative models of

interpretation.

The history of therelationship of psychoanalysis to transsexuals is one that

is exceedingly fraught, and trans persons have good reason to be sceptical about

the potential for reconciliation. For those seeking surgery, the dependence on

psychiatric approval already introduces a foreign element into the therapeutic

relationship that compromises the relationship from the outset. But even in the

absence of this element, resistance on the part of trans persons to psychoanalysis

is a reasonable response to patronizing, moralizing, and stigmatizing attitudes

held toward them by many analysts. Although this observation was made in 1974

(Person and Ovsey 1974), it has recently been reiterated by psychoanalyst and

theorist Patricia Gherovici (2011: 3): ''In both subtle and brutal ways, psycho-

analysis has a history of coercive heteronormatization and pathologization of

non-normative sexualities and genders.'' Indeed, as Gherovici points out, until

very recently, many analysts have been either threatened or puzzled by trans-

sexuals and often have been unsuccessful in concealing their transphobic views.

Moreover, she suggests that this transphobic history is ''based on a selective

reinterpretation of the Freudian texts'' or, more forcefully, one based not only on

selective rereadings but on ''reductive distortions'' born of a ''homophobic and

transphobic history'' (ibid.). Her point is that psychoanalysis has much to offer

when it manages to divest itself of its normalizing and discriminatory history. It is

to these often neglected but more valuable aspects that contemporary theorists

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turn in order to develop a more promising understanding of trans embodiments

and identities.

Several psychoanalytic theorists have turned to Jacques Lacan's theory of

sexuation to investigate sexuality, subjectivity, and desire in relation to transsex-

uality (Carlson 2010; Dean 2000; Elliot 2001, 2010; Gherovici 2010, 2011; Gozlan

2011; Salamon 2010; Shepherdson 1994). These theorists support Lacan's reading of

sexuality as rooted in the polymorphous perversity of infantile sexuality and in the

sexual drives that are not gender speciﬁc as well as his view that sexual positions of

masculinity and femininity are taken up based on unconscious fantasy and not

anatomy. While Freud took reproductive genitality as the ideal model of sexuality,

Lacan (1998) rejected this norm in claiming that there is no sexual relation as such

but that sexuality comes to attach itself to relations of love and gender identity that

are socially constructed. Asserting a complex relationship between body and

psyche, Lacanian theorists emphasize the instability and uncertainty of sexual

identity, arguing that the normalizing constructions of gender imposed by the

social must be understood as something other than sexual difference.

Recently, Shanna T. Carlson locates the rift between gender studies and

psychoanalysis regarding the question of transgender precisely where the logic of

sexual difference is concerned. Where gender refers to conventional mean-

ings attributed to masculinity and femininity based on a belief that such mean-

ings become attached to the body, sexual difference refers to ''two different

logics . . . two different approaches to the Other, two different stances with respect

to desire, and (at least) two different types of jouissance '' (Carlson 2010: 64). For

Carlson, the only difference between transsexual and cisgender subjects is that

the latter claim a ''false monopoly on gender certainty'' (ibid.: 65) and have the

power to exclude and oppress transsexuals. Moreover, she suggests that trans-

gendered persons who pose the questions ''Am I a man, or am I a woman, and

what does that mean?'' have the potential to expose, through their suffering, what

discourses of gender mask: not a ''liberating multiplicity'' but a ''discursive ﬂex-

ibility'' based on lack and on exclusion (ibid.: 66).

In a similar spirit, Gherovici (2011: 10–11) agrees with trans theorists Kate

Bornstein (1994) and Patrick Caliﬁa (1997) that transsexual desires for gender

certainty must not be simplistically reduced to a fantasy of being outside sex.

Gherovici takes issue with Catherine Millot's (1990) assumption that transsexuals

occupy a ''psychotic'' position based on the fantasy of a sex that is not lacking, a

sex that is complete and outside sexual difference. Charles Shepherdson (1994)

clariﬁed what was at stake in this fantasy of psychic redemption, a concern

anticipated by Sandy Stone (1991) and discussed by Patricia Elliot (2001) and

Gayle Salamon (2004) with respect to aspects of Jay Prosser's (1998) theory of

trans embodiment. Although some argued in the late 1990s against Millot's

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view that surgery is a harmful conﬁrmation of the fantasy (Elliot and Roen 1998),

it was not until a decade later that a practicing Lacanian analyst explicitly chal-

lenged her colleagues to abandon Millot's ''generalized assumption that most

transsexuals are psychotic'' (Gherovici 2011: 12).

Gherovici creatively extends Lacan's concept of the ''sinthome''—a kind

of generalized model of the symptom that is a way to deal with what Lacan calls

the absence of sexual relation—to trans desires for reembodiment or transition.

A symptom is a compromise formation between a repressed drive element and a

repressing agency. For Lacan, the ego structured by the compromise of id and

superego is the typical symptom of humans. The sinthome suggests that it is

possible through analysis or through writing to bring about a subjective change

that replaces a dysfunctional symptom with a new compromise that better favors

life, love, and work. Gherovici (2011: 14) endorses Lacan's view that there is ''no

subject without a sinthome,'' a construction of the subject's position in relation to

discourses of the social. Moreover, because sexual positions are not based on

anatomy but on uncertainty, transsexual transition is a sinthome that establishes

''a workable consistency for the subject'' (ibid.: 12). With reference to Prosser and

others, Gherovici contends it is the trans narrative, the writing of one's trans-

formation, that marks the sinthome for transsexual subjects.

Psychoanalyst Oren Gozlan applies Gherovici's concept of the sinthome to

transsexuality as well. As the place ''where surgery and writing intersect,'' the

transsexual sinthome is a solution to suffering that goes beyond a defensive

illusion of unity that would deny lack, subjectivity, and desire (Gozlan 2011: 48).

Differing from the symptomatic idealization of the other sex that represses sex-

ual difference, the sinthome offers a way to understand transsexual surgery as

''a means to claim one's desire'' through giving meaning to one's embodiment

(ibid.: 46). Gozlan describes transitioning as a ''rebirthing of oneself,'' but one

that ''accepts failure as inevitable and is willing to live creatively with the 'between

zone' '' (ibid.: 48). For him, the scar becomes an important ''remainder'' a nd

''reminder'' of separation from the Other, and surgery ''becomes an act—it tra-

verses a phantasy of union, giving up the phantasized Other, but having to live

with a scar'' (ibid.: 49). Like Gherovici, Gozlan recasts the process of transitioning

as a creative project that includes both surgery and narration— an afﬁrmation

that mirrors the experience of many transsexual authors.

As the psychoanalytic work of Gherovici and others aims to depathologize

transsexuality, there may be a new beginning for the relationship between

psychoanalysis and trans as well. There is certainly some hope in Gherovici's

observation that ''transgender people are actually changing the clinical praxis,

advancing new ideas for the clinic'' (2011: 9), ideas that, if heeded, promise to

transform the relationship altogether.

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Patricia Elliot is a professor of sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is author of Debates

in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory: Contested Sites (2010).

References

Bornstein, Kate. 1994. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us . New York: Routledge.

Caliﬁa, Patrick. 1997. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism . San Francisco: Cleis.

Carlson, Shanna T. 2010. ''Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference.'' differences

21, no. 2: 46–72.

Dean, Tim. 2000. Beyond Sexuality . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Elliot, Patricia. 2001. ''A Psychoanalytic Reading of Transsexual Embodiment.'' Studies in Gender

and Sexuality 2, no. 4: 295–325.

———. 2010. Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory: Contested Sites . Surrey, UK:

Ashgate.

Elliot, Patricia, and Katrina Roen. 1998. ''Transgenderism and the Question of Embodiment:

Promising Queer Politics?'' GLQ 4, no. 2: 231–61.

Gherovici, Patricia. 2010. Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Demo-

cratizing of Transgenderism. New York: Routledge.

———. 2011. ''Psychoanalysis Needs a Sex Change.'' Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review

7, no. 1: 3–18.

Gozlan, Oren. 2011. ''Transsexual Surgery: A Novel Reminder and a Navel Remainder.'' Interna-

tional Forum of Psychoanalysis 20, no. 1: 45–52.

Lacan, Jacques. 1998. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality: The

Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by

Bruce Fink. New York: Norton.

Millot, Catherine. 1990. Horsexe: Essay on Transsexuality . Translated by K. Hylton. New York:

Autonomedia.

Person, Ethel Spector, and Lionel Ovesey. 1974. ''The Transsexual Syndrome in Males. II. Sec-

ondary Transsexualism.'' American Journal of Psychotherapy 28, no. 2: 174–93.

Prosser, Jay. 1998. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality . New York: Columbia

University Press.

Salamon, Gayle. 2004. ''The Bodily Ego and the Contested Domain of the Material.'' differences 15,

no. 3: 95–122.

———. 2010. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality . New York: Columbia

University Press.

Shepherdson, Charles. 1994. ''The Role of Gender and the Imperative of Sex.'' In Supposing the

Subject, ed. Joan Copjec, 158–84. London: Verso.

Stone, Sandy. 1991. ''The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.'' In Body Guards: The

Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. J. Epstein and K. Straub, 280–304. New York:

Routledge.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399920

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Psychoanalytic

SHANNA T. CARLSON

The failures of psychoanalysis with respect to transgender people are somewhat—

and sadly—familiar. Perhaps the most famous example is Lacanian psychoana-

lyst Catherine Millot's Horsexe: Essay on Transsexuality, a text whose precision

explaining Lacanian terminology is matched only by its tendency to sensationalize

and generalize about transgender experience. Mostly, however, Lacanians are

strikingly silent on the subject of transgender phenomena— striking, given that

Lacanian psychoanalysis is fundamentally preoccupied with the question of

''sexual difference.''

Yet is there not something trans about psychoanalysis? Might

there be something psychoanalytic about trans? Which ''trans'' and which ''psy-

choanalysis''? And what is the relation between ''sex'' and ''gender''?

It was Anna O., a ''hysterical''

analysand of Joseph Breuer, who coined the

term the talking cure and thereby—in a sense—invented psychoanalysis. The

invention of psychoanalysis by a hysterical analysand is not simply anecdotal,

for hysteria is at the heart of psychoanalysis in other ways, too. The ''truth'' with

which Lacanian psychoanalysis concerns itself is the idea that the subject is

divided from itself; this truth goes by various names, including subjective divi-

sion and, controversially, castration. In Lacanian terminology, hysteria is that

psychic structure most preoccupied with subjective division. As the structure

most preoccupied with the truth that Lacanian psychoanalysis wishes to support,

it stands to reason that hysteria should possess a fundamental position in the

discourse.

Hysteria's centrality to Lacanian psychoanalysis is relevant here because

one form that the preoccupation with subjective division takes involves the critique

and questioning of ways in which gender identities fail to encapsulate the body. This

is one sense in which psychoanalysis itself may be trans, for various lines of inquiry

in transgender studies also involve the critique and questioning of ways in which

gender identities fail to encapsulate the body. These lines of inquiry are motivated

by diverse objectives and arrive at diverse conclusions. Some, however— like psy-

choanalysis—explore the limits of language itself: ''What about those messy spaces

between words and around their borders?'' (Wilchins 2002: 46). Some confront the

unveriﬁable character of sex and gender, as in the words of Bo Luengsuraswat:

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''What proof do I have to secure my masculinity at this point?'' (2010: 245). Some

locate in an impasse the site from which to invent something new, as in Matt

Richardson's essay on Jackie Kay's novel Trumpet: ''Joss [the protagonist] advises us

to 'make it up,' leaving us with the burden of decision: To keep chasing the genders

of white society that we are excluded from or to embrace other possibilities'' (2012:

376). These examples have differing points to make, but in moments like these they

converge with Lacanian psychoanalysis, articulating singular accounts of the idea

that ''the body will never ﬁnd in language a harmonious home'' (Gherovici 2010:

212) and proposing solutions as to how to make do in proximity to that limit.

Near the end of his career, Lacan (1998: 78–89) articulates a new way of

thinking sexual difference. His ''formulas of sexuation'' use the vocabulary of

logic to map two positions that subjects take in language. These positions — to be

''not-all'' or ''all'' inscribed within the phallic function — are ''sexes,'' but there is

nothing necessarily gendered about them; neither do they refer to biological

sex.

Instead, they describe stances a subject takes with respect to subjective

division. According to this view, language ''sexes'' us in that it demands that we

take a position with respect to our own division.

What happens when we take a trans look at the formulas, not expecting

the formulas' positions to be occupied by (only) the ''men'' and ''women'' of

normative imaginings? The formulas rely for their coordinates on neither bio-

logical theories of sex nor normative understandings of gender; instead, the

positions they map are oriented around the un-gendered (but very sexy) notion of

subjective division. As such, I would submit that these positions are— like the

''genders'' described here — ''each capable of supporting rich and rapidly prolif-

erating ecologies of embodied difference'' (Stryker, Currah, and Moore 2008: 12).

Part of what Lacanian psychoanalysis has to offer the ﬁeld of transgender

studies can be located in the language it has developed for thinking about that

suffering of the subject that eludes the social. However, the drive to support the

subject in this capacity also limits Lacanian psychoanalysis's usefulness to the

ﬁeld—that is, to the extent that ''transgender is an expansive and complicated

social category'' (Currah, Juang, and Price Minter 2006: xv). The meeting spaces

between the psychic and the social have always been vexed for psychoanalysis,

and necessarily so.

Still: what if Lacanian psychoanalysis and transgender studies could forge

an understanding of sex capable of conjugating multiplicity with division, self-

determination with limits, and empowerment with ''castration''? This sex need

not be inhabited only by norm-abiding ''men'' and ''women'' who have bowed to

the ''real''; it could be inhabited by the rest of us, too.

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Shanna T. Carlson is a Collegiate Assistant Professor/Harper Schmidt Fellow at the University of

Chicago, where she teaches literature. Her publications include ''Transgender Subjectivity and

the Logic of Sexual Difference'' (differences, summer 2010), ''In Defense of Queer Kinships:

Oedipus Recast'' (Subjectivity , September 2010), and ''Symbolic Deliveries: Logic, theAct, and The

Case of the Young Homosexual'' ( (a): The Journal of Culture and the Unconscious, forthcoming).

Notes

1. The notable exception is Patricia Gherovici.

2. Hysteria is a term with baggage. I am not suggesting there is any necessary link between

hysteria and transgender; instead, I am interested in the possibility that certain ways of

thinking about transgender may converge with features of Lacanian psychoanalysis that

are radical, generous, even hope ﬁlled.

3. There are limitations here, too. For instance, while Lacan is clear that gender does not

dictate one's unconscious sexuation, he uses gender-normative language to name the

bodies that occupy these sites. Additionally, work needs to be done with the ''phallic

function,'' perhaps beginning with radical rereadings of the phallus as the signiﬁer for the

subject's lack-in-being.

References

Currah, Paisley, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Price Minter. 2006. Introduction to Transgender

Rights, xiii–xxiv. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gherovici, Patricia. 2010. Please Select Your Gender. New York: Routledge.

Lacan, Jacques. 1998. On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973 . Book 20

of Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan . Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by

Bruce Fink. New York: Norton.

Luengsuraswat, Bo. 2010. ''Proof.'' In Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation , ed. Kate Bornstein and

S. Bear Bergman, 242–46. Berkeley, CA: Seal.

Richardson, Matt. 2012. '' 'My Father Didn't Have a Dick': Social Death and Jackie Kay's Trumpet .''

GLQ 18, no. 2–3: 361–79.

Stryker, Susan, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore. 2008. ''Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or

Transgender? The Stakes for Women's Studies.'' WSQ 36, no. 3–4: 11–22.

Wilchins, Riki. 2002. ''Queerer Bodies.'' In Genderqueer: Voices from beyond the Sexual Binary,

ed. Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins, 33–46. Los Angeles: Alyson Books.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399929

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Queer

HEATHER LOVE

What is the place of queer in transgender studies? The ﬁelds of queer studies and

transgender studies are linked through shared histories, methods, and commit-

ments to transforming the situation of gender and sexual outsiders. While queer is

associated primarily with nonnormative desires and sexual practices, and trans-

gender is associated primarily with nonnormative gender identiﬁcations and

embodiments, it is both theoretically and practically difﬁcult to draw a clear line

between them. In distinction to both gay and lesbian studies and sexuality

studies, queer studies deﬁnes itself as a critical ﬁeld that questions stable cate-

gories of identity. Transgender studies also deﬁnes itself against identity,

offering a challenge to the perceived stability of the two-gender system. Whether

and in what context these ﬁelds should be seen as distinct is a live question;

however, queer and transgender are linked in their activist investments, their

dissident methodologies, and their critical interrogation of and resistance to

gender and sexual norms.

Challenging discrete categories of identity has been central to the work

of both queer and transgender studies from the start. In the late 1980s and

early 1990s, queer emerged as an activist slogan that sought to capture the radical

energies of struggles for sexual and gender freedom in the face of the AIDS crisis.

By reclaiming a homophobic slur as the name for a movement and, soon after, a

ﬁeld of study, queer activists and scholars indicated the signiﬁcance of vio-

lence and stigma in the experience of gender and sexual outsiders. Queer, with its

valences of strange, odd, and perplexing, was also meant to indicate a range of

nonnormative sexual practices and gender identiﬁcations beyond gay and lesbian.

Forwarding a model of coalition among the marginalized and the excluded, queer

as at its most capacious was imagined as a rallying cry against ''the regimes of the

normal'' (Warner 1993: xxvi), poised to address ''the fractal intricacies of language,

skin, migration, state'' (Sedgwick 1993: 9).

Transgender is also a term that emerged in an activist context in order to

challenge the rule of identity. If queer can be understood as refusing the stabili-

zations of both gender and sexuality implied by the categories gay and lesbian and

opening onto a wider spectrum of sexual nonnormativity, transgender emerged as

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a term to capture a range of gendered embodiments, practices, and community

formations that cannot be accounted for by the traditional binary. Although the

precise origins of the term are contested, it has taken root over the past couple of

decades as an activist, scholarly, and vernacular term that refuses normalizing and

clinical views of gender in favor of a more capacious and mobile account. In

Transgender History, Susan Stryker (2008: 1) deﬁnes the concept of transgender as

''the movement across a socially imposed boundary from an unchosen starting

place,'' capturing the critical force and ﬂexibility of the term. While transgender

functions as an umbrella term, able to conjure a spectrum that can include trans-

sexuals, cross-dressers, and butches and femmes, it also signals a resistance to the

taxonomic framework implied by the model of the spectrum (even as it ''over-

comes'' it). Such a critical impulse — the refusal of all categories of sexual and

gender identity—might be called genderqueer , a term that suggests the intimacy

between transgender and queer.

Queer and transgender studies are linked not only in their shared critique

of sexual and gender normativity but also in their resistance to disciplinary and

methodological norms. The counterdisciplinary thought of Michel Foucault has

been crucial for the development of both ﬁelds. Foucault's (1978) account of the

disciplinary force of the modern regime of sexuality informs the antinormative,

anti-identity politics of transgender and queer studies. In addition, Foucault's

genealogical approach to history allowed him to consider a range of genders and

sexualities—for instance, in the story of the complex nineteenth-century ﬁgure

Herculine Barbin (Barbin and Foucault 1980)—outside modern categories of

identity. Such unsettled and unsettling instances of embodiment, practice, and

identiﬁcation threaten not only discrete categories of sexual and gender identity

but the very distinction between gender and sexuality. Finally, Foucault's critique

of the will to knowledge masquerading as scientiﬁc objectivity is crucial to the

methodology of both queer and transgender studies. Since those with nonstan-

dard embodiments and sexual practices have been disproportionately subjected

to the clinical gaze, Foucault's (2003) critical history of the human sciences has led

to an insistence in both ﬁelds on queer and trans people as the subjects rather than

the objects of knowledge. Such insistence points to a shared commitment to the

politics of knowledge, to the idea that new ways of being in the world depend on

new ways of thinking and new critical frameworks.

Despite historical, methodological, and political overlaps, queer and

transgender studies have not always traveled in tandem, and it is not clear, as these

ﬁelds age, to what extent they should. It is clear that the anti-identitarian, anti-

normalizing, and coalitional aspects of queer have been useful in articulating and

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furthering transgender scholarship and politics; and indeed this shared com-

mitment to crossing disciplinary and identity boundaries can make it hard to

distinguish sharply between queer and transgender studies or to sort out these

lines of inﬂuence. However, while queer at its most capacious is understood to

indicate a wide range of differences and social exclusions, it has often been cri-

tiqued for functioning more narrowly in practice. In her important account of the

exclusions of queer politics, ''Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,'' Cathy J.

Cohen (2005) indicts queer as a false universal, one that claims to address the

situation of all marginal subjects but in fact is focused on the concerns of gays and

lesbians. One can see a similar critique of queer among some trans scholars, who

have argued that queer studies has not engaged fully with the material conditions

of transgender people but has rather used gender nonnormativity as a sign or

allegory of queerness.

Such tensions about the status and inclusiveness of queer do not take place

in a vacuum but rather in fraught material, professional, and institutional con-

texts. Queer studies, despite some notable successes, remains an understaffed and

underfunded venture. Nonetheless, the ﬁeld is in a stronger position than trans-

gender studies, which is often taught as an addendum to queer studies or gender

studies. How women's and gender studies programs and LGBT studies programs

can best support institutional initiatives in the ﬁeld of transgender studies is a

crucial question in the present. Inclusion of transgender material in courses and

curricula is a double-edged sword, since it advances knowledge of the ﬁeld and

meets considerable student demand, but it arguably forestalls the most crucial

step in the institutionalization of transgender studies: the hiring of scholars

primarily situated in transgender studies and of trans-identiﬁed scholars to

tenure-track positions in the university.

Furthermore, despite signiﬁcant overlap in the intellectual formations of

queer and transgender studies, the conceptual ﬁt between them is not seamless.

Queer has proven less useful than transgender studies in accounting for embodi-

ment. Trans studies makes accounting for material experience and making space for

new forms and experiences of embodiment central (in this aspect, one sees sig-

niﬁcant links between transgender and disability studies). Queer is deeply tied to

the intellectual formation of poststructuralism, particularly as it developed in lit-

erary theory and psychoanalysis. The ﬁeld of transgender studies also was inﬂu-

enced by this framework—particularly in canonical texts such as Sandy Stone's

''Th e Empire Strikes Back'' (1991)— but it has tended to be more methodologically

inclusive and diverse. While queer studies continues to resist social science meth-

odologies in favor of a more humanistic version of interdisciplinary or cultural

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studies, trans studies has stronger ties to legal studies, transnational analysis, the

history of medicine, architecture and design, ethnography, and political economy.

It is not clear whether queer is best understood as a substantial term with

historical links to communities marked as gender and sexual deviants or as a more

abstract theoretical term, one that describes a capacious nonnormativity, political

critique, and resistance to identity. A similar ambiguity marks transgender , which

can refer to particular modes of embodiment or communities of people but can

also be understood as a theoretical term that points to the crossing and dena-

turalizing of identity categories. The powerful destabilizations that both queer

and transgender have effected are crucial, but in the present they may need to be

balanced by an awareness of the continuing force of identity. Etymologically, both

trans and queer refer to crossing, and in that sense both terms invoke mobility as

well as its limits. Given that more and more gender-normative, economically and

racially privileged, coupled, and metropolitan gays and lesbians are crossing into

the mainstream, these ﬁelds may need to turn their attention in the present to

crossing in the sense of being crossed or thwarted in one's desires, ambitions, or

life chances. Social class, race, region, ability, and gender presentation play a

crucial role in determining rights, access to resources, and freedom from violence;

and transgender, transsexual, and genderqueer people suffer disproportionately

from what Amber Hollibaugh and Cherrı

´e Moraga, writing in 1981, called ''queer

attack'' (403). If queer has political force in the context of struggles for gender and

sexual freedom, it is because of its ability to convey the ongoing realities of stigma,

violence, and exclusion.

Heather Love teaches gender studies and twentieth-century literature and culture at the

University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer

History (2007) and the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (''Rethinking Sex'').

References

Barbin, Herculine, and Michel Foucault. 1980. Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered

Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. New York: Pantheon Books.

Cohen, Cathy J. 2005. ''Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer

Politics?'' In Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology , ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G.

Henderson, 21–51. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1978. An Introduction . Vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality . New York: Vintage.

———. 2003. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception . London: Routledge.

Hollibaugh, Amber, and Cherrı

´e Moraga. 1981. ''What We're Rollin around in Bed With: Sexual

Silences in Feminism.'' Heresies, no. 12: 58–62.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. ''Queer and Now.'' In Tendencies , 1–20. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-

versity Press.

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Stone, Sandy. 1991. ''The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.'' In Body Guards: The

Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, 280–304.

New York: Routledge.

Stryker, Susan. 2008. Transgender History . Berkeley, CA: Seal.

Warner, Michael. 1993. Introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet , ed. Michael Warner, vii–xxxi.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399938

Reveal

DANIELLE M. SEID

The reveal is a moment in a trans person's life when the trans person is subjected

to the pressures of a pervasive gender/sex system that seeks to make public the

''truth'' of the trans person's gendered and sexed body. While the reveal is fre-

quently used as a narrative technique in literature and ﬁlm, it also profoundly

impacts trans people's actual lives, as seen in media event reveals, like Christine

Jorgensen's, and as experienced by trans people in a variety of situations in daily

life—such as border crossings, doctor's visits, and job interviews.

At stake in reveals is the issue of agency. Inextricably bound to narrative,

the reveal can be seized upon by a trans person as a moment to exert agency and

reveal oneself, to determine the meaning of one's own life and body. Unlike the

act of coming out for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, which can have the effect of

afﬁrming an ''identity,'' the reveal results in a predicament in which the meaning

of the trans body is contested, and competing ''truths'' vie for dominance. And yet

such a ''performance,'' of revealing instead of being revealed, frequently demands

that trans persons continuously reassert and defend their truth.

When used as a narrative technique in literature and ﬁlm, the reveal

presents previously ''hidden'' or unknown information to the audience, often in a

manner that twists the plot or produces a climax. In popular narrative ﬁction and

ﬁlm representations of transgender people, the moment in which a trans char-

acter's trans status is discovered by the audience, or by another character, typically

functions as a reveal. This reveal is often highly sensationalized, dramatized, or

eroticized, though it is also sometimes depicted as comic. Reveals involving trans

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women, like those in The Crying Game (dir. Neil Jordan, 1992) and Transamerica

(dir. Duncan Tucker, 2005), often display the trans woman's genitals, as an excit-

atory practice which, projected at a presumably heteronormative, cissexual

audience, increases the likelihood that the audience will react with shock and

revulsion. Film reveals of trans men generally shy away from an explicit genital

reveal, though ''female'' body parts are often highlighted, as with the display of

chests between one trans man and another in Albert Nobbs (dir. Rodrigo Garcı

´a,

2011).

In mainstream ﬁlm, the reveal stages a denaturalization of widespread

assumptions about gender and sex—namely that one's gender must match one's

sexed body—but it typically does so in a manner that regulates and corrects

gender noncompliance, narratively reinscribing a binary gender system as ''nat-

ural'' and desirable. Structuring an audience's knowledge of a character's trans-

gender status as a reveal can contribute to the perception that living a transgender

life involves concealing ''the truth'' of sexed bodies. The moment of the reveal

provokes a struggle over the meaning of the trans body, a struggle in which the

trans person often ''loses'' to dominant discourses about trans lives, the conclu-

sion being: that's really a man. As such, the reveal places many trans people in a

vexed situation in which the terms that would make a trans person intelligible are

already predetermined.

Danielle M. Seid is a PhD student at the University of Oregon, where she specializes in ﬁlm/TV,

queer studies, and critical race theory.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399947

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Revolution

GABRIELA CANO

A revolution is generally understood as the violent upheaval of the established

order. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 destroyed the oligarchic state and created a

new constitutional order that promised land reform to the peasants, welfare and

labor rights to the working class, and a national direction to the economy. Like

other revolutionary processes, it also produced a nationalist culture and a nar-

rative that celebrated the political and military contributions of male revolu-

tionaries as well as their violent masculinity set to defend the goals of social

emancipation. At the same time, postrevolutionary culture was set to stabilize

traditional gender hierarchies and the masculine/feminine binary.

However, the instability and disorder of wartime also dismantled social

hierarchies and Victorian respectability and provoked ruptures of gender con-

ventions, opening the space for gender transitions that would perform masculi-

nity in the armed struggle (Monsiva

´is 1984). Some women took up male attire

and masculine identities in order to pass as men to protect themselves from the

sexual violence that commonly intensiﬁes during armed conﬂicts or simply to

ﬁght as soldiers without the social gender restrictions that usually burden women

in combat. In most cases it was a temporary, strategic masculinization that often

included taking up a male mode of attire and name; for example, Angela Jime

´nez

fought under the name of Angel Jime

´nez. At the end of the war, Jime

´nez and

several other women gave up their masculine identities and went back to their

feminine names, to wearing women's clothing, and to female roles in society as

mothers and wives. The documented exception is Amelio Robles (1889–1984). Born

Amelia Robles, he preserved the masculine identity he forged within the rough

environs of war until his death, even through old age and illness (Cano 2006).

His masculinization during war did not simply respond to the pragmatic purpose

of enjoying the social privileges reserved to men, but rather it was the product of a

deeper, more vital desire to radically transform the female identity assigned at birth

in order to make himself male in every aspect of life (Fig. 1).

Interest in Amelio Robles's story goes beyond its particulars: his story is

the only documented case of a gender transition that occurred during a Latin

American revolution and was accepted by the institutions of the postrevolutionary

state. Practically all of his identiﬁcation papers are issued in the masculine, and he

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was even decorated as a vet-

eran of the Mexican Revolu-

tion by the Ministry of War,

the highest military authority

of the country. Such recogni-

tion was possible because his

comrades in arms admired

the masculinity—machismo—

that Robles displayed on the

battleﬁeld. Personal qualities

such as his courage and capac-

ity for responding to aggression

immediately and violently, his

skills with guns and horses, and

his enjoyment of heavy drink-

ing and womanizing won him

the appreciation of fellow men

in the army. In the face of death

and living through the hor-

rors of the battleﬁeld, Amelio

Robles made good friends

among guerrilla ﬁghters. Such

strong bonds and complicities

would be instrumental for the ofﬁcial recognition of his masculinity. Once the war

was over, some of Robles's comrades moved up to high ofﬁces in the postrevolu-

tionary state, and they were complicit in extending ofﬁcial letters of recommen-

dation to Robles referring to him in the masculine.

In the days of combat, moral reserves and gender conventions were often

abandoned, creating spaces of subversion such as the one that made Robles's

masculinization possible. However, such acceptance was not granted to other

forms of gender transgression; effeminacy and male homosexuality drew extreme

rejection. Fellow soldiers, on the other hand, admired and recognized Amelio

Robles's masculinity because he took the stereotype of machismo. This stereotype

eventually became central to the heroic nationalist narrative of the Mexican

revolution.

At a time when surgical procedures and hormone therapies for sex change

had not been developed, Amelio Robles constructed a very convincing masculine

social identity and body image through performance, attire, and the skillful

handling of studio photography, the cultural resources available in an isolated

Figure 1. Letter submitted by Amelio Robles to the

Mexican Ministry of Defense in 1970. Courtesy of Archivo

Histo

´rico de la Secretarı

´a de la Defensa Nacional, Mexico

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rural area of Mexico in the early twentieth century. A carefully selected wardrobe

featuring the pants, shirts, jackets, and hats common in rural environments

complemented the poses, gestures, and attitudes involved in this daily perfor-

mance. He chose shirts with large chest pockets that concealed his small breasts.

With enduring portraits of Robles's perfectly credible masculine poses, gestures,

and mode of dress, studio photography contributed as well to the establishment

of his masculine appearance.

The scant historical evidence available — photographs and ofﬁcial

documents—suggests that Amelio Robles felt nothing but a man. However, even

if the term transgender did not exist in his day (it was coined as an umbrella term

in the late twentieth century in a context of reclaiming rights and visibility for

diverse cross-gender identities), Robles's masculinity can be better understood,

and acquires wide signiﬁcance, as the result of a successful transgendering process

that made the most of the cultural resources of his time and beneﬁted from the

breaking of conventions during revolutionary war and from the nationalist nar-

ratives that worked to stabilized the gender binary that prevailed in the postrev-

olutionary Mexican state.

Gabriela Cano is a professor at El Colegio de Me

´xico in Mexico City. She is the author of Se

llamaba Elena Arizmendi (2010) and coeditor of Sex in Revolution: Gender, Power, and Politics in

Modern Mexico (2006). Her book Gender Battles in the Mexican Revolution, or The Intimate Joy of

Colonel Robles is forthcoming.

References

Cano, Gabriela. 2006. ''Unconcealable Realities of Desire: Amelio Robles's (Transgender) Mas-

culinity in the Mexican Revolution.'' In Sex in Revolution: Gender, Power, and Politics in

Modern Mexico, ed. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano, 35–56.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Monsiva

´is, Carlos. 1984. ''La aparicio

´n del subsuelo: Sobre la cultura de la Revolucio

´n Mexicana.''

Historias, no. 8–9, 159–77.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399956

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Sick

MICHA CA

´RDENAS

They say we're sick.

The year I gained a breast, my mother lost one to breast cancer.

The year I gained my voice, my mother was losing hers to dementia,

brought on by chemo and twenty years of anti-psychotics for her schizophrenia.

The doctors say we're sick

Myself and my mom.

We each take our pills everyday from little amber bottles.

But I don't feel sick

and that gives me some feeling of

solidarity, empathy, something I can't ﬁnd words for,

for my mother.

It makes me wonder if my mom feels sick?

I remember her smile when I last visited her, in North Carolina,

which I can't do often.

Laughing with her, I started to relate to her in a new way,

as a person, as a femme who wore poodle skirts and now uses a wheelchair,

who loved my Colombian father and his thick accent.

Getting in the car, my mom held my hand in hers and said

we have almost the same color of nail polish on,

the day was beautiful and so painful

I struggled not to cry, for her.

In a way we're all sick, but we're all also caretakers,

family members, chosen and biological,

and we are all there for one another,

in need or to offer help,

in a society that would leave each of us in isolation,

we are ﬁnding ways of existing together, interdependent,

and however difﬁcult it may be at times, with love.

In an article discussing Lea T's fall advertising campaign for Givenchy and Lady

Gaga's fashion shoot as Joe Calderone in Vogue Hommes , the New York Times

declared ''2010 will be remembered as the year of the transsexual'' (Van Meter

2010). In Gaga Feminism , J. Jack Halberstam describes ''the very recent rise in

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popularity of the term 'transgender' '' and states that ''the tendency to read gender

variance in non-Western contexts as a sign of anachronism has not been par-

ticularly productive, nor has the tendency to read all gender variance as 'trans-

genderism' '' (2012: 81). Following this claim, one can ask: What is lost in the

transgender movement's increasing mainstream success, and who is left behind?

How does the media's representation of transgender people in a positive light

serve to normalize and regulate the image of gender nonconformance and limit

the range of political possibility?

A news article describing Lana Wachowski's speech at the Human Rights

Campaign awards illustrates this limiting in action. The Hollywood Reporter

article is titled ''Lana Wachowski Reveals Suicide Plan, Painful Past in Emotional

Speech (Exclusive Video)'' (Abramovitch 2012). The title performs the common

narrative surrounding transgender people, the narrative that supports the model

of medical intervention: we are sick, mentally ill, and without medical inter-

vention we are suicidal. A disability studies critique is useful here when philos-

opher of disability Abby L. Wilkerson states, ''Intersexualization illustrates the

ways in which sexual disabilities are constituted in and through social environ-

ments'' (2012: 193). One can ask, is being suicidal our condition, or is that con-

dition created by the violence of a transphobic society?

The Wachowski article goes on to describe an image of transgender people

that ﬁts well within what Wilkerson describes as ''normate sex'': married, white,

thin, ﬁnancially successful, monogamous. Wilkerson points to the ''desperate need

for alliance building'' between the disability rights movement and the transgender/

intersex/genderqueer movements. She calls for ''a sexual-political interdepen-

dence: a politics, that is, that emphasizes our interdependence as allies'' (ibid.: 204).

Such an alliance allows for a transgender movement that does not only follow a

normative model of medical transition but that openly questions the narrative of

pathologization placed on transgender and gender-nonconforming people and that

questions the Western biomedical model of medicine, which only treats illness

instead of focusing on healing and well being. While transgender people can claim a

disabled status based on our medical diagnoses and frequent interactions with the

medical-industrial complex, such a claim risks appropriation and the diluting of

claims for justice from other disabled people. Transgender people can work in

solidarity, or interdependence, with disabled people by joining the disability

movement's strategy of critiquing the authority that deﬁnes illness, opening up a

decolonization of medicine that can imagine other models of health based in desire

and liberation, not illness and correction to norms. At the same time, transgender

people who identify as disabled should be supported by their communities when

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they publicly identify as disabled and speak out in solidarity with other kinds of

disabilities. I am sick too. On top of having the diagnosis of ''transsexualism,'' I was

diagnosed with ADHD as a child, and it persists in having a major inﬂuence on

my life.

The transgender rights movement can learn from women of color femi-

nism that not only are coalitions essential for success, but recognizing and

embracing difference within our movements is key to creating movements that

perform the world we want now. The risk of not building solidarity between

disability rights and transgender politics is demonstrated by movements such as

Occupy Wall Street, whose focus on an economically reductive deﬁnition of

the 99 percent versus the 1 percent created a movement in which sexual assault

occurred (Newcomb 2011) and camps were divided into racial and class ghettoes.

Queer of color critique builds on women of color feminism to demonstrate how

these issues are inseparable. Roderick A. Ferguson, in Aberrations in Black , states:

''The decisive intervention of queer of color analysis is that racist practice artic-

ulates itself generally as gender and sexual regulation, and that gender and sex-

ual differences variegate racial fomations'' (2003: 3) One could transpose this

to state that abelist practice articulates itself as gender and sexual regulation, or

transphobic practice articulates itself as the regulation of illness. Either way, such a

conjunction helps one understand that the need for solidarity between disability

activists and gender-nonconforming activists is not just strategic; it connects the

roots of our struggles, deepening our claims for liberation and opening the way to

a decolonial vision of healing justice.

micha ca

´rdenas is a PhD student in media arts and practice (iMAP) and Provost Fellow at the

University of Southern California and a member of the art collective Electronic Disturbance

Theater 2.0. micha's coauthored book The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities was

published in 2012.

References

Abramovitch, Seth. 2012. ''Lana Wachowski Reveals Suicide Plan, Painful Past in Emotional

Speech (Exclusive Video).'' Hollywood Reporter , October 24. www.hollywoodreporter

.com/news/lana-wachowski-reveals-suicide-plan-382169.

Ferguson, Roderick A. 2003. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique . Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

Halberstam, J. Jack. 2012. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal . Boston: Beacon.

Newcomb, Alyssa. 2011. ''Sexual Assaults Reported in 'Occupy' Camps,'' November 3. abcnews.go

.com/US/sexual-assaults-occupy-wall-street-camps/story?id=14873014.

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Van Meter, William. 2010. ''Transsexuals Are Edging into the Mainstream: Is 2010 the Year of the

Transsexual?'' New York Times, December 8. www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/fashion

/09TRANS.html.

Wilkerson, Abby L. 2012. ''Normate Sex and Its Discontents.'' In Sex and Disability , ed. Robert

McRuer and Anna Mollow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399965

Sinophone

HOWARD CHIANG

Pioneered by the literary scholar Shu-mei Shih (2007), sinophone is an analytic

category that provides a long-overdue alternative to the discourses of ''Chinese''

and ''Chinese diaspora'' that have traditionally deﬁned Chinese studies. The

sinophone world refers to Sinitic-language communities and cultures outside

China or on the margins of the hegemonic productions of the Chinese nation-

state and Chineseness. As such, Sinophone communities and cultures bear a

historically contested and politically embedded relationship to China, similar to

the relationships between the anglophone world and Britain, for example, or the

francophone world and France, or the hispanophone world and Spain. Sino-

phone studies therefore presents a radical break from traditional approaches to

Chinese studies in that it disrupts the chain of equivalence established, since the

rise of nation-states, among language, culture, ethnicity, and nationality as mean-

ingful categories of analysis.

The concept of the sinophone is important for transgender studies because

the ﬁrst case of transsexuality in Chinese-speaking communities was reported not

in mainland China but in post–World War II Taiwan (Chiang 2012). In 1953, four

years after Mao Zedong's political regime took over the mainland and the

Nationalist government was forced to relocate its base, news of the success of

native doctors in converting a man into a woman made headlines in Taiwan. The

story ﬁrst came to public attention on August 14, when the United Daily News

(Lianhebao ) surprised the public by announcing the discovery of an intersexed

soldier, Xie Jianshun, in Tainan, Taiwan (Lianhebao 1953b). Within a week, the

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characterization of Xie in the Taiwanese press changed from that of an average

citizen whose ambiguous sex provoked uncertainty and anxiety to that of being

considered the ''ﬁrst'' Chinese transsexual.

Xie was frequently dubbed the ''Chinese Christine.'' This allusion to the

contemporaneous American ex-GI transsexual celebrity Christine Jorgensen, who

had traveled to Denmark for her sex reassignment surgery and gained worldwide

familiarity immediately afterward due to her personality and glamorous looks,

reﬂected the growing inﬂuence of American culture on the Republic of China at

the peak of the Cold War. One newspaper headline on Xie's case, ''Christine Will

Not Be America's Exclusive: Soldier Destined to Become a Lady,'' exempliﬁes Xie's

transformation into a transsexual cultural icon whose status would put Taiwan

on a par with the United States on the global stage as a modern and technologi-

cally sophisticated nation (Lianbebao 1953a). As was the case with Jorgensen in

the United States, extensive popular press coverage in Taiwan of Xie's transition

shifted common understandings of sexuality and gender, introduced the concept

of transsexuality as something distinct from intersex conditions, and ampliﬁed

the roles of both medical science and mass media in the construction of modern

identity.

Of signiﬁcance in both national and trans-Paciﬁc contexts, Xie's experi-

ence made bianxingren (transsexual) a household term in sinophone cultures of

the 1950s. She served as a focal point for numerous news stories that broached the

topics of changing sex, human intersexuality, and other atypical conditions of the

body. People who wrote about her debated whether she qualiﬁed as a woman,

whether medical technology could transform sex, and whether the two ''Chris-

tines'' were more similar or different. These persistent comparisons of Taiwan

with the United States, through the comparisons of two versions of transsexuality,

became an important arena for articulating a sense of sinophone difference from

anglophone culture as well as of Taiwanese nationalism. Xie's story highlighted

issues that pervaded postwar sinophone society in Taiwan: the censorship of

public culture by the state, the unique social status of men serving in the armed

forces, the limit of individualism, the promise and pitfalls of science, the nor-

mative behaviors expected of men and women, and the boundaries of acceptable

sexual expression. Xie Jianshun's saga, and those of other reported cases of sex

change that followed in her wake, attest to the emergence of transsexuality as a

modern form of sexual embodiment in sinophone society. Xie's story in particular

became a lightning rod for many post–World War II anxieties about gender and

sexuality and called dramatic attention to issues that would later drive the feminist

and gay and lesbian movements in the decades ahead.

Press stories of Xie and other transsexuals illustrate how the Republican

government claimed sovereignty in postwar Taiwan in part by deploying and

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demonstrating its mastery of the Western biomedical epistemology of sex. Wide-

ranging debates on sex transformation had preoccupied sexologists and popular

writers in mainland China during the Republican era (1912–49) in response to

scientiﬁc thought's global dissemination, and these debates migrated to Taiwan

along with the Nationalist government (Chiang 2012). The Republican govern-

ment in Taiwan also drew on the island's history of Japan colonization. As

did Britain in Hong Kong, Japan institutionalized in Taiwan a highly Wester-

nized biomedical infrastructure. After Mao ''nationalized'' Chinese medicine in

mainland China in the 1950s, Taiwan and Hong Kong became the two locations

within sinophone cultures where Western medicine was most ''advanced.'' These

historical legacies informed the immense media publicity showered on Xie

Jianshun —and sex change more generally — ﬁrst in Taiwan and afterward in

Hong Kong. The rapid transfer of Western biomedical technology to these

locations during the Cold War, coupled with their relatively open social and

cultural milieus, enabled the sinophone articulations of transsexuality to

emerge ﬁrst and foremost along the postcolonial East Asian Paciﬁc Rim.

The story of Xie Jianshun helps illuminate the broader contours of

sinophone culture, because its epistemological and historical underpinnings are

rooted outside ''China'' as conceived in a narrow geopolitical sense. It touches on

legacies of both Japanese postcolonialism and American neo-imperialism; it

involves the recontextualization of scientiﬁc internationalism, the Republic's

nationalist state projects, and it touches as well on Taiwan's cultural, political,

and economic afﬁliations with Hong Kong and Japan as anticommunist subre-

gions of Cold War East Asia. Considering Xie's celebrity and inﬂuence as a

sinophone (re)production of transsexuality can help push postcolonial queer

studies beyond its overwhelming preoccupation with ''the West'' and recenter

attention on China speciﬁcally and Asia more generally. Tracing the dispersed

circuits of knowledge that condensed in the public representations of Xie Jian-

shun allows us to see the ''Chinese Christine'' not as a cheap knock-off of a Western

original but rather as a ﬁgure through which to read inter- and intra-Asian

regional dynamics and conditions of subjectivity.

Howard Chiang is an assistant professor of history at the University of Warwick. He is the editor

of Transgender China (2012), Queer Sinophone Cultures (2013, with Ari Larissa Heinrich),

Psychiatry and Chinese History (forthcoming), and Historical Epistemology and the Making of

Modern Chinese Medicine (forthcoming). He is currently working on a manuscript tentatively

titled ''Sex Changed China: Science, Medicine, and Visions of Transformation.''

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References

Chiang, Howard. 2012. ''Why Sex Mattered: Science and Visions of Transformation in Modern

China.'' PhD diss., Princeton University.

Lianhebao 聯合報 ( United Daily News). 1953a. ''Burang Kelisiding zhuanmei yuqian dabing jiang

bianchen xiaojie'' 不讓克麗絲汀專美於前大兵將變成小姐(''Christine Will Not Be

America's Exclusive: Soldier Destined to Become a Lady''). August 21, 3.

———. 1953b. ''Nanshi faxian yinyangren jiangdong shoushu bian nannu

¨'' 南市發現陰陽人將

動手術辨男女 (''A Hermaphrodite Discovered in Tainan: Sex to Be Determined after

Surgery''). August 21, 3.

Shih, Shu-mei. 2007. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Paciﬁc . Berkeley:

University of California Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399974

Somatechnics

NIKKI SULLIVAN

In 2003 a group of academics at Macquarie University organized a conference on

body modiﬁcation. The aim of the event was to articulate the diverse ways in

which all bodies—not simply those that are tattooed or those that have under-

gone some sort of transformative surgical procedure— are always already mod-

iﬁed. One of the keynote speakers at the conference was Susan Stryker, whose

work in the ﬁeld of transgender studies problematized the ''common-sense''

understanding of technology, which, at the time, underpinned the dominant

model of the transsexual body as either requiring or having undergone techno-

logical intervention. Following the conference, Stryker and her colleagues at

Macquarie coined the term somatechnics in an attempt to highlight what they saw

as the inextricability of soma and techne

´, of the body (as a culturally intelligible

construct) and the techniques (dispositifs and hard technologies) in and through

which corporealities are formed and transformed. From the outset, then, soma-

technics has addressed and been shaped by transgender issues, and this connec-

tion was explicitly articulated at the Transsomatechnics conference held at Simon

Fraser University in 2008.

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The term somatechnics , derived from the Greek soma (body) and techne

(craftsmanship), supplants the logic of the ''and,'' indicating that techne

´is not

something we add or apply to the already constituted body (as object), nor is it a

tool that the embodied self employs to its own ends. Rather, techne

´sare the

dynamic means in and through which corporealities are crafted: that is, contin-

uously engendered in relation to others and to a world. What we see here, then, is

a chiasmatic interdependence of soma and techne

´: of bodily being (or corpore-

alities) as always already technologized and technologies (which are never simply

''machinic'') as always already enﬂeshed. Anna Munster nicely articulates this

vision when she writes that technologies are ''always in a dynamic relation to the

matter which gives [them their] substance and to the other machines — aesthetic,

social, economic—which substantiate [them] as . . . ensemble[s]'' (1999: 121). To

put it slightly differently, the categories of being that are integral to our (un)

becoming-with, and the orientation(s) that shape them, are somatechnological

(rather than simply natural or cultural, internal or external to us, enabling or

oppressive). For example, transgender, like forms of bodily being commonly pre-

sumed not to be technologically produced, is a heterogeneous somatechnological

construct that comes to matter in contextually speciﬁc ways and in relation to other

discursive formations. In making this claim, I am not suggesting that modes and

practices of embodiment (such as those we call transgender) are not ''real.'' Indeed,

they are the matter(ialization) of being, but this materialization takes place through

certain highly regulated (situated) somatechnologies. Given this, the primary aim of

somatechnics as a critical orientation is — at least as I understand it — to queer

orderability by bringing to light the operations of power, the soma-techno-logic,

that constitute(s) (un)becoming-with in situated ways. I will return to this point in

due course.

The history of Western thought is, as Elizabeth Grosz and others have

argued, subtended by ''a profound somatophobia'' (1994: 1). From the ancient

Greeks, to Enlightenment thinkers (Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Hobbes), to the

common-sense ﬁctions that shape contemporary life, the body has been con-

ceived (and thus constituted) as a natural, biological entity, the ﬂeshly shell of a

soul, a self, and/or a mind that is superior to it. Given its status as both prison and

property, the brute matter of the body (as object) is constituted in and through

this particular imaginary as that which the subject must transcend, transform,

master, and/or shape, and nowhere is this more apparent than in autobio-

graphical transsexual narratives published in the west in the twentieth century.

There have, of course, been various challenges posed, particularly from the mid-

twentieth century on, to the kind of determinism associated with this model of

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the body, the self, and the relation between them, but all too often such attempts

reiterate—albeit inadvertently—a sort of naive materialism in which the body

appears as a ﬂeshly substrate that simply is prior to its regulation. This ontological

tendency is apparent, for example, in accounts of self hood (often found in dis-

cussions of transgender) that rely on a presumed distinction between sex and

gender—the idea that the sexed body is a natural biological substrate onto which

contextually speciﬁc (that is, culturally determined) attributes, roles, and capa-

cities are imposed—as well as in dominant conceptions of, and debates about,

technology.

Technology, claimed Martin Heidegger in his inﬂuential essay, ''The

Question Concerning Technology,'' is commonly conceived both as a human

activity and as a means to an end. The effect of this instrumentalist conception is

that debates about technology tend to revolve around ''our manipulating tech-

nology in the proper manner as a means'' ([1954] 1977: 5). In other words, the

primary focus of discussions of particular technologies tends to be on whether,

how, and to what extent they might be used to enhance life, to achieve integrity, to

enable one to realize one's true self. Little has changed, it seems, in the sixty years

since Heidegger ﬁrst made these claims, and this is clear if one looks at accounts of

so-called gender reassignment surgeries. In brief, such practices are framed by

some as medical treatments that will enhance the lives of those who undergo

them, while others have argued that such practices are (for a variety of reasons)

unethical and/or immoral; that they constitute a misuse of technology. Some

argue that individuals have a right to bodily self-determination, and others argue

(variously) that such a right, if it exists, is never absolute and that therefore the

use of technologies that (re)shape the body requires strict regulation. Despite the

differences of opinion expressed in these claims, what they share is an instru-

mentalist view of technology, one in which technology is (constituted as) an

object external to and manipulable by the subject(s) who deploy it to their own

ends (whether those ends be a sense of bodily integrity, the fulﬁlment of a reli-

gious obligation, the construction of the self as altruistic, appropriately profes-

sional, morally responsible, or whatever). Indeed, each is subtended by a will to

mastery which, Heidegger and Foucault would argue, is itself technological.

Technology, suggests Heidegger in his critique of instrumentalist logic, is less a

thing that is external to the self than an orientation, a way of thinking/knowing/

seeing that brings forth (or engenders, shapes, and ''orders'') being, or, more

accurately, (un)becoming. Technology, then, is at once the (contextually speciﬁc)

means by which we order the world and the ways of thinking/knowing/seeing that

precede us and make us be(come). Given this, the problem with instrumentalism

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as an orientation, and thus with the instrumentalist view of technology as sepa-

rate from the self who deploys it as a means to an identiﬁable and achievable

end, is that it veils over the coindebtedness, coresponsibility, coarticulation, and

movement of (un)becoming-with.

Critiques of this view of technology and the

ethicopolitical effects that such a way of thinking produces have been articulated

at length by theorists as diverse as Donna Haraway, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice

Merleau-Ponty, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze, and Fe

´lix Guattari, to name but a

few. Somatechnics adds another (heterogeneous) voice to these attempts to think

otherwise, but it does so from the possibly unique position of having always

already been shaped by trans*.

Nikki Sullivan is an associate professor of critical and cultural studies in the Department of

Media, Music, Communication, and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. She is coeditor

(with Samantha Murray) of Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies (2009) and

cofounder and co–chief editor (with Jane Simon) of the Somatechnics journal.

Note

1. Elsewhere I speak of the movement of (un)becoming-with as ''transing'' (Sullivan 2009).

References

Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Heidegger, Martin. (1954) 1977. ''The Question Concerning Technology.'' In The Question Con-

cerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, 3–35. New York: Harper Perennial.

Munster, Anna. 1999. ''Is There Postlife after Postfeminism? Tropes of Technics and Life in

Cyberfeminism.'' Australian Feminist Studies 14, no. 29: 119–29.

Sullivan, Nikki. 2009. ''Transsomatechnics and the Matter of 'Genital Modiﬁcations.' '' Australian

Feminist Studies 24, no. 60: 275–86.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399983

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Somatomorph

TARYNN M. WITTEN

Somatomorph. So

¯-ma?to

¯´-mo

¯rf. Despite a century of linguistic history that charts

our cultural-political efforts to satisfactorily capture the complexity inherent

in the matrix of human sex, gender, and sexuality, we remain hindered by an

inadequate lexicon. The generally accepted meme ''trans'' originates from early

medical language adopted in the late 1800s to describe people now referred to as

''transdressers'' (Williams 2012). As ﬁrst coined, it established a lexicon of ''dif-

ference'' for those who failed to align with traditional biomedical and sociocul-

tural expectations of sex and gender. Despite its origins, the word trans has

evolved as the result of desires among those in both the trans-identiﬁed political

community and the medical community to derive a more sufﬁcient, meta-

inclusive meme. Despite these good intentions, however, the unfortunate result

continues to be an insufﬁciently complex meme, resulting in the exclusion of

those who live beyond the expected Western biomedical, sexed, gendered, and

sexual identity. This continued exclusion creates social and political inequalities

and disparities in numerous aspects of daily life that translate into long-term,

negative biomedical and psycho-socioeconomic impacts on those identiﬁed for

various reasons as ''trans'' (Ettner, Monstrey, and Eyler 2007; Grant, Mottet, and

Tanis 2011; Redman 2011; Witten and Eyler 2012).

For many individuals who would claim the identity transsexual, the root

of their challenge is an inherent disconnection (lack of harmony) between the

internalized perception of self and the embodied, corporal representation of

themselves to others. Thus while sex, gender, and sexuality may be important

ingredients in the identity recipe, they are sociolinguistic constructs that emerge

from the physical corpus and its subsequent window dressing embedded within

the totality of the sociocultural politics of a person's environment. In the language

of complexity theory, the corpus is core and thus primary; the rest — including

perceived sex, depicted sex, and representations of gender —is emergence.

Words like trans sexual and trans gender fail to accurately describe the core

relationship to the body because they originate from the external, social per-

spective rather than from the inherent, material root: the body. While the lan-

guage of ''trans'' may imply a transformation in the material being of the body or

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in the projection of sexed identity, it fails to capture the complexity of transfor-

mation. Moreover, the meme ''trans sexuality'' inadvertently and unfortunately

implies connection with sexual identity that is simply incorrect. Given that the

corpus is core in the complex identity being, the word transsexual should be

replaced with a more accurate term so as to indicate that the challenge is around

genital sex rather than sexuality or sexual identity. The word transgender fails to

capture the now accepted multidimensionality of ''gender'' and does not speak to

the corporal aspects of trans-identity. In addition, preﬁxes such as cis and trans —

preﬁxes that emerged from the ﬁeld of organic chemistry as descriptors of

molecular conformation states— when used as modiﬁers of words like sex and

gender, continue to promote a binary. That is, one's identity becomes either cis

or trans rather than understood to be a continuum in which cis and trans coexist

as descriptors within a larger semantic range.

In a frustrated effort to neutralize some of the stigma around the various

trans identities, I ﬁrst coined the word transcorporal (Witten 2007a, 2007b).

This word offsets the stigma around the juxtaposition of trans and sex/gender/

sexuality by replacing the emergent constructs of sex, gender, and sexuality

with the core construct of the corporal nature of trans identity. In doing so, it

somewhat levels the playing ﬁeld with respect to discussions around trans versus

non-trans bodies. However, it does not engage the larger queer population that

chooses to bend, blend, and blur or to alternatively deﬁne the semiotics of the

body and its myriad, complex representations. Nor does it extend its inclusion to

a multicultural sensibility. Though the historical evolution of the meme ''trans''

reached for an inclusiveness for the breadth of the ''condition'' of trans, the actual

effect was to reiterate the non-normality once again, even in the guise of trans-

corporal being.

The larger question then becomes, how do we queer the insufﬁcient meme

''trans'' to simultaneously escape the recapitulation of difference and fully

encompass the complexity of human sexed, gendered, and sexual being? Can the

meme ''trans'' be queered enough to embrace those who claim such identities

as genderqueer, gender-bending, gender-blending, gender-variant, gender non-

conforming, XTX, WBM, MBW, cross-dresser, transvestite, and a host of other

descriptors? And given the organic, grassroots emergence of the concept of trans

being, how do we preserve the sanctity of the historical language that other

population members ﬁnd more relevant to their state of being? Finally, how do we

create a linguistic landscape that nulliﬁes, to a greater extent, the signiﬁcant

negativity associated with the historical as well as the political semantics currently

used to describe the Western trans community?

To address these questions, we revisit the idea that the core challenges or

objectives faced by trans-identiﬁed individuals revolve around manipulations of

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the body, or soma, and what emerges through the body into the public as rep-

resentations of sex, gender, and sexuality. Some of the biophysical manipulations

incurred in transformation of the soma may be permanent; others may not. Some

of the changes may be subtle, while others may be ﬂagrant and readily apparent

to those beyond the self. In our way of thinking, an individual who has chosen

to morph the body, the soma, and to then engage in the sociolinguistic and

evidentiary representation of the soma beyond the self has become a ''somato-

morph'' or ought to be somatomorphically identiﬁed.

The phrase ''somatomorphically identiﬁed'' is semantically more inclusive

of the complex human matrix of sex, gender, and sexualized being (Witten and

Eyler 2012: ch. 6). Somatomorph is a continuum descriptor rather than a binary

term; morphing is a continuum construct, while trans implies a discrete relation-

ship between one state of being an another. Use of the term soma refocuses our

sociolinguistic understanding of those we understand now to be trans back to the

prime root—the body —while still acknowledging the emergent relevance of sex-

uality and gender. Because somatomorph implies a dynamic, continuum sexed-

being, it encompasses additional continuum identities such as gender-bending,

and gender-blending— identities made comprehensible through somatic change.

Similarly, for those who choose to physically change their bodies in a permanent

way, somatomorph is equally appropriate because these individuals are changing

their soma. Various cultural gender identities can also fall under the aegis of

somatomorphic identity, as gender is a sociocultural consequence of morphing the

soma either through actual physical interventions such as surgery and/or hor-

mones or through less permanent means such as makeup and dress.

Tarynn M. Witten is an associate professor of biological complexity and physics at the Virginia

Commonwealth University. She is the author of The Tao of Gender (2002) and an editor/author of

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Aging: Challenges in Research, Practice, and Policy (2012).

References

Ettner, Randi, Stanley Monstrey, and A. Evan Eyler, eds. 2007. Principles of Transgender Medicine

and Surgery. Binghamton, NY: Haworth.

Grant, Jamie M., Lisa A. Mottet, and Justin Tanis. 2011. ''Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the

National Transgender Discrimination Survey.'' Washington, DC: National Center for

Transgender Equality and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. www.thetaskforce.org

/downloads/reports/reports/ntds_full.pdf (accessed October 29, 2013).

Redman, Daniel. 2011. ''Fear, Discrimination, and Abuse: Transgender Elders and the Perils of

Long-Term Care.'' Aging Today 32, no. 2: 1–2.

Williams, Cristan. 2012. ''Tracking Transgender: The Historical Truth.'' The TransAdvocate (blog),

March 28. www.transadvocate.com/tracking-transgender.htm.

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Witten, Tarynn M. 2007a. ''Transcorporality and Aging.'' Invited talk presented to the Center for

the Study of Human Sexuality, New York University.

———. 2007b. ''I'm Rubber, You're Glue—Words, Meaning, and Identity in Transgender.''

Invited plenary presentation to the Fifth Annual Translating Identity Conference, Bur-

lington, Vermont.

Witten, Tarynn M., and A. Evan Eyler, eds. 2012. Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex

Aging: Challenges in Research, Practice, and Policy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399992

Sports

ANN TRAVERS

Modern sport, which emerged in Europe and its colonies in the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries, was a male-supremacist as well as a ''civilizing''

project that represented a backlash against the increasing power of middle- and

upper-class white women; it was designed to emphasize sex difference, to socialize

boys and men into orthodox masculinity, and to further the goal of white middle-

and upper-class morality and leadership within Western imperialist projects

(Pronger 1990; Carrington and McDonald 2009). Mainstream competitive and

amateur sport in North America still plays a central role in naturalizing the

ideology of a two-sex system while normalizing white cisgendered heterosexual

masculinity and class privilege (Hill Collins 2005).

Sport has also been the site of resistance to oppressive systems of domi-

nation organized around categories of race and sex; in recent years, transsexual

and transgender athletes and activists have challenged simplistic notions of

binary-based biological sex difference (Travers and Deri 2010; Grifﬁn and Carroll

2010). Renee

´Richards, a transsexual woman, set an important precedent in

1977 when she successfully sued the Women's Tennis Association for barring

her participation (Birrell and Cole 1990). Other ground-breaking trans athletes

include Michelle Dumaresq (women's mountain biking), Lana Lawless and

Mianne Bagger (Ladies Professional Golf Association), Kai Allums (NCAA

women's basketball), Keelin Godsey (two-time NCAA women's hammer throw

champion), and the Indian runner Shanti Soundarajan.

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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its afﬁliates ﬁnally

discontinued the long-reviled, scientiﬁcally unfounded practice of gender veri-

ﬁcation testing for women athletes prior to the 2000 Olympic Games (Cavanagh

and Sykes 2006), but the IOC's role in normalizing the two-sex system and male

superiority continues—most dramatically, in recent years, in the case of the

gender-troubling ﬁgure of South African runner Caster Semenya, whose ''mas-

culine'' appearance became a subject of concern among her competitors and

sporting ofﬁcials (Nyong'o 2010). The IOC enacted a policy on transsexual par-

ticipation in 2003; known as the Stockholm Consensus, the policy requires

transsexual athletes to complete hormonal transition at least two years prior to

competing in an Olympic event, to undergo genital transformation surgery, and

to have legally changed sex. While widely lauded as a ﬁrst step, the Stockholm

Consensus has also been broadly criticized on the grounds that genitals have no

bearing on athletic performance, that the expense of surgery is a barrier for many

athletes, and that many governments refuse to supply legal documents desig-

nating the appropriate legal sex identity (Cavanagh and Sykes 2006).

A 2010 report, On the Team: Equal Opportunity for Transgender Student

Athletes (Grifﬁn and Carroll 2010), proposed important policy recommendations

that subsequently have been adopted in both the United States and Canada. Citing

the broad overlap between male and female adolescent athletic performance, the

report recommends that transgender high school students should be eligible to

compete on whatever team they choose without medicalized ''sex change.'' At the

college level, participation by transgender athletes requires a formal diagnosis of

gender identity disorder. Early-transitioning athletes who used hormone blockers

during adolescence and who currently take ''cross-sex'' hormones are immediately

eligible to participate in college sports; athletes who transitioned after puberty

must undergo one year of cross-hormone therapy prior to participation. This

protocol was adopted by the National Collegiate Athetics Association (NCAA) in

September 2011 (Lawrence 2011).

Transgender participation in college sports under these guidelines does

not signiﬁcantly affect the ideology of two sexes that undergirds modern sport,

nor does it challenge assumptions about male athletic superiority. Male-to-female

athletes are required to follow a hormone regime that negates the performance-

enhancing effects of testosterone, considered normal in the ''male'' body, in order

to participate as women in women's sports; in contrast, FTM (female-to-male)

transgender athletes are not required to submit to any hormonal regime in order

to participate as men in men's sports. Once they have undergone testosterone

therapy as part of their transition, however, FTM athletes may no longer compete

in women's sports. No current policy debate on transgender participation in

mainstream sport questions the sex-segregated structure of sporting spaces.

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Ann Travers is an associate professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology and

Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Recent articles include ''The Sport Nexus and Gender

Injustice'' (Studies in Social Justice , 2008), ''Women's Ski Jumping, the 2010 Olympic Games,

and the Deafening Silences of Sex Segregation, Whiteness, and Wealth'' (Journal of Sport and

Social Issues, May 2011), and ''Thinking the Unthinkable: Imagining an 'Un-American,' Girl-

Friendly, Women- and Trans-Inclusive Alternative for Baseball'' (Journal of Sport and Social

Issues, February 2013).

References

Birrell, Susan, and Cheryl L. Cole. 1990. ''Double Fault: Renee Richards and the Construction and

Naturalization of Difference.'' Sociology of Sport Journal 7, no. 1: 1–21.

Carrington, Ben, and Ian McDonald, eds. 2009. Marxism, Cultural Studies, and Sport . Boston:

Taylor and Francis.

Cavanagh, Sheila L., and Heather Sykes. 2006. ''Transsexual Bodies at the Olympics: The Inter-

national Olympic Committee's Policy on Transsexual Athletes at the 2004 Athens

Summer Games.'' Body and Society 12, no. 3: 75–102.

Grifﬁn, Pat, and Helen J. Carroll. 2010. On the Team: Equal Opportunity for Transgender Student

Athletes. www.nclrights.org/press-room/press-release/groundbreaking-report-urges-high

-school-and-college-athletics-to-establish-standard-national-policies-for-transgender

-student-athletes/ (accessed December 13, 2013).

Hill Collins, Patricia. 2005. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism.

New York: Routledge.

Lawrence, M. 2011. Transgender Policy Approved. www.ncaa.org/wps/wcm/connect/public/NCAA

/Resources/Latest+News/2011/September/Tr ansgender+policy+approved (accessed Decem-

ber 13, 2013).

Nyong'o, Tavia. 2010. ''The Unforgivable Transgression of Being Caster Semenya.'' Women and

Performance 20, no. 1: 95–100.

Pronger, Brian. 1990. The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex.

New York: St Martin's.

Travers, Ann, and Jillian Deri. 2010. ''Transgender Inclusion and the Changing Face of Lesbian

Softball Leagues.'' International Review for the Sociology of Sport 46, no. 4: 488–507.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400001

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The State

PAISLEY CURRAH

States do many things. They test students, imprison individuals, make roads,

adjudicate property disputes, track the health of populations, issue identity doc-

uments, provide beneﬁts to those deemed deserving, safeguard markets, regulate

the poor, drop bombs, and patrol borders. Imaging ''the state'' as an entity, an

institution, a unitary thing gives an intelligible shape to the countless activities

carried out under the force of law. The idea of the state smuggles within it certain

expectations: an ordered hierarchy, a comprehensive rationality, a unity of pur-

pose and execution. Conceptions of the state differ depending on their particular

historical or theoretical genealogies, and each one calls forth its commensurate

form of political contestation or critical analysis. Those differences are visible in

the range of political positions represented by trans movements. Examining the

issue of sex classiﬁcation can help illustrate them.

In the classical liberal tradition, the state is thought to be a neutral umpire,

meting out judgment according to the rule of law, which Locke described as

''settled standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties.'' Governments

brought into being by this social compact should not treat people differently

because of arbitrary particularities of identity. According to this tradition's con-

temporary script, that governments have denied rights based on distinctions of race

and gender, among others, in the past is an unfortunate historical contingency, one

that betrayed the principle of equality and that has now been, or soon will be,

rectiﬁed. Because individuals exist before and outside the political community they

decide to form or join, the characteristics they brought into the social state should

not become the basis for treatingthem differently. In the United States, this view of

the state is enshrined in constitutional jurisprudence and legal doctrine and provides

the backdrop for most legal challenges to state-sponsored discrimination against

trans people. For example, in framing arguments to jurists and policy makers, trans

rights advocates are often forced to argue that it is not birth sex that is immutable but

gender identity. The goal of what might be called the mainstream trans rights

movement is to install gender identity as the basis for sex re- classiﬁcation, rather

than the sex assigned at birth or on the surgically modiﬁed body. This would do

much to improve the day-to-day lives of transgender people.

For the Left, however, the liberal state and the principles of political equality

it celebrates conceal the maldistribution of equality. A certain domesticated form

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of selfhood is reproduced when individuals petition the government for recog-

nition of their particular selves and, in turn, recognize themselves when they are

hailed by various state apparatuses— interpolation is the term of art used to

describe this relationship. From this more radical perspective, then, the trans-

gender rights movement is merely insisting that the hailing be more accurate. A

transgender man will now have an M on his driver's license, and the police ofﬁcer

who stops him on the street may call him ''sir'' rather than ''ma'am.'' But the power

of the state to surveil individuals and to regulate gender remains intact. While the

political approach of many trans legal advocates requires them to naturalize

gender identity, the more radical trans Left recognizes that ''sex'' cannot be made

to ﬁt into a rigid presocial biological schema of male and female. On the question

of sex classiﬁcation, the goal should not be to install the ''right''deﬁnition of sex in

the regulatory architecture to make the legal recognition of transition possible but

to get the state out of the business of deﬁning sex in the ﬁrst place.

Both the classical liberal theory of the state and the Left's critical rejoinder,

however, lack the capacity or perhaps the ﬂexibility to account for contradictions

in policies for sex reclassiﬁcation. Perhaps what underlies the inability to account

for contradictions in sex classiﬁcation is the belief that the state actions should

manifest an underlying coherence. In fact, the hope—or fear—that we are governed

by a single, rational legal structure is belied by the existence of a virtually uncount-

able number of state institutions, processes, ofﬁces, and political jurisdictions. In the

United States, for example, when some individuals cross borders, walk into a gov-

ernment ofﬁce to apply for beneﬁts, get a driver's license, go to jail or prison, sign up

for selective service, try to get married, or have any interaction with any state actor,

the sex classiﬁcation of some people can and often does switch. Even within a single

jurisdiction, almost every particular state agency— from federal to municipal — has

the authority to decide its own rules for sex classiﬁcation. To complicate matters even

more, both state and federal judges have found that one's sex classiﬁcation for one

social function may not hold for others. These include legislatures, courts, depart-

ments, agencies, elected ofﬁcials, political appointees, public servants, constitutions,

laws, regulations, administrative rules, and informal norms and practices. These

intertwined and sprawling apparatuses all rest, sometimes uneasily, on diachronous

layers of sedimented yet still active historical state formations. Given this disarray, it is

not surprising that different state entities might sometimes advance different, even

incommensurate, projects. Indeed, how could they not?

According to Gilles Deleuze, a concept ''should express an event rather

than an essence'' (1995: 14). Molar, large-scale accounts of sex and the state have

assumed a sameness to sex and a singular rationality to state actors, decisions, and

projects. If the state is not unitary, coordinated, and hierarchically organized in an

ultimately rational way— if, as Michel Foucault suggests, ''the state is only a

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composite reality and a mythicized abstraction whose importance is much less

than we think'' (1991: 103)— then it should come as no surprise that state deﬁ-

nitions of sex are also plural. A contradiction is something that does not make

sense, a position that is logically inconsistent. To begin by letting go of the

assumption that there is any ''there there,'' any whatness , to (legal) sex apart from

what an agency says it is, the contradiction evaporates. The ofﬁcial sex designa-

tion—or, more precisely, the M or the F —stamped on documents or coded in

records becomes the starting point. Then an analysis can focus not on what sex is,

or what it should be , but on what it does, what it accomplishes, what it produces.

Indeed, if the only thing we know for sure about sex is what any of these many

state actors say it is in any particular instance, sex will turn out to be as messy and

diffuse a concept as the state. Entering into the analysis without a ﬁrm sense of

what sex is or what the state is— as a priori facts, as ediﬁces—makes the processes

through which they come into being more visible. It might be better to defer

attempts to resolve—theoretically or politically—the messiness in order to

understand what a particular system of sex designation does for a particular state

project such as recognition or redistribution (Currah, forthcoming).

Of course, states should not only or always be imagined as messy, scattered

nodes of local and arbitrary power arrangements. The Leviathan state's terrible

concentrated authority to impose sanctions (death, imprisonment, ﬁnes) has

been the subject of theories of sovereignty for centuries. For this purpose, the

most apt deﬁnition of the state begins with the simple description from Max

Weber: ''A human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the

legitimate physical violence within a particular given territory'' (1991: 78). To create

a truly compelling account of sovereign violence and the paradox of sovereignty,

one must take Weber's deﬁnition, put question marks around ''legitimate,'' and

add the observation made by scholars such as Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt,

Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben that the force that creates

the law and makes it legitimate cannot be justiﬁed by a law that does not yet exist.

Still, much of what states do—regulating the health, safety, and public welfare

through myriad regulations, rules, decisions, practices—does not reach the

threshold of juridical violence, even if those actions are ultimately undergirded

by its threat. Fetishizing a generalized idea of the state and its terrifying or

redemptive power (depending on one's perspective) can obscure what is actually

happening in the local, micro, particular sites where most public authority is

exercised. While it is crucial to theorize the singular ﬁnality of state violence,

neglecting to examine the messiness of actually existing and potentially incom-

mensurate policies, practices, rules, and norms risks substituting the conceptual

for the concrete and gets in the way of understanding what might actually be

going on (Latour 1995: 48).

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Paisley Currah teaches political science and gender studies at Brooklyn College and the

Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His recent publications include ''Homo-

nationalism, State Rationalities, and Sex Contradictions'' (Theory and Event , 2013) and

''Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Gender Non-conforming Bodies at the Airport,''

coauthored with Tara Mulqueen (Social Research , summer 2011).

References

Currah, Paisley. Forthcoming. States of Sex . New York: New York University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations 1972–1990 . Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia

University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1991. ''Governmentality.'' In The Foucault Effect , ed. Graham Burchell, Colin

Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social . New York: Oxford University Press.

Weber, Max. 1991. ''Politics as a Vocation.'' In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans

Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77–128. London: Routledge.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400010

Subaltern

TRISH SALAH

From a military term designating a subordinate ofﬁcer, the subaltern entered

social and cultural theory via the Prison Notebooks of Italian Marxist Antonio

Gramsci. Gramsci used the term to designate proletarian and peasant classes

denied access to political representation or voice within government by the fas-

cist Italian state. More broadly, Gramsci (1971) used the term to designate classes

excluded from political hegemony by ruling elites. The subaltern's contempo-

rary usage in cultural and political theory dates from the rise of the Subaltern

Studies Group, who redeﬁned the term to describe the subordinated population

of the South Asian subcontinent on the basis of their distance from economic and

political elites and who developed an anti-imperial historiography from the point

of view of those dispossessed under colonization (Louai 2012).

Postcolonial critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reframed the term to fore-

ground gendered, caste, class, and colonial constitutive elements barring the

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subaltern from speaking or from being heard by Western poststructuralist and

feminist theorists as well as by diasporic intellectuals (1988). Troubling what might

be seen, in the work of the Subaltern Studies Group, as the essentializing of the

subaltern as a speciﬁc population, Spivak located the subaltern at the interstices of

competing or conﬂicting discursive formations striated by class differentiation

(1987). She argued that between the competing discursive claims of an imperial

Western feminism and an anticolonial and sexist Hindu nationalism, the sub-

jective and speaking position of a resistant Hindu woman was barred (1988). In

A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak further queried progressives' insistence

on the availability of subaltern speech given its location ''on the other side of a

difference, or epistemic fracture, even from other groupings of the colonized,''

and highlighted ''our'' implication as interpreters. She reiterated that the subaltern

may be silenced by ''her own more emancipated granddaughters: a new main-

stream . . . [or] the liberal multiculturalist metropolitan academy'' (1999: 309).

There are several senses in which the term subaltern speaks to and within

trans studies. Drawing upon poststructuralist, feminist, and anticolonial dis-

courses (Anzaldu

´a 1987; Derrida 1980; Foucault 1980, Spivak 1988; Haraway 1985,

1991), Sandy Stone's ''The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto''

([1991] 1996) theorized the ways in which transsexuals had been subalterned by

both feminist transphobia and medical discourses. Stone both rebutted the

antitranssexual polemic of Janice Raymond's The Transsexual Empire: The

Making of the She-Male and critiqued a medical model in which, to be recognized

as subjects eligible for medical care, transsexuals were enjoined to produce per-

sonal histories within the restrictive conventions of a diagnostic portrait. These

conventions required ''prospective transsexuals'' to signify as highly gender

normative within their sex of identiﬁcation, as intensely body dysphoric, and as

heterosexual. As well, they implicitly privileged middle-class and white subjects.

While J. Meyerowitz (2002), Jay Prosser (1998), Henry Rubin (2003), and others

have documented transsexual agency in forging diagnostic criteria as a way of

securing access to transition-related healthcare, the erasures and coercive pro-

ductivities of the diagnosis subalterned both transsexual and nontranssexual

transgender subjects, subjecting both to institutional regulation and adminis-

trative violence. For example, for transsexuals validated by the medical model, the

recognized program of care involved erasing or rewriting one's pretransition

history and disappearing ''into the woodwork.'' As Stone has noted: ''It is difﬁcult

to articulate a counter-discourse if one is programmed to disappear'' (1996: 295).

The meaning and political valences of such woodworking are, however,

contested in queer, feminist, and trans studies. In Changing Sex , Bernice Haus-

man (1995) draws upon Michel Foucault to propose that transsexual subjects

speak only through the demand for surgery and are duped into reproducing

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conservative gender norms. For Hausman, trans subjects are less excluded from

meaningful speech than deﬁnitively constructed by hegemonic articulations.

However, Prosser argues that Hausman obscures her own gendered embodiment

and subjective investments to tacitly justify her nontranssexual authorial loca-

tion as ''the authoritative site from which to speak'' (Prosser 1998: 132–33). Indeed,

Viviane Namaste (2000, 2005), Prosser (1998), and Rubin (2003) all challenge

queer feminist deployments of poststructuralism that mobilize transgender ﬁg-

ures in the service of theoretical projects that paradoxically deny transsexual

experience and speech.

Namaste's and Rubin's assessments of the discursive conditions of pos-

sibility underwriting transsexual speech within ''queerly-paradigmed'' transgen-

derism (Rubin 2003: 276) echo Spivak's concern with subalterning dynamics

within progressive movements as well as within liberal, multicultural, metro-

politan institutions. Demonstrating the exclusion of sex workers, prisoners, sub-

stance users, the poor, the racialized, and nonstatus people, Aizura (2011),

Namaste (2000, 2005), Ross (2005), and Spade (2011) expose practices of erasure

(of the excluded subaltern) in the contemporary production of the rights-bearing

transgender subject.

Subaltern trans positions also appear at the interstice of transnational

sexualities and genders, modernization and globalization, and through the net-

works of global gay human rights discourse and Anglo-American transgender

liberation. How these English language forms encounter, appropriate, or are

translated by globally local ''trans'' constituencies raises questions of the political

economy of identity movements and discourses. Reﬂecting upon the situation of

francophone travesties and transsexuelles , Namaste draws upon Spivak to critique

as linguistic imperialism the export of US anglophone sexual minority nomen-

clature and politics (such as transgender and queer), arguing that they do not

translate conceptually or culturally into Quebec (Namaste 2005). Similarly, David

Valentine highlights differentials of class, race, education, and employment in the

normative prescription of acceptable language in LGBTservice provision, which

effectively require gay-identiﬁed subjects to ''speak transgender'' in order to be

legible (2006: 417). Meanwhile, Katrina Roen (2001) queries how, within capi-

talist globalization, transgender and transsexual rhetorics are valued as modern

and metropolitan in opposition to non-Western and indigenous gender-variant

identities. Conversely, genderqueer and transgender writers contest the terms of

inscription within medically sanctioned transsexual discourses, arguing that they

produce hierarchies of authenticity, reproduce class- and race-based privilege,

and require that gender-nonconforming subjects enlist within binary gendered

positions to be recognized (Halberstam 1998, Wilchins 2002).

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Ewa Ziareck's recent application of Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard's (1999) dif-

ferend to progressive formations, including feminist movements and radical

democracy theory, suggests some of the stakes of coercively homogenizing pro-

gressive discourses and raises the issue as one of constitutive as well as contingent

violence (Ziareck 2001). There may be an afﬁnity between the subaltern and

Lyotard's notion of the differend, the trace or remainder of discursive battles,

which must be resolved for a discourse, even a counterdiscourse, to emerge. Such

traces of ''border wars'' attest to the violence by which transsexuality, transgen-

derism, and other kinds of gender and sex variance are repeatedly buried or erased

from the social world.

Trish Salah is an assistant professor of women's and gender studies at the University of

Winnipeg. Her recent publications include ''Notes towards Thinking Transsexual Institutional

Poetics'' in Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard

(2013), Wanting in Arabic: Poems

(2nd ed., 2013), and Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1 (2014).

References

Aizura, Aren. 2011. ''The Persistence of Transsexual Travel Narratives.'' In Trans Gender Migra-

tions: Bodies, Borders, and the (Geo)politics of Gender Trans-ing, ed. Trystan Cotton,

139–56. New York: Routledge.

Anzaldu

´a, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt

Lute.

Derrida, Jacques. 1980. ''La loi du genre'' (''The Law of Genre''). Translated by Avital Ronell. Glyph,

no. 7: 176 (French), 202 (English).

Foucault, Michel. 1980. Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-

Century Hermaphrodite. New York: Pantheon.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks . New York: International.

Halberstam, Judith. 1998. ''Transgender Butch: Butch/FTM Border Wars and the Masculine

Continuum.'' In ''The Transgender Issue,'' ed. Susan Stryker. Special issue, GLQ 4, no. 2:

287–310.

Haraway, Donna. 1985. ''A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in

the 1980s.'' Socialist Review , no. 80: 65–107.

———. 1991. ''The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.'' In

Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 295–337.

New York: Routledge.

Hausman, Bernice. 1995. Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Louai, El Habib. 2012. ''Retracing the Concept of the Subaltern from Gramsci to Spivak: Historical

Developments and New Applications.'' African Journal of History and Culture 4, no. 1:

4–8.

Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois. 1999. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute . Translated by Georges van den

Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Meyerowitz, J. 2002. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States . Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Namaste, Viviane. 2000. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2005. Sex Change, Social Change: Reﬂections on Identity, Institutions, and Imperialism.

Toronto: Women's Press.

Prosser, Jay. 1998. Second Skins: Body Narratives of Transsexuality . New York: Columbia University

Press.

Roen, Katrina. 2001. ''Transgender Theory and Embodiment: The Risk of Racial Marginalisation.''

Journal of Gender Studies 10, no. 3: 253–63.

Ross, Mirha-Soleil. 2005. ''Interview with Mirha-Soleil Ross.'' In Namaste, Sex Change, Social

Change, 86–102.

Rubin, Henry. 2003. Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men . Nashville:

Vanderbilt University Press.

Spade, Dean. 2011. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of

Law. Cambridge, MA: South End.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1987. ''Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.'' In In

Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 197–221. New York: Routledge.

———. 1988. ''Can the Subaltern Speak?'' In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture , ed.

C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, 271–313. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education.

———. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Stone, Sandy (1991) 1996. ''The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.'' In Body

Guards: The Cultural Politics of Sexual Ambiguity, ed. K. Straub and J. Epstein, 280–304.

New York: Routledge.

Valentine, David. 2006. '''I Went to Bed with My Own Kind Once': The Erasure of Desire in the

Name of Identity.'' In Transgender Studies Reader , ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle,

407–19. New York: Routledge.

Wilchins, R. 2002. ''Queerer Bodies.'' In GenderQueer: Voices from beyond the Sexual Binary, ed.

R. Wilchins, C. Howell, and J. Nestle, 33–46. Boston: Alyson Books.

Ziarek, Ewa. 2001. An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical

Democracy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400019

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Surgery

TRYSTAN T. COTTEN

Redrawing the body's sex contours afﬁrms the feminist mantra that biology is not

destiny. Surgery has been an important part of trans agency and medical tran-

sitioning since Michael Dhillon began the ﬁrst of thirteen operations to recon-

struct his morphological sex in 1946. Trans surgery is any surgery that alters the

body's primary and secondary sex characteristics, but this was not always the

case when surgery was institutionalized in the gender clinics of large research

universities like Johns Hopkins and Stanford in the 1950s and 1960s. The desire

for surgery not only became a deﬁnitive characteristic of transsexuality, distin-

guishing it from other so-called disorders like cross-dressing, transvestism,

and homosexuality. But it was also narrowly conceived as the reconstruction of

morphological sex, which excluded trans people who wanted to keep their gen-

itals intact from treatment. The formalization of the Harry Benjamin Standards of

Care in 1979 liberalized trans people's access to surgery by extending diagnostic

powers to clinicians and doctors outside the university gender clinics and opening

up additional avenues of medical transitioning for trans people. Many trans

people began having surgeries to masculinize or feminize parts of their body

while leaving their genitalia intact. In turn, this helped produce a proliferation

of transition trajectories in a multitude of directions, enabling (in part) the

emergence of a critical transgender movement in the 1990s and debunking clinical

assumptions that binary gender was the end goal of transitioning.

A ''somatechnology'' perspective views trans surgery as part of a larger

techne of discursive and institutional practices (law, medicine/science, art, edu-

cation, information and surveillance technologies) through which trans bodies

are constituted, positioned, and lived. Sometimes more weight is given to struc-

tural practices in the substantiation of trans identities, which has been critiqued

for its lack of emphasis on the role of trans people's agency as coconstitutive

with technology and dispositifs in the making (and remaking) of trans bodies.

While the former perspective sheds important light on somatechniques of trans

identities, the emphasis is nonetheless on how trans bodies/identities are affected

by discursive and nondiscursive practices. Equally important is understanding

how trans people affect the evolution of discourses and technologies through

individual/personal as well as collective resistance, organization, and struggle.

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A good example of balancing both perspectives is that of Dr. Harold

Gillies and Michael Dhillon. Gillies had been performing pedicle-ﬂap phalloplasty

to reconstruct the maimed genitals of war veterans for more than three decades,

since inventing the surgery during WWI. Yet it was not until a transsexual man,

Dhillon, contacted him that Gillies realized the more extensive potential of his

surgical technique to assist not only cisgender but also transsexual males. Dhil-

lon's transsexual body was both a ﬂeshly and symbolic catalyst and ﬁeld for

Gillies's surgical imagination to extend and develop further. Cutting, splicing,

pulling, tucking, and transplanting nerves, arteries, blood vessels, skin, fat, and

muscle tissues, trans surgeries rewrite the functional and phenomenological

circuitry of human bodies and change how subjects experience and express

gender and sexuality. In doing so, trans bodies not only rewrite normative scripts

of binary sex and gender. They are also (re)writing medical knowledge of human

bodies and surgical practice, as surgeons, spurred by the needs of their patients,

continue experimenting with new technologies and practices to produce better

results.

Trans people seek sex reassignment surgery for many reasons, all of which

highlight the signiﬁcance of the body's ﬂeshy contours and chemistry to gender

identity and expression. Some form of surgical modiﬁcation of sex characteristics

is usually required in most countries to legally change the gender marker of

identiﬁcation documents, which is essential to trans people's mobility—social,

economic, and geographical. Surgery gives ﬂeshly form to proprioceptive gender,

bringing bodily matter into alignment with gender self-image, and allows trans

people new embodiments of experiencing/expressing gender and sexuality that

were not possible before surgery. Some trans people's pursuit of surgery indicates

how the performance of gender (e.g., cross-dressing, gait, mannerisms, motility,

verbal expression, etc.) falls short in regards to some people's ability to fully

embody and express their preferred gender identity. Trans people suffer dis-

crimination, abuse, and even death when their morphological sex is discovered to

be different from their visible gender. Depending on the context, for example,

genital surgery might prevent trans women from being sentenced to male prisons

where they would likely be sexually harassed and assaulted on a daily basis.

Surgery can also remove barriers of exclusion from certain gender-speciﬁc spaces

(e.g., locker rooms/bathrooms and bathhouses), social and medical services (e.g.,

shelters for homeless and/or battered women), or social events that privilege

morphological sex over gender presentation as the deﬁnitive criterion for access.

Some trans people are also hesitant to pursue romantic and sexual relationships,

as the prospect of explaining their body's ﬂeshly difference to potential lovers can

bring up feelings of shame and fear of rejection. Surgery helps minimize some of

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these anxieties and opens up opportunities of romantic and social bonding for

trans people.

While sex reassignment surgery can function as a vehicle of trans agency, it

can also be deployed to police nonnormative trans bodies that transgress and

challenge gender and sexual normativity. This is most evident in social policies

requiring sex reassignment surgery for a legal change of sex on identiﬁcation

documents, for example, or bureaucratic rules making sterilization mandatory for

gender transitioning. A biopolitical analysis emphasizes how these mandates are

part of a larger administrative apparatus of managing bodies and their productive

and reproductive capacities for state interests. Pregnant men, men with breasts,

and females with penises all unhinge the sex/gender binary and heterosexuality as

socially engineered contrivances, while bureaucracies are erected to reel these

transgressive bodies back in for biopolitical management. Despite the attempt at

containing trans bodies, many people still ﬁnd ways (depending on their eco-

nomic and political situation) to circumvent the system and exercise some

modicum of control of their transition trajectory.

Trystan T. Cotten is an associate professor of gender studies at California State University,

Stanislaus. His areas of research are in transgender surgery and medicine and transgender

identities in Africa and the Diaspora. His latest book is Hung Jury: Testimonies of Genital Surgery

by Transsexual Men (2012).

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400028

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Surveillance

TOBY BEAUCHAMP

Surveillance is built into the production of the very category of transgender. The

Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association's Standards of Care

(1979) formally deﬁned the category of transsexual in a list of behaviors and life

narratives, formalizing the diagnosis of gender identity disorder as one of the ﬁrst

steps in a standardized process for managing transgender lives. Following these

guidelines, medical professionals approved surgery or hormones for clients ﬁtting

the standardized criteria and expected these clients to eventually eliminate all

references to their former gendered lives and fully assimilate into a normatively

gendered world (see Stone 1991; Caliﬁa 2003). Indeed, in many cases the possi-

bility of medical transition depended on one's perceived potential to pass as

nontransgender, an assessment process typically grounded in the regulatory

norms of whiteness, class privilege, and heterosexuality.

Thus two major forms of surveillance operate through medical and psy-

chiatric institutions: ﬁrst, the monitoring of individuals in terms of their ability

to conform to a particular medicalized understanding of transgender identity;

and second, the expectation that medical transition should enable those indi-

viduals to withstand any scrutiny that would reveal their transgender status.

These forms of surveillance also reach beyond medical contexts to inﬂuence law,

policy, and social relations. For instance, legal changes of gender on identiﬁcation

documents typically rely on medical evidence as proof of gender identity, and the

data collected as part of these legal processes (along with any form requiring one

to identify as a speciﬁc gender) form a paper trail through which state agencies

may track, assess, and manage transgender people. Similarly, the policing of

gendered spaces ranging from public bathrooms to homeless shelters dispropor-

tionately affects gender-nonconforming people (Spade 2011). And representations

of transgender people in popular media such as police dramas and daytime talk

shows often encourage viewers to uncover gendered truths by scrutinizing certain

bodies and identities. All of these practices reinforce the discursive and material

links between the category transgender and various forms of surveillance, from

the systemic to the quotidian.

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Yet surveillance practices need not speciﬁcally name transgender as a cat-

egory of concern in order to be intimately connected to transgender politics or to

affect the material lives of gender-nonconforming people. For instance, in the years

following 9/11, the US Department of Homeland Security advanced new security

policies as part of the war on terror, including increased scrutiny of identiﬁcation

documents at airports and national borders, that almost never explicitly mention

transgender populations. But transgender people, particularly trans people of color,

poor trans people, trans youth, and trans immigrants, are especially targeted by

such scrutiny because they are more likely to have inconsistent identiﬁcation

documents. Related security measures, including increased restrictions on immi-

gration and asylum, new forms of state scrutiny of those perceived to be undoc-

umented immigrants, and the implementation of x-ray scanning technologies in

airports and prisons typically do not cite explicit concerns with transgender pop-

ulations. But because these policing practices are often concerned with individuals

who appear to be fraudulent or deceptive, gender-nonconforming people—cul-

turally constructed as concealing something— disproportionately feel their effects.

Even while surveillance mechanisms discipline transgender people, the

very efforts made to police and manage gender nonconformity reveal productive

contradictions and ﬁssures in surveillance practices. By seemingly displacing

gender regulation onto only transgender people, nontransgender bodies and

identities appear both naturally gender normative and free from scrutiny. Yet the

difﬁculty these systems encounter in trying to classify gender-nonconforming

people demonstrates how regulatory norms of gender affect all bodies and iden-

tities by enforcing categories that are made to seem natural. For example, in cases

such as medical requirements for changing identiﬁcation documents, contra-

dictory requirements put forward by different regions or jurisdictions point out

the state's own confusion about how gender is deﬁned and reveal gendered

categories to be contingent rather than unchanging. In this sense, the category

transgender can usefully problematize the narrow, immutable taxonomies on

which surveillance programs and technologies tend to rely, showing how the

state's own classiﬁcation systems fail to account for the complexities of bodies and

identities.

Toby Beauchamp is an assistant professor of gender and women's studies at Oklahoma State

University. He is currently completing a book manuscript titled ''Going Stealth: Transgender

Politics and US Surveillance Practices.''

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References

Caliﬁa, Patrick. 2003. Sex Changes: Transgender Politics . San Francisco: Cleis.

Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. 1979. Standards of Care: The

Hormonal and Surgical Sex Reassignment of Gender Dysphoric Persons. Galveston: Janus

Information Facility, University of Texas Medical Branch.

Spade, Dean. 2011. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of

Law. Brooklyn, NY: South End.

Stone, Sandy. 1991. ''The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.'' In Body Guards:

The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, 280–304.

New York: Routledge.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400037

Symbolic Subversion

SASKIA E. WIERINGA

Heteronormativity is imposed with the help of a sliding scale of violence: from

material (economic and legal), structural, and physical to symbolic. Symbolic

violence refers to the almost unconscious, internalized modes of cultural of social

domination (Bourdieu 1991). Gender relations is a prime ﬁeld of symbolic power

(Butler 1990). Heteronormativity refers to a system in which sexual conduct and

kinship relations are organized in such a way that a speciﬁc form of heterosex-

uality becomes the culturally accepted ''natural'' order. Thus biological sex, sex-

uality, gender identity and expression and normative gender roles are aligned

in such a way that a dominant view on sexual and gender relations, identities,

and expressions is produced. The forms of resistance to the effects of hetero-

normativity can likewise be located on a sliding scale of subversion. The forms of

subversion range from struggles for sexual rights (political struggles for legal

reform and social policies) to material (economic) resistance and to symbolic

forms of subversion. Symbolic subversion extends from self-defeating strategies,

via various forms of adaptation, to more or less public forms of rebellion. Along

its path we ﬁnd secrecy, partial acceptance of the codes of normalcy, denial of

one's own needs, and the secret search for sexual pleasure, but we also ﬁnd hard

work, sacriﬁce, and deﬁance.

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In a comparative research project on three categories of abjected women in

India and Indonesia (widows/divorced women, sex workers, and lesbians; some

individuals were included who identiﬁed as transgender and were in a same-sex

relationship), we found that far from being passive victims of heteronormative

(symbolic) violence, they demonstrated multiple forms of resistance ranging

from outright deﬁance to more subtle accommodations (Wieringa 2012). Just as

cultural and religious norms determine the particular construct of hetero-

normativity in a given society, they also shape the salience of particular types of

resistance and make certain forms of subversion intelligible.

Subversions may be divided into manifest rebellions and symbolic forms

of subversion; the latter range from self-defeating yet deﬁant actions of (self )

destruction to ostensible adaptations to the current heteronormative model.

Open, physical, and visible struggles include outright rejection of the model and

the claims of sexual agency and citizenship. In situations where transgender

people are stigmatized, lonely, and legally, economically, and psychologically

vulnerable, searches for economic stability, social respect, friendship, and/or

sexual partners constitute forms of symbolic subversion of the dominant gender

order. Even if they ostensibly or publicly accept its hegemony, their very actions

and search for accommodation within the system reveal subversion, or what

James C. Scott (1990: 137) referred to as the ''hidden transcripts, the disguised

ideological resistance'' to the dominant order.

Symbolic subversion can be seen as a continuum, its form ranging from

outright resistance to (partial) compliance and even to deﬁant defeat. In the case

of a double suicide of a lesbian couple, when they publicly go to their death

together, usually because they are denied the possibility of staying together, the

ultimate unmasking of heteronormativity is acted out. The myth of the ''har-

monious patriarchal family'' is uncovered for what it means to those who are

unable to live by its norms: a cruel power ploy that may end in death for those who

experience this form of ''happiness'' as a travesty of the bliss they had found for

themselves.

Some transgender people may perform their masculinity or femininity so

convincingly that they are seen to be ''normal'' men or women, which is often also

how they prefer to see themselves. Others are more likely to be perceived as

rupturing the sex-gender nexus and subverting heteronormative norms, even

though they may embrace certain aspects of them.

The subversion of heteronormativity covers awide range from open forms

of deﬁance and rebellion to more covert methods, rooted in daily practices and

more or less subconscious strategies for survival. There is often a thin line between

deﬁance and defeat. The risks of defeat are multiple. A certain amount of deﬁance

is needed to survive—socially, economically, emotionally, and even physically.

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But too much deﬁance carries enormous risks such as social isolation, economic

hardship, or physical and psychological violence. Subversion should be seen as a

continuum of practices and motivations — from visible, physical forms of resis-

tance to more invisible, symbolic forms.

Saskia E. Wieringa is an honorary professor at the University of Amsterdam, holding the chair

of women's cross-cultural same-sex relations. Her latest (coedited) books include Women's

Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia (2007), The Future of Asian Feminisms (2012),

The Sexual History of the Global South (2013), and Family Ambiguity and Domestic Violence in

Asia (2013).

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . New York: Rout-

ledge.

Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts . New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press.

Wieringa, Saskia. 2012. ''Passionate Aesthetics and Symbolic Subversion: Heteronormativity in

India and Indonesia.'' In ''Queer Asian Subjects: Transgressive Sexualities and Hetero-

normative Meanings,'' ed. Evelyn Blackwood and Mark Johnson. Special Issue, Asian

Studies Review 36, no. 4: 515–31.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400046

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Tatume

VIC MUN

˜OZ

Tatume or tatuma or calabacita (genus Cucurbita ) is a keyword (Williams 1983)

for transing land, decolonization, diaspora, the meaning of seasons, and growing

food.

Tatume has made that steady bargain with the way things are (see Rich

1989); displaced to el norte , here in the garden, it grows southward toward the

brightest sunlight. Tatume addresses my location on Cayuga Nation Territory, one

of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, as central to what it means to me to be a

diaspora Boricua queer, trans-/gender-nonconforming in this queer decolonial

time and Indigenous place (Halberstam 2005).

The intersections of diaspora and decolonization are what I attempt to

trans—through a juxtaposing of the vocabulary of growing tatume and the

challenges of deﬁnition it poses within a binary view of growing seasons and the

concepts of immature (summer squash) and mature (winter squash). Growing

through these narrow spaces is something that tatume knows how to do. Tatume

is a search for an imagined home after forced displacement.

One of the earliest references to squash, in English, that I could locate is

attributed to R. Boyle's 1661 Sceptical Chymist (ii. 107): ''A selected seed of . . . Squash,

which is an Indian kind of Pompion, that Growes a pace.''

Growing quickly.

Adapting.

Squash is one of ''The Three Sisters'' (squash, corn, and beans) planted

together by the Haudenosaunee. Squash becomes zucchini through a process of

colonization. The practice of interplanting, for example, the Three Sisters is a

fundamental indigenous growing practice. To plant only one crop, to genetically

engineer seeds to grow the sweetest vegetable, to create a tomato that can be

picked green and shipped thousands of miles, is the continued imperialism of the

ﬁfteenth century; we are not postcolonial. Genetic modiﬁcation is sold through

the ideology of feeding the world; saving the hungry. But in fact, indigenous

cultural property is stolen through the process of patenting. Traditional Ecolo-

gical Knowledge (Salmo

´n 2012: 82) is patented through a process of biocoloni-

alism (Howard 2001). The ideology of saving the other fuels a colonizing mis-

sion that has not stopped (Smith 2012). The growing of only one kind of food,

exempliﬁed by Monsanto's genetically modiﬁed corn, can only be sustained

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through genetic engineering, because nothing grows alone . Organisms are inter-

dependent as are concepts, such as trans- and gender.

Last year, I saved tatume seeds. This year I planted them. They are growing.

Saving seeds, not souls. Rooting decolonization in the place where I live; I live on

stolen land.

To understand tatume — and the vocabulary that surrounds its Western

explanations—is to confront colonization and the struggle for land. The word,

squash, is cut from the Narragansett word, askutasquash. What we eat tells of who

has been colonized and by whom. How we ''eat the other'' (hooks 1992). Language

cuts by those who have difﬁculty saying the ''foreign'' words but no difﬁculty

colonizing land, bodies, and sexualities (Hutchins and Aspin 2007).

While looking for calabaza seeds among heirloom growers in the United

States, I found tatume. The descriptions of the squash were appealing to me

because the writers could not settle on whether the squash was a ''summer'' or

''winter'' squash. This complication with where to place the squash revealed not

just that these gardeners had only two categories for squash but that there are only

two possible growing seasons—summer and winter —and depending on when

they are harvested, they are ''mature'' or ''immature.'' Tatume was bound to

confuse these categories.

Descriptions of tatume on blogs and websites highlight its difference within

a binary framework of growth and harvest. Here are two illustrative examples:

Most of the squash that we are familiar with come from the species Cucurbita pepo.

''Tatume'' is a variety of this species. C. pepo is a native of Meso-America and

archeological evidence shows that gardeners there have been growing varieties of

C. pepo for the past 8,000 to 10,000 years. In America, squash is generally divided

into two categories based on when they are harvested. ...''Ta tume'' is one the rare

varieties of squash that can be harvested as either a summer or winter type. (White

2010)

I said, ''That's one of them? It doesn't look anything like the ones earlier in the

season,'' and she remarked, ''Yes that's one of them. They are actually a type of

WINTER SQUASH. We just pick them when they are really young and immature

and have no seeds.'' That is why we don't see them later on in summer—if you let

it keep growing; it will become a mature winter squash. There were several there at

her booth with different colors. Some were green with orange stripes and some

were salmon-colored with green-grey stripes. (''Mystery'' 2012)

I plant vegetables and herbs from home here, on Haudenosaunee lands.

I am committed to non–genetically modiﬁed foods and seeds (Navazio

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2012). When I listened to Onondaga Faith Keeper Oren Lyons say that we need to

grow our own food, I understood this as food sovereignty, which is part of

decolonization.

Tatume, an askutasquash , confuses Western binaries: summer or winter,

mature or immature. It grows close to the ground, able to take up water from the

morning dew and keep growing in hot, dry weather. When the zucchini plants

wilt and need the scarce resource of water, tatume continues to grow its tendrils,

seeking out moisture. It has adapted to the harsh, dry weather by growing in many

directions. The growth habit is exponential, from one vine, others, then more

from those: the shape of survival.

Tatume unsettles categories of summer and winter squash because it is

both and neither. Tatume grows against predetermined categories, sprawling with

strategic abandon across the dry ground, perhaps trying to ﬁnd a way home. For

me, the process of understanding this queer squash and what it tells about land,

colonization, and diaspora is part of a process toward decolonial trans-gender

sovereignty (Mun

˜oz 2012). Transing Tatume is a conceptual interplanting. A

negotiation with the way things are; changing ourselves through a constant study

of what could be.

Vic Mun

˜oz is a professor of psychology and gender studies and coordinator of the First Nations

and Indigenous Studies Program at Wells College.

Notes

1. I use ''trans-'' and ''transing'' in alliance with what Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa

Jean Moore (2008) beautifully articulate:

Neither ''-gender'' nor any of the other sufﬁxes of ''trans-'' can be understood in

isolation— that the lines implied by the very concept of ''trans-'' are moving targets,

simultaneously composed of multiple determinants. ''Transing,'' in short, is a practice

thattakesplacewithin,aswellasacrossorbetween,genderedspaces....Thoseofus

schooled in the humanities and social sciences have become familiar, over the last

twenty years or so, with queering things; how might we likewise begin to critically

trans- our world'' (13).

2. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. ''squash,'' accessed 7 January 2014, www.oed.com.

References

Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives .New

York: New York University Press.

hooks, bell. 1992. ''Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.'' In Black Looks: Race and Repre-

sentation, 21–39. Boston: South End.

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Howard, Stephanie. 2001. Life, Lineage, and Sustenance: Indigenous Peoples and Genetic Engi-

neering: Threats to Food, Agriculture, and the Environment. Edited by Debra Harry and

Brett Lee Shelton. Wadsworth, NV: Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism.

www.ipcb.org/pdf_ﬁles/LifeLineageandSustenance.pdf.

Hutchins, Jessica, and Clive Aspin. 2007. Sexuality and the Stories of Indigenous People . Wellington,

Aotearoa, NZ: Huia.

''The Mystery of the Calabacita Squash.'' 2012. Blogcritics (blog), January 15. blogcritics.org/tastes

/article/the-mystery-of-the-calabacita-squash.

Mun

˜oz, Vic. 2012. ''Gender/Sovereignty.'' In Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender

and Gender Studies, ed. Anne Enke, 23–33. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Navazio, John. 2012. The Organic Seed Grower: A Farmer's Guide to Vegetable Seed Production.

White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green.

Rich, Adrienne. 1989. ''The Desert as Garden of Paradise.'' In Time's Power: Poems 1985–1988 , 25–31.

New York: Norton.

Salmo

´n, Enrique. 2012. Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and

Resilience. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London:

Zed.

Stryker, Susan, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore. 2008. ''Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or

Transgender?'' WSQ 36, no. 3–4: 11–22.

White, Jay. 2010. '' 'Tatume': The Squash of Many Names.'' Aggie Horticulture (blog), June.

aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/newsletters/hortupdate/2010/jun/tatume.html.

Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society . New York: Oxford

University Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400055

Television

QUINN MILLER

Transgender histories and TV intertwine. RuPaul's All Stars Drag Race (2012)

resurrects Thelma Harper (Vicki Lawrence) of The Carol Burnett Show, a series

that, in its original run, included a skit set at a trans person's class reunion. In

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (2010: 10–11), Kate Bornstein and S. Bear

Bergman point to Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation as shared cultural

touchstones. References to TV in scholars' accounts of their self-recognition as

trans signal further connections between television and trans history. Milton

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Berle's drag performances, Leslie Feinberg recalls, ''hit too close to home. I longed

to wear the boys' clothing I saw in the Sears catalog'' (1996: 4). Jamison Green's viewing

of NBC's 1955 broadcast of Peter Pan starring Mary Martin as the title character

instigated ''one of those lucid moments'' of early male identiﬁcation. ''I clearly

remember thinking,'' he writes, '' 'if she can be a boy, then so can I' '' (2004: 11–12).

An abundance of trans TV content makes the medium an important

component of trans studies. Personal histories of gender regulation, gender

nonconformity, and gender transition may develop in relation to the national and

transnational star trajectories of televisual icons like Turkey's Bu

¨lent Ersoy and

Kuwait's Shjoon Alhajri or through the circulation and aesthetics of series like The

Jack Benny Show; Soap; Bosom Buddies; Quantum Leap; Ask Harriet; Ugly Betty;All

My Children; Degrassi: The Next Generation; Dirty, Sexy, Money; America's Next

Top Model; The Glee Project; Work It;andDrop Dead Diva. Jose

´B. Capino's study

of Philippine TV's movie talk shows, a genre prominent from the mid-1980s

through the present, illuminates another trans dimension of TV programming,

that of production, showing how the medium has allowed drag queens, faux drag

queens, and a variety of gender ''outcasts'' to ''openly . . . party on television'' in

unexpected ways (2002: 273). Mary L. Gray (2009: 158) has argued that rural youth

use ''the portability and the 'realness''' of scientiﬁc TV specials to understand and

articulate their gender identities and trans experiences.

In commercial TV systems, advertisers drive content, making decisions

based on demographics and ciscentric market research strategies. Yet as Alexander

Doty (1993) has shown, even within capitalism, television not only reinforces

norms but also provides tools for nonconformity that people use to queer and

feminist ends. The technologies of television and medical transition debuted

publicly contemporaneously in the mid-twentieth century. Since then, the

everyday ﬂow of TV, like trans history, has remained highly ephemeral and

egregiously undocumented. Consider a sitcom proposal I came across in the Bob

Cummings Papers at Brigham Young University while deep into specialized

research around genderqueer sitcom camp. As part of the backstory presented in

this document—one I have yet to place chronologically but that Cummings, the

star of two eponymous post–World War II series and the sitcoms My Hero and

My Living Doll, appears to have penned—Christine Jorgensen shows up along-

side Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, and other ''divinely endowed international

female luminaries,'' revealing a television history complex with respect to trans

culture.

While the ﬁelds of TV studies and trans studies have not as yet intersected

much, they actually have a lot in common. Television studies examines the ways in

which TV takes on a wide range of competing and conﬂicting meanings through

its characteristic discourse of multiplicity. Mark Williams, in arguing for ''the

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signiﬁcance of television'' in cultural history, has encouraged scholars to empha-

size the ''ﬁssures, occlusions, [and] discontinuities'' of media by analyzing

''borders that exist at the levels of technology/industry/mode of address, borders

that appear to have inspired or enabled an attention to spatial/social/historical

borders'' (2009: 47). The commonality in trans studies' and TV's attention to

borders and border crossings is evident in Julia Serano's Whipping Girl: A

Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007).

While television appears as an object of pro forma critique in the book's discussion

of the print comic Hothead Paisan, with sitcom writing offered as the barometer for

instrumentalist uses of gender and sexual minorities in genre ﬁction, TValso assists

with critique, as when Serano describes how the narrational strategies of medical

makeover reality shows on non-trans-speciﬁc topics helped her understand the

workings of transphobic tropes in other mediums (203, 55).

New research trajectories in TV studies offer exciting opportunities for

scholars in trans studies. Exploring synesthesia and sense memory through

advertising content during the 1950s, Marsha F. Cassidy (2009: 43) argues for a

''telesthetic'' history, bringing ''the full sensorium back to critical consciousness.''

TV studies' recovery of embodiment would beneﬁt immensely from a broader

awareness of trans people as a part of history, particularly as cultural workers.

With postwar public intellectuals like Marshall McLuhan theorizing television as

a prosthetic extension and technology of the self, the medium surely played a

more crucial role in the early psychic and somatic dimensions of trans experience

than we realize. Television offers things quite helpful for many trans people:

gender performance, dysphoria relief, artistic expression, and queer family.

Quinn Miller is an assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon, where he teaches

queer media studies. His recent publications include ''How to Queer Television'' (in How to

Watch Television, 2013) and ''Queer Exteriors'' (in Transgender Migrations, 2011).

References

Bornstein, Kate, and S. Bear Bergman, eds. 2010. Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation . Berkeley,

CA: Seal.

Capino, Jose B. 2002. ''Soothsayers, Politicians, Lesbian Scribes: The Philippine Movie Talk

Show.'' In Planet TV: A Global Television Studies Reader , ed. Lisa Parks and Shanti Kumar,

262–74. New York: New York University Press.

Cassidy, Marsha F. 2009. ''Touch, Taste, Breath: Synaesthesia, Sense Memory, and the Selling of

Cigarettes on Television, 1948–1971.'' In Convergence Media History , ed. Janet Staiger and

Sabine Hake, 34–45. New York: Taylor and Francis.

Doty, Alexander. 1993. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

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Feinberg, Leslie. 1996. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman.

Boston: Beacon.

Gray, Mary L. 2009. Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America .New

York: New York University Press.

Green, Jamison. 2004. Becoming a Visible Man . Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

''RuPaul's Gaff-In.'' 2012. Directed by Nick Murray. RuPaul's All Stars Drag Race. Logo (MTV/

Viacom). October 29.

Serano, Julia. 2007. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of

Femininity. Emeryville, CA: Seal.

Williams, Mark. 2009. ''Rewiring Media History: Intermedial Borders.'' In Staiger and Hake,

Convergence Media History, 46–56.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400064

Temporality

KADJI AMIN

''Temporality'' refers to the social patterning of experiences and understandings of

time. Attending to the ways in which transgender experiences are constituted by

yet exceed normative temporalities promises to do justice to the complex ways in

which people inhabit gender variance. A critical focus on the temporal under-

pinnings of transgender as a historical category, on the other hand, may open the

way toward a more transformative politics of justice.

Transsexual autobiography, which narrates the transsexual subject's self-

actualization through surgical and hormonal transformation, has been an impor-

tant genre for the dissemination of transsexuals' understandings of their own life

narratives; it is also a fraught practice, since the narration of a transsexual life in

conformity to the diagnostic ''narratemes'' of gender identity disorder (GID) has

been the medical criterion of transsexuality and thus the determining factor in

accessing hormonal and surgical treatments (Prosser 1998: 104). Jay Prosser has

argued that the value of autobiography to transsexuals must be understood

according to its capacity, as a genre, to construct transsexual experience in and

through time. Autobiography is a diachronic narrative form that retrospectively

bestows an illusion of teleological progression upon the aleatory chaos of life

experience. If some transsexuals return to the genre of autobiographical narrative

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post–medical transition, Prosser proposes that it is precisely because the genre's

constitutive tension between retrospection and progression — between the self at

the time of writing and the self of the past —contains the potential to heal the

sexed and temporal splits in transsexual experience by producing ''continuity in

the face of change'' (1998: 120). Prosser does not consider the fact that if the

retrospective construction of a coherent transsexual plot narrative proves healing

to some, it is at the expense of episodes, or even ﬂeeting moments, that would

fracture or exceed it. To transsexual or transgender people for whom such episodes

are critical and thus impossible to excise or reinterpret without doing violence to

experience, the generic and temporal conventions of autobiography may prove

singularly conﬁning and distorting, and the genre itself may replicate, rather than

heal, the coercions of the medical demand for ''proper'' transsexual narrativization.

We might understand the construction of transsexual subjectivity

according to an organized, progressivist temporality that joins both continuity

and change as a form of what queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman has termed

''chrononormativity,'' a social patterning of experiences of time in conformity

with normative frameworks. Freeman proposes that chrononormativity is

established via ''a mode of implantation, a technique by which institutional forces

come to seem like somatic facts'' (2010: 3). The medical criteria for diagnosing

transsexuality, the therapeutic confessional discourses of talk shows and the press,

and the generic conventions of written autobiography might all be thought of as

authorizing transsexual subjects by implanting normative narratives of sexed

development, continuity, and coherence. To say that transsexual autobiography is

chrononormative is not necessarily to say that it is bad but rather to illuminate the

ways in which it produces an experience of healing and empowerment for certain

trans subjectivities and one of fragmentation and invalidation for others.

Attending to the vagaries of transgender and transsexual experience, on the other

hand, may necessitate a recognition of what some theorists have described as a

''queer'' — that is, nonchronological and nonnormative — form of temporality.

The emergent literature on queer temporalities explores the patterning of time

according to social modes of power and the potential alliance between asyn-

chronic temporalities and queer sexual and social practices (Freeman 2007).

J. Halberstam (2005) in particular associates ambiguously gendered bodies and

noncontinuously gendered life narratives with the experience of being out of sync,

a sense of rupture between past, present, and future, and split subjectivities. His

work suggests that transgender lives may require mixed strategies—not only

healing and an achieved coherence but also the ability to represent and to inhabit

temporal, gendered, and conceptual discontinuities.

Any inquiry into the social patterning of temporality must, however,

broaden the lens beyond individual transgender experiences of time to scrutinize

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the temporal underpinnings of transgender as a historically produced cate-

gory. David Valentine (2007) has argued that through US activism that led to the

simultaneous removal of homosexuality and inclusion of gender identity disorder in

the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, third edition ( DSM -III) in

1980— followed by the promotion by the mainstream US gay and lesbian movement

of an account of homosexuals as essentially the same as heterosexuals but for an

essentially ''private'' difference of sexual practice— homosexuality has been nor-

malized, stabilized, and privatized by being purged of gender transitivity, which has

been displaced onto the separate category of transgender. Although, according to

Valentine, this particular historical relation between homosexuality and transgender

produced gender and sexuality as separate categories of analysis, this history is

increasingly erased as the separation of gender and sexuality —and of homosexu-

ality and transgender — is institutionalized as a matter of ontology, not historical

process. Since this ontological conceptual separation is seen as a mark of modernist

progress, the self-understandings of those gender-variant subjects who do not

experience their gender as separate from their sexuality are increasingly dismissed as

atavistic modes of false consciousness.

Given that each deployment of the term transgender risks reif ying the

notions of the at once ontological and progressive distinction between gender and

sexuality, a critical transgender studies must work actively against transgender's

historical baggage and temporal underpinnings. Strategies for doing this might

include foregrounding modes of gender variance inseparable from homosexu-

ality; returning to a feminist understanding of gender not simply as a neutral

category of social difference but as a site invested with relations of power; and

capitalizing on transgender's associations with public sex, economic marginality,

racialized inequality, and policing to promote a politics of structural transforma-

tion rather than identity. Since a modernist progress narrative is being institu-

tionalized along with the category of transgender, an attentiveness to nonchro-

nological, nonprogressivist temporalities of gender variance across the registers of

experience, history, and geography could prove critical to contesting a normative

organization of temporality and identity that blocks transformative justice politics

and distorts the experiences of many gender-variant people.

Kadji Amin is an assistant professor of queer studies in the Department of Cultural Analysis

and Theory at Stony Brook University. His book Untimely Genet is forthcoming.

Works Cited

Freeman, Elizabeth, ed. 2007. ''Queer Temporalities.'' Special issue, GLQ 13, no. 2–3.

AMIN * Temporality * Keywords 221

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———. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories . Durham, NC: Duke University

Press.

Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives . Sexual

Cultures. New York: New York University Press.

Prosser, Jay. 1998. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality . New York: Columbia

University Press.

Valentine, David. 2007. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category . Durham, NC:

Duke University Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400073

Tranifest

KAI M. GREEN and TREVA ELLISON

''Tranifesting'' (transformative manifesting) calls attention to the epistemologies,

sites of struggle, rituals, and modes of consciousness, representation, and

embodiment that summon into being ﬂexible collectivities. Flexible collectivities

are those that are capable of operating across normativizing and violative con-

ﬁgurations of race, gender, class, sex, and sexuality. Our ﬁrst encounter with

tranifest as a term was at a June 2011 gathering for black radical warrior/healers

that took place in Durham, North Carolina, called Indigo Days. Tranifest circu-

lated as a part of an experimental lexicon created by Indigo Days participants to

think and dialogue about gender and sexuality across generational, class, and

gender differences in order to build collective capacity for bodily, emotional, and

structural healing. To tranifest is to mobilize across the contradictions, divisions,

and containment strategies produced by the state and other such large-scale

organizations of power that work to limit our capacity to align ourselves across

differences in ways that are necessary for social transformation.

The need for such ﬂexible new collectivities is underscored for us by our

observation, working as we do within the contemporary United States, that the

hierarchical stratiﬁcations of race, gender, and sexuality that work against our

survival are in part reproduced by institutionalizing within the academy the very

political-intellectual projects that seem most capable, through their intersectional

analyses, of articulating the necessary preconditions of deep social transformation

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(Ferguson 2012: 28). Tranifesting enacts a resistance to the political and epistemic

operations that would encapsulate, and capitalize for others, the fruits of our

labor. It is a form of radical political and intellectual production that takes place at

the crossroads of trauma, injury, and the potential for material transformation

and healing.

We draw inspiration from the history of US black women's struggles—

which we believe is underengaged by transgender studies — in, for example, the

1969 decision by members of the six-month-old Black Women's Alliance to

rename themselves the Third World Women's Alliance in order to acknowledge

the shared experiences and goals of black and Puerto Rican women with regard

to forced sterilization and reproductive self-determination. This act of renaming

and reﬁguring exempliﬁes precisely that sense of a ﬂexible epistemology, in which

ruptures are mobilized as generative sites for solidarity and transformation,

that we seek to address by tranifesting. Similarly, tranifesting, we contend, to

borrow language from Sylvia Wynter, is ''the ceremony that must be found,'' the

''re-writing of knowledge such that it is 'availing to the needs of mankind,'

de-structuring the ratiomorphic apparatus'' in ways that clear the ground for

dreaming a different future, a future that keeps alive the liberatory potential of

black feminism and Third World solidarity and liberation (Wynter 1984: 21).

Tranifesting, as an epistemic operation, is meant to call attention to the

ways in which black feminism and transgender studies are similarly yet differen-

tially capable of mediating particular individual experiences and operationalizing

identity—not as ends in themselves but as places from which to generate trans-

formative politics. The aim of doing so is to encourage a deeper and more

intentional engagement between these two ﬁelds of study. Both transgender

studies and black feminism enter the white feminist/women's studies terrain by

marking its conceptual limits, its inability to account for those who are dis-

appeared, or who are only taken up as marginalized tokens of diversity (Enke

2012; Salamon 2010). Also, black feminism and transgender studies scholarship

both challenge the categories of man and woman as ontological givens by naming

the logics, relations, forces, and developments that have been productive of

multiple gendered and sexual discourses, expressions, and embodiments. As early

as 1851, when Sojourner Truth confronted an audience of mostly white women

with her famous question, ''Ain't I a woman?,'' she was pointing out how gender

emerges as much from such contingent social formations as plantation capitalism

as from the biological body. Subsequent generations of black feminist scholars—

Hortense Spillers, Denise Riley, Toni Cade Bambara, and Frances Beal, to name

but a few—have furthered this fundamental insight into gender's sociohistorical

contingency and its imbrication with constructions of race and class (Bambara

1970; Riley 2003).

GREEN and ELLISON * Tranifest * Keywords 223

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Transgender studies has also emerged as a product and project of trani-

festing. Scholars and activists like Leslie Feinberg and Marsha P. Johnson politicized

gender-nonconforming expression and embodiment through the term transgender

in order to call into being a collectivity centered on gender self-determination

that reveals and challenges the social production and state-sanctioned contain-

ment and regulation of gender and sexual deviancy. Transgender studies scholars

have also theorized how racism, gender discrimination, and transphobia are

coconstituted, calling on transgender studies and political organizing to deal with

unmarked privileges in order to ''face our own contradictions'' (Juang 2006;

Koyama 2006). Our formulation of tranifesting, as a political-intellectual endeavor,

proceeds from thesetypes of engagements as well as more recent work situated at the

intersections of transgender studies and black feminism (Snorton 2011; Sudbury

2009; Walcott 2009).

The political urgency of this ''inter-inter-disciplinary'' engagement is

underscored by the increasing access to visibility, rights, and citizenship afforded

to some transgender subjects alongside the simultaneous expansion of penal

democracy in the United States and beyond that ensnares transgender and gen-

der-nonconforming subjects whose vulnerability is produced around other axes

of difference, including race, poverty, and legal citizenship status (Aizura 2012;

Shelley 2011).

Black feminism and transgender studies share an investment in destabi-

lizing the gender and sexual normativities through which such injustices are

perpetrated. Let us use their tools to move beyond mere theorizing, to tranifest

the forms of collective life that can enliven and sustain us in a future worth living

in. Let us tranifest a new world order!

Kai M. Green is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the

University of Southern California. His dissertation manuscript is titled ''Into the Darkness: A

Black Queer (Re)Membering of Los Angeles in a Time of Crises.''

Treva C. Ellison is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at

the University of Southern California. Treva's forthcoming dissertation, ''Towards a Politics of

Perfect Disorder: Carceral Geographies, Queer Criminality, and Other Ways to Be,'' gives an

account of LGBT and queer organizing and advocacy in Los Angeles around issues of surveil-

lance, policing, and incarceration between 1949 and 2012.

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References

Aizura, Aren. 2012. ''Transnational Transgender Rights and Immigration Law.'' In Enke, Trans-

feminist Perspectives, 133–52.

Bambara, Toni Cade. 1970. The Black Woman: An Anthology . New York: New American Library.

Enke, Anne. 2012. Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies.

Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Ferguson, Roderick A. 2012. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority

Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Juang, Richard. 2006. ''Transgendering the Politics of Recognition.'' In The Transgender Studies

Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 706–20. New York: Routledge.

Koyama, Emi. 2006. ''Whose Feminism Is It Anyway? The Unspoken Racism of the Trans

Inclusion Debate.'' In Stryker and Whittle, Transgender Studies Reader , 698–705.

Riley, Denise. 2003. Am I That Name: Feminism and the Category of Women in History . Min-

neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Salamon, Gayle. 2010. Assuming a Body: Transgender Theory and Rhetorics of Materiality .New

York: Columbia University Press.

Shelley, Kristopher, ''Krystal.'' 2011. ''Krystal Is Kristopher and Vice Versa.'' In Captive Genders:

Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, ed. Nat Smith and Eric A. Stanley,

165–69. Oakland, CA: AK.

Snorton, C. Riley. 2011. ''Transﬁguring Masculinities in Black Women's Studies.'' The Feminist

Wire. May 18. thefeministwire.com/2011/05/transﬁguring-masculinities-in-black-womens

-studies/.

Sudbury, Julia. 2009. ''Maroon Abolitionists: Black Gender-Oppressed Activists in the Anti-prison

Movement in the U.S. and Canada.'' Meridians 9, no. 1: 1–29.

Walcott,Rinaldo. 2009. ''Reconstructing Manhood; or, The Drag of Black Masculinity.'' Small Axe

13, no. 1: 75–89.

Wynter, Sylvia. 1984. ''The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.'' Boundary 2 12–13: 19–70.

doi:10.2307/302808.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400082

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Tranimals

LINDSAY KELLEY

The preﬁx trans- engulfs animal , making the singular animal plural: trani-

mals.

This portmanteau word articulates the labor and biocapital of cross-

species organisms. Animals become tranimals through the preﬁxial materiality of

genetic modiﬁcation (Hansen 2008; Kelley and Hayward 2013), digital distribu-

tion (King 2010), and aural afﬁnity (Prabhakar 2009). Tranimals turn ''sex-

bending trick[s]'' (Helmreich 2011); their procreations are interstitial, decorative,

and discursive. Transdisciplinary in their pluralities, these indeterminate, disor-

dered forms secrete traces across disciplines and pollute categories.

Trans- extends beyond animal to microbial, even molecular, forms of life.

Trans- implies interchange between both gender expression and genetic expres-

sion (tranimals are said to ''express'' their modiﬁcations). Their movement across

categories coupled with their vulnerable position as experimental subjects binds

tranimals to other forms of trans- life, including humans. Trans- organisms are

under the same knife, compelled to navigate diagnostic and pharmacological

landscapes. This shared terrain troubles ''animacy hierarchies'' that would limit

opportunities along species lines (Chen 2012: 98).

Within the imagined corre-

spondence between trans- and animal, nonhuman and human, fragile lives are set

adrift on currents of biomedical capital.

Consider the ''tranimal[s]-forming agent'' (Helmreich 2011) green ﬂuores-

cent protein (GFP), a reporter gene ﬁrst harvested and synthesized from the jellyﬁsh

Aequorea victoria in the 1960s (Shimomura 1995; Baille Gerritsen 2001). Following

GFP, we ﬁnd jellyﬁsh proteins drifting through the bodies of other species. A GFP

bestiary works to carry transgenic bioluminescence: GFP-expressing rhesus monkey

ANDi has siblings who glow in stillborn death while ANDi's date of death remains

unknown (Trivedi 2001). Eduardo Kac's GFP Bunny, Alba, frames the laboratory

rabbit as both conceptual art and domestic companion (Kac 2005). Developed in

Taiwan for commercial purposes, multicolored GFP ﬁsh are sterile and decorative

(Whitehouse 2003; Taikong Group). GFP expression in domestic kittens marks a

protein that resists feline immunodeﬁciency virus: glowing paws point to clinical

intervention into human-cat disease (Wongsrikeao et al. 2011). Transgenic pig ﬂesh

follows stem cells like breadcrumbs (Hsiao et al. 2011). Countless other organ-

isms labor to express GFP for biomedical science, including bacteria, microbes,

and ﬂies.

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Tranimals-forming agents like GFP suggest a ﬂuid exchange of tissue and

sensation, mediated by the constraints of the laboratory. Technoscience has

transformed the jellyﬁsh's localized ﬂash in response to external stimulus into a

steady, diffuse glow. Even as Aequorea victoria populations diminish at sea, their

synthesized ﬂesh multiplies and ﬂourishes. Yet, the ﬂeeting, responsive biolu-

minescence of jellyﬁsh becomes uninteresting if not invisible compared to the

constant visual excitement of GFP tranimals. As the watery bodies of Aequorea

victoria haunt the celebrated lives of ANDi and Alba, we begin to understand and

become tranimals by ﬁnding their ﬂesh in our own.

Lindsay Kelley's art practice and scholarship explore how the experience of eating changes

when technologies are being eaten. She is an associate lecturer in the College of Fine Arts,

University of New South Wales. Her book, The Bioart Kitchen , is forthcoming. She has also

published numerous essays and coedited an issue of parallax , ''bon appe

´tit.''

Notes

1. The term tranimals debuted at the 2009 annual meeting of the Society for Science,

Literature, and Art panel ''TRANimalS: Theorizing the Trans- in Zoontology'' (Kelley

and Hayward 2009), and was presented again in the ''Somatic Sociality of Tranimals''

panel at the 2010 Zoontotechnics (Animality/Technicity) Conference (Kelley and Turner

2010).

2. Borrowing from linguistics, Mel Chen critically engages the term ''animacy hierarchy''

(''the tenuous hierarchy of human-animal-vegetable-mineral'') to question assumptions

about race, sexuality, and liveliness (Chen 2012: 98).

References

Baille Gerritsen, Vivienne. 2001. ''The Greenest of Us All?'' Protein Spotlight 11. web.expasy.org

/spotlight/pdf/sptlt011.pdf (accessed December 1, 2012).

Chen, Mel. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect . Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Hansen, Natalie. 2008. ''Humans, Horses, and Hormones: (Trans) Gendering Cross-Species

Relationships.'' Women's Studies Quarterly 36, no. 3–4: 87–105.

Helmreich, Stefan. 2011. ''Homo microbis and the Figure of the Literal.'' Fieldsights — Theorizing

the Contemporary. Cultural Anthropology Online , April 24. culanth.org/ﬁeldsights/259

-homo-microbis-and-the-ﬁgure-of-the-literal.

Hsiao, F. S. H., et. al. 2011. ''Toward an Ideal Animal Model to Trace Donor Cell Fates after Stem

Cell Therapy: Production of Stably Labeled Multipotent Mesenchymal Stem Cells from

Bone Marrow of Transgenic Pigs Harboring Enhanced Green Fluorescence Protein

Gene.'' Journal of Animal Science 89, no. 11: 3460–72. doi:10.2527/jas.2011-3889.

Kac, Eduardo. 2005. Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, and Robots. Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Kelley, Lindsay, and Eva Hayward, panel cochairs. 2009. ''TRANimalS: Theorizing the Trans- in

Zoontology,'' panel at the annual meeting of the Society for Science, Literature, and Art,

Atlanta, November 5–8.

———. 2013. ''Carnal Light.'' parallax 19, no. 1: 114–27.

Kelley, Lindsay, and Lynn Turner, panel cochairs. 2010. ''Somatic Sociality of Tranimals,'' panel at

the Zoontotechnics (Animality/Technicity) Conference, Cardiff University, May 12–14.

King, Katie. 2010. ''My Distributed Animality.'' SL Tranimal (blog). sltranimal.blogspot.com

(accessed December 1, 2012).

Prabhakar, Prema. 2009. '' 'Do Not Rest in Peace': The O bsessional Mediumship of Diamanda

Galas.'' Paper presented at the annual meeting for the Society for Science, Literature, and

Art, Atlanta, November 5–8.

Shimomura, Osamu. 1995. ''A Short Story of Aequorin.'' Biological Bulletin 189, no. 1: 1–5.

doi:10.2307/1542194.

Taikong Group. Taikong Group Ornamental Fish. www.tkﬁsh.com.tw/en/about/about-tk

(accessed December 1, 2012).

Trivedi, Bijal P. 2001. ''Introducing ANDi: The First Genetically Modiﬁed Monkey.'' Genome News

Network, January 16. www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/01_01/ANDi.shtml.

Whitehouse, David. 2003. ''GM Fish Glows in the Bowl.'' BBC News. news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science

/nature/3026104.stm (accessed October 15, 2012).

Wongsrikeao, Pimprapar, et al. 2011. ''Antiviral Restriction Factor Transgenesis in the Domestic

Cat.'' Nature Methods 8, no. 10: 853–59. doi:10.1038/nmeth.1703.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400091

Transability

ELISAA.G.ARFINI

''Transability'' denotes the persistent desire to acquire a physical disability and/

or to seek the actual elective transition of the body from abled to disabled. It can

be understood as the cultural translation of the diagnostic category BIID (body

integrity identity disorder), which, albeit not currently listed in the World Health

Organization's International Classiﬁcation of Diseases or in the American Psy-

chiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,

frames the desire for disability as a mental disease. Relevant biomedical literature

on the condition was inaugurated by John Money (Money, Jobaris, and Furth

1977), who reported two case studies of individuals desiring amputation.

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Transability is an umbrella term developed within the community of indi-

viduals who identify as transabled. It mirrors the term transsexuality . In partic-

ular, the term is meant to echo the ''wrong body'' metaphor and what is perceived

to be a trajectory of successful recognition, one that transsexual individuals gained

after obtaining regulated access to medical technologies of sex reassignment.

Transability thus constructs a narrative of transsexuality, one that understands

the goal of transition as passing, accepts a prediscursive origin of trans desire, and

defers to a regulated process that proceeds from medical diagnosis to legal name

change. Although it is currently deprecated in favor of a more counternormative

model of transgender embodiment, transsexual narrative as constructed by

transability is naturalized as the ﬁgural model of transition from deviancy to

normality, from suffering to reconciliation, and as an exemplary history of social

acceptance and cultural recognition.

An analysis of transabled narratives (Arﬁni 2010) demonstrates how regimes

of justiﬁcation (Boltanski and The

´venot 1999) and autobiographics (Gilmore 1994)

are carefully orchestrated in order to achieve a similar naturalization of transabled

desires. The struggle for recognition of transabled politics rests its modern and

liberal claims on the right for self-determination (Stryker and Sullivan 2009). The

goal of this politics thus relies on constructing an autonomous and compos mentis

subject rather than on the construction of a certain body.

Transabled agendas can be evaluated in terms of antagonism and/or

conformity to normative discourse. However, a deconstructive reading can also

expose how transability reveals crucial processes regulating the binary opposition

between ability and disability. If, despite its assimilationist goals, transability

remains a desire for malfunction, aberration, deformity, this is due not to the

nature of transabled desire but to the social construction of body standards.

Normative body standards, in fact, construct sovereign subjects by conﬂating

difference with lack and integrity with autonomy. Legitimate membership in the

class of able bodied is thus revealed as a highly policed social determination.

Elisa A. G. Arﬁni is a postdoctoral fellow in sociology in the Department of Philosophy and

Communication at the University of Bologna, Italy. She is the author of Scrivere il sesso.

Retoriche e narrative della transessualita

`(2007).

References

Arﬁni, Elisa A. G. 2010. ''Istruzioni per diventare disabili: Un'analisi narrativa del progetto sul

corpo transabile.'' Studi Culturali 7, no. 3: 343–64.

Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent The

´venot. 1999. ''The Sociology of Critical Capacity.'' European

Journal of Social Theory 2, no. 3: 359–77.

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Gilmore, Leigh. 1994. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation . Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press.

Money, John, Russell Jobaris, and Gregg Furth. 1977. ''Apotemnophilia: Two Cases of Self-

Demand Amputation as a Paraphilia.'' Journal of Sex Research 13, no. 2: 115–25.

Stryker, Susan, and Nikki Sullivan. 2009. ''King's Member, Queen's Body: Transsexual Surgery,

Self-Demand Amputation, and the Somatechnics of Sovereign Power.'' In Somatechnics:

Queering the Technologisation of Bodies, ed. Nikki Sullivan and Samantha Murray, 49–61.

Farnham, UK: Ashgate.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400118

Transbutch

JEN MANION

The vast possibilities for gender variance manifested by the category of trans-

gender have been precluded by a dominant narrative of crossing from one

clear gender to another (Meyerowitz, 2002). As the categories ''transman'' and

''transwoman'' become increasingly stable, other transgressive gender identities

are obscured and separated from the category of transgender (Feinberg 1996;

Stryker and Whittle 2006). ''Transbutch'' signiﬁes a gendered embodiment that is

both butch and trans, not tied to any singular deﬁnition of butch or trans but

rather falling somewhere in between. Transbutch marks a liminal space that

embraces both the historical legacies of the category of butch and the more

expansive possibilities created by the transgender rights movement for recogni-

tion, community, and empowerment.

The category of transbutch is a response to the hostility and misunder-

standing displayed by some butches and lesbians toward transmen (Halberstam

1998). As many lesbians mourned the alleged loss of the butch and felt they

needed to defend the boundaries of their ''woman identiﬁed woman'' commu-

nities, butches became increasingly reappropriated with an emphasis on their sex

(female) rather than their gender (masculine). Some have promoted the use of the

phrase ''butch women'' to emphasize that butches are not transgender and love

being women (Bergman 2010). Transbutches embody a third space (with others)

between the uncritical celebration of ''womanhood'' and its rejection entirely.

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Transbutches embrace aspects of masculinity without denouncing their social

afﬁliation with an oppressed group of people who were predominantly raised and

socialized as girls.

The category of transbutch has emerged from trans* discourses, activism,

and communities that challenge people to claim conscious gender identities. This

is a departure from the historic butch code of silence that required masculine

women to avoid, downplay, or deny their gender deviance. Requests for preferred

pronouns and the emergence of the category of cisgender have compelled butches

to ﬁgure out where they ﬁt in this new gendered order. While butches or even

transbutches might not identify as transgendered, they are not cisgendered either.

Transbutches relate to transmen and embrace their status as gender out-

laws. Both share many of the following: identifying as more masculine than

androgynous, taking pleasure from passing as male, assuming a male sexual

identity, and rejecting the notion that biology is destiny. Like most butches and

transmen, transbutches do not embrace a chief marker of female embodiment —

the breast—and seek to minimize its presence through baggy clothes, binding, or

top surgery (Rubin [1992] 2011). Top surgery (or the desire for it) has historically

distinguished transsexuals from butches, but this is changing. As more transmen

embrace top surgery and share powerful stories of pleasure and relief, butches are

following their lead. This further blurs the line between transmen and butches.

In a group of transmen, the transbutch may or may not be accepted as a

peer. In society, transmen and transbutches are treated to similar forms of

judgment and misunderstanding that also vary depending on region, race, eth-

nicity, class, ability, and body type. Despite these variations, however, the nuances

of these complicated gender identiﬁcations are largely meaningless to the masses.

Transbutches might retain some social privilege by not fully claiming a male

identity (as many transmen do) in a world where so many people still believe that

one needs to be born with a penis to really be a man.

Jen Manion is an associate professor of history at Connecticut College. Jen is coeditor of Taking

Back the Academy: History of Activism, History as Activism (2004). Jen's book Liberty's Prisoners:

Gender, Sexuality, and Punishment in Early America is forthcoming. Jen's new project is titled

''Early American Transgender Histories: From Revolution to Civil War.''

References

Bergman, S. Bear. 2010. Butch Is a Noun . Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp.

Feinberg, Leslie. 1996. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul . Boston:

Beacon.

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Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Female Masculinity . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Meyerowitz, Joanne. 2002. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rubin, Gayle. (1992) 2011. ''Of Catamites and Kings: Reﬂections on Butch, Gender, and Bound-

aries.'' In The Gayle Rubin Reader , 241–53. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Stryker, Susan, and Stephen Whittle, eds. 2006. The Transgender Studies Reader . New York:

Routledge.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400127

Transgender

CRISTAN WILLIAMS

The word transgender entered widespread use as an umbrella term for describing a

range of gender-variant identities and communities within the United States in

the early 1990s.

At that time, Virginia Prince (1913–2009), a self-identiﬁed het-

erosexual cross-dresser from Los Angeles who later started living socially as a

woman full time and who played an indisputably important role in the formation

of gender-variant communities, organizations, and identities within the United

States in the mid-twentieth century, was often credited with coining the term

(Feinberg 1996). Her role in this regard has been overstated, and the history of the

word itself is far more complex than has been previously understood.

Prince did describe herself with such terms as transgenderal as early as 1969

and transgenderist as early as 1978, as a means to name the speciﬁc behavior of

living full time in a chosen social gender role different from that typically asso-

ciated with birth-assigned sex, without undergoing genital sex-reassignment

surgery (see Ekins and King 2006). In 1975, FI News featured an article about the

term transgenderist (Mesics 1975), deﬁning it in the manner Prince would later

use, and in 1976, Ari Kane, a contemporaneous gender-variant community leader

on the East Coast, used the term in a similar fashion (see Mesics 1975). Prince and

Kane, however, did not use the word ''transgender'' in its contemporary all-

inclusive sense, nor were they ﬁrst in coining words involving some compound of

trans + gender. More importantly, the earliest documented uses of ''transgender''

do not distinguish cross-dressing or living full time without surgery from trans-

sexual identities.

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In 1965, for example, Dr. John Oliven proposed that the term transsexu-

alism be replaced by the term transgenderism, arguing that the concept of sexuality

could not account for the ''all consuming belief that [transsexuals] are women

who by some incredible error were given the bodies of men'' (1965: 514). On April

26, 1970, a TV Guide newspaper insert used the term ''transgendered'' to describe

the transsexual title character of Gore Vidal's sex-change farce Myra Breckinridge

(''Sunday Highlights'' 1970). In 1974, Drs. Robert Hatcher and Joseph Pearson

used ''transgender'' as a term for operative transsexuals, writing, ''The transves-

tite rarely seeks transgender surgery'' (1974: 176). During that same year, Oliven

again used ''transgender'' but this time as a term inclusive of both transves-

tites and transsexuals (1974). By 1975, transvestite/transsexual groups began using

''transgenderism'' as a term inclusive of transsexuals and transvestites (Dowell

1975). In 1979, 1982, and 1985, Christine Jorgensen, then perhaps the world's most

famous transsexual, publicly rejected the term transsexual in favor of the term

transgender (Parker 1979; Associated Press 1982; Canadian Press 1985). In 1984,

TV-TS Tapestry magazine featured an article recounting the importance of a

''transgender community,'' in which ''transgender'' was used as an umbrella term

inclusive of transsexuals and cross-dressers (Peo 1984). By the mid-1980s,

''transgender'' had been used multiple times— in medical, pop-culture, and trans

community sources alike — as an umbrella term inclusive of transsexuals, cross-

dressers, and other gender-variant people.

The dramatic rise in the term's

popularity in the early 1990s, therefore, should be seen as the acceleration of a

longer trend rather than the creation of a new meaning for an existing term that

originally meant something else. The coinage, uptake, and diffusion of ''trans-

gender'' was an organic, grass-roots process that emerged from many sources, in

many conversations happening in many different social locations.

This new understanding of transgender 's etymology not only has impor-

tant implications for tracing the complex recent history of gender and sexuality; it

can also intervene in contentious identitarian disputes within and among various

contemporary trans communities. One common polemical use of what might be

called the ''Virginia Prince Fountainhead Narrative'' of transgender 's origin is that

a motley movement of various gender-nonconformists, transsexuals, and queers

commandeered a term that referred speciﬁcally to heterosexual cross-dressers

who chose to cross-dress full time — transgenderists — thereby colonizing the

identity label of another group and forcibly assimilating them into political and

social formations they wanted nothing to do with.

Prince herself felt this way; she

claimed ownership of the term and objected to the broader use of ''transgender''

(Prince 1991).

Etymological research clearly documents, however, that since the 1970s,

''transgender'' has in fact been used with a variety of meanings. One important use

WILLIAMS * Transgender * Keywords 233

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has been to group together different kinds of people who might otherwise have

virtually no social contact with one another. This grouping together across ﬁne

gradations of trans experience and identity can facilitate communication and

hence build the experienced reality of a shared community, with overlapping and

intersectional social needs and political goals. It is this expansive, rather than

narrow, use of the term that encompasses the intellectual and political promise of

atransgender studies.

Cristan Williams is the founder of the Transgender Archives in Houston, Texas, and is the

executive director of the Transgender Foundation of America.

Notes

1. See the chart documenting the rising popularity of transgender in Stryker and Aizura

2013 (2).

2. See the extensive citations published in Williams 2012.

3. See, for example, the opinion of Billie Jean Jones (1992), publisher of cross-dresser

magazine TV Guise.

References

Associated Press. 1982. ''Transgender.'' Appeal-Democrat , May 11.

Canadian Press. 1985. ''She Gave Spark to Sexual Revolution.'' Regina Leader-Post, December 18.

Dowell, Frances. 1975. ''Salmacis Offer Lectures.'' Female Impersonator News 1, no. 6: 2.

Ekins, Richard, and Dave King. 2006. The Transgender Phenomenon . London: Sage.

Feinberg, Leslie. 1996. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman.

Boston: Beacon.

Hatcher, Robert, and Joseph Pearson. 1974. ''Psychiatric Evaluation for Transgender Surgery.'' In

A Practical Handbook of Psychiatry, ed. Joseph R. Novello, 176–78. Springﬁeld, IL:

Charles C. Thomas.

Jones, Billie Jean. 1992. ''Readers Write. . . . '' Gender EUPHORIA 6, no. 2: 9.

Mesics, Sandy. 1975. ''The Transgenderist Explains.'' Female Impersonator News 1, no. 6: 4.

Oliven, John F. 1965. Sexual Hygiene and Pathology. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

———. 1974. Clinical Sexology . Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Parker, Jerry. 1979. ''Christine Recalls Life as Boy from the Bronx.'' Winnipeg Free Press , October 18.

Peo, Roger. 1984. ''The 'Origins' and 'Cures' for Transgender Behavior.'' TV-TS Tapestry,no.42:40.

Prince, Virginia. 1991. ''VIEWPOINT!!!'' Gender EUPHORIA 5, no. 11: 7.

Stryker, Susan, and Aren Aizura. 2013. ''Transgender Studies 2.0.'' In Transgender Studies Reader 2,

ed. Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura, 1–12. New York: Routledge.

''Sunday Highlights.'' 1970. TV Guide . Des Moines Register , April 26.

Williams, Cristan. 2012. ''Tracking Transgender: The Historical Truth.'' Ehipassiko (blog). cristanwilliams

.com/b/tracking-transgender-the-historical-truth (accessed November 1, 2013).

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400136

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Transition

JULIAN CARTER

In the late twentieth century, transition became the vernacular term of choice in

anglophone North America for describing the process or experience of chang-

ing gender. Initially, ''transition'' denoted a standardized trajectory of ''sex reas-

signment'' in which people were shuttled from the psychiatrist, through the

endocrinologist, to the surgeon, to the judge (Cooke 1998; Rubin 2003). While any

individual element of this sequence may be passionately desired, its trajectory

through batteries of expert gatekeepers can be alienating even for those who most

closely conform to those experts' standards. The sequence itself materializes the

discomforting biopolitical requirement that trans-people must literally embody a

particular set of psychiatric perspectives and medical practices.

Transition thus weighs especially heavily on people who lack the resources

or the wish to conform to its polarized deﬁnitions of sexed embodiment, such as

poor and/or uninsured people and those whose gender expression is not formed

in relation to dominant white European American conventions. This is why many

North American trans- communities insist that ''everyone transitions in their own

way'': open-ended refusal to deﬁne ''transition'' is a principled stance against

institutionalizing any given form of trans- being. Such resistance reﬂects decades

of struggle over who decides what counts as legitimate trans-/gender expression—

struggle that clings to the word itself.

Despite its affective complexity and political freight, ''transition'' is fre-

quently deployed to refer to the ways in which people move across socially deﬁned

boundaries away from an unchosen gender category. Such actions, and the lan-

guage denoting them, have varied over time and place. For instance, in the

nineteenth-century US West, people ''assumed the dress'' of their preferred gen-

der (Boag 2011). In the mid-twentieth century, one had ''the operation'' that

accomplished a ''sex change.'' Late 1960s San Francisco queens ''came out,'' sub-

merging references to speciﬁc strategies in a wider celebration of social emergence

as a member of one's chosen sex while echoing the self-afﬁrmative language of gay

liberation (Cooke 1998). ''Transition'' became widely used only in the mid-1990s.

''Transition'' differs from ''sex change'' in its inherent reference to duration rather

than event, from ''assuming a dress'' in its attention to the embodied self who

dresses, and from ''coming out'' in its disengagement from politically radical and

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street subcultures; yet conceptual residue from these earlier vocabularies adheres

to the term as the activities it encompasses expand. Thus in common usage,

''transition'' conjoins expectations of ongoing, indeterminate process with expec-

tations of eventual arrival and implies some shift in bodily self-presentation that is

both central to, and inadequate to describe, the interpersonal/psychic experience

of altering one's social gender.

Multiple technical deﬁnitions of transition preexisted the word's appli-

cation to gender, and we might well consider how the resonances of these earlier

usages could perhaps linger in the new transgender context. In rhetoric, transi-

tions function as the ramps and bridges over which audiences are guided from

one point to the next; they are evaluated as successful when our presentation

seamlessly supports our claims, weak when the seams show. In physics, transition

refers to a state of matter in which different phases of the same substance (as solid,

liquid, or gas) achieve a temporary, unstable equilibrium that allows them to

coexist. In dance, transitions are strategies for redirecting embodied energies;

they can change the quality or the direction of movement, increase or decrease

momentum, cover space, and/or occupy time. In parturition, transition names

the shift from active labor to pushing the baby out. Transitions are brave work.

Like birth, like writing, gender transition is when hopes take material form and in

doing so take on a life of their own.

Transition is a list of trial names on the fridge, initials doodled on notepads.

It is wearing a dress every day for a year, even though you imagine yourself as a

rocker chick in torn jeans. It is searching for your name and photograph on your

company's website so you can compile a list to send through HR to the IT people

who will, you hope, be consistent about updating them. It is borrowing your

brother's clothes. Transition is a misnomer because you were here, like this, all

along. Transition is calling 911 before you cut off your dick so they can get you to

the hospital before you bleed out. It is never having to reassure an embarrassed

checkout clerk again. It is when you stop—or maybe start —avoiding mirrors, and

bathrooms. It is like being slowly ﬂayed in public. It is a rush of romantic feeling

when you touch your own skin. Transition is a revised interface with agents of the

security state. Transition is your secret self made available for social relationships.

Transition is thousands of little gestures of protest and presence, adding

up and getting some momentum behind them so that you ﬁnally achieve escape

velocity from the category you were stuck in all those years ago. But how do you

know when you have arrived? ''Transition'' is not like ''the operation'' in this sense,

though ''the operation'' often serves as an imagined conclusion. At some point,

for many people, changes become less pronounced, less socially and affectively

intense. We may stop celebrating every sign of our revised movement in the world.

We are on the other side. Still when we pass, if we are unlucky in our relatives,

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we may be buried in clothes and under a name that suit someone else's idea of

authentic gender, and none of us control how we are remembered. When we are

not aware of the days getting longer, have the seasons stopped changing? This is

the promise of transition, as the term continues to expand from its psychiatric

and surgical usage: that we can live in the time of our own becoming and that

possible change is not restricted to the narrow sphere of our conscious intention.

Julian Carter is associate professor of critical studies at California College of the Arts in

Oakland and San Francisco. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and

Race in America, 1880–1940 (2007) and is currently writing about transformation and tran-

sition in contemporary dance.

References

Boag, Peter. 2011. Re-dressing America's Frontier Past . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cooke, Suzan. 1998. Interview by Susan Stryker. San Francisco, CA, Jan 10. Tape recording. San

Francisco: GLBT Historical Society.

Rubin, Henry. 2003. Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men . Nashville:

Vanderbilt University Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400145

Translatinas/os

LAWRENCE LA FOUNTAIN-STOKES

The neologism translatinas/os is of recent coinage and has been employed to

identify transgender, transsexual, and transvestite individuals in Spanish-

speaking parts of Latin America and elsewhere.

The term brings together the

preﬁx trans - and the noun Latina/o , employed as a gender-inﬂected synonym for

Latin American or as an ethnic or racial marker for a person of Latin American

descent who lives elsewhere, for example in Australia, Canada, Europe, or the

United States. Given that the preﬁx trans - is used to indicate individuals who

might have migrated (or whose family histories might include migration) and

who might have transnational connections, it acquires a double valence, referring

LA FOUNTAIN-STOKES * Translatinas/os * Keywords 237

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to geography and physical displacement as much as to gender identity and

expression. The expansive use of the root word Latina/o is quite notable, as this

term is more associated in recent times with US populations, who use it in

contradistinction to Hispanic but also to Latin American (or latinoamericana/o)

(see Oboler 1995). The term translatina/o is not coterminous with or represen-

tative of the entire Latina/o trans population—a broader and more diverse

group, as Marcia Ochoa (2010) has discussed—and can be juxtaposed to ver-

nacular Latin American terms explored by others, such as Don Kulick's (1998)

analysis of the word travesti in Brazil and Annick Prieur's (1998) discussion of

jota and vestida in Mexico.

Ochoa actually proposes the terms ''Latina/o trans-

populations'' and ''US trans-Latina/os'' (with a hyphen), and protests the dom-

inant practice of marginalizing female to male (FTM) transgender Latinos. In his

own work on Latina trans performers on Australian television (speciﬁcally on the

Mexican transsexual Miriam), Vek Lewis (2009) proposes the term ''translatini-

dad'' to convey ''the idea of a uniform, colossal Latin American type that traverses

national borders and celluloid memory, tinged with the connotations of a colo-

nially inscribed, phallic femininity, which [the performer's] transsexuality is

positioned to represent'' (240). Lewis (in Namaste 2011) also criticizes the use of

English-language terms and neologisms and privileges the use of vernacular

Spanish and Portuguese-language categories.

''Translatina'' has been employed in the Unites States to name community

support groups such as El/La para Translatinas, an AIDS-prevention and social

support group for Latina trans women located in the Mission District of San

Francisco. The name of this group plays with the standard third-person singular

female pronoun in the Spanish language, ella (she), and breaks it down into two

elements with a slash: the ﬁrst word, el (the), is the singular male article in Spanish

and also references the third person singular male pronoun e

´l(he), while the

second word, la (the) is the singular female article. As such, ''El/La'' can be read in

many ways, for example as He/She, S/he, or ''He who is intrinsically part of She.''

Leading trans ﬁgures in El/La have included Alexandra Byerly (now known as

Alexandra Rodrı

´guez de Ruiz), who is originally from Mexico.

A variation of ''translatina'' appears in the name of a national US orga-

nization established in 2009, the Coalicio

´n TransLatin@ (TransLatin@ Coalition),

which uses the at symbol to indicate double gender valence in the Spanish lan-

guage, following very recent linguistic innovations (other new spellings in Spanish

include the use of a/o and o/a to mark female and male). The TransLatin@

Coalition identiﬁes itself as ''La voz de inmigrantes TransLatin@s/The voice of

TransLatin@ Immigrants.'' There appear to be no transmen in positions of

leadership in this organization, based on the names included as members of the

board of directors on its website.

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Translatina is also the title of a feature-length documentary by the Per-

uvian director Felipe Degregori (2010). This 93-minute ﬁlm was funded by the

Pan American Health Organization (a Regional Ofﬁce of the World Health

Organization), UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS), the

United Nations Development Program, RedLacTrans (Red Latinoamericana y

del Caribe de Personas Trans [Latin American and Caribbean Network of

Trans People]), and ILGA-LAC (the Latin American and Caribbean Region of

the International Lesbian and Gay Association), with additional support from

the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID). The

documentary focuses mostly on the Peruvian experience, including interviews

with trans individuals, government ofﬁcials, members of the police, LGBT

activists, and health professionals. It also includes interviews with a large number

of trans women and LGBT leaders from throughout Latin America and the

Caribbean (ﬁfteen nationalities), including trans rights pioneers such as Marcela

Romero, Claudia Baudracco, and Marı

´a Bele

´n Correa (Argentina), Liza Minnelli

(Brazil), Raiza Torriani (Bolivia), Valentina Riasco (Colombia), Bianca Vidal

(Chile), Rashell Erazo (Ecuador), Paty Betancourt and Amaranta Go

´mez (Mex-

ico), Silvia Martı

´nez (Nicaragua), Venus Tejada (Panama), Jana Villayzan (Peru),

and Gloria Marin

˜o (Uruguay), most of whom are involved with RedLacTrans.

The ﬁlm also highlights the role of nongovernmental organizations and of trans

organizations at the national level, for example the Association of Transgenders,

Transsexuals, and Transvestites of Argentina (ATTTA). Topics addressed include

police brutality, lack of employment opportunities outside traditional ﬁelds such

as sex work and beauty salons, educational and family discrimination, health

challenges (particularly HIV/AIDS), body modiﬁcation (particularly through the

use of injectable biopolymers), legal challenges (including name change legisla-

tion), personal relationships, dreams of migration (particularly to Italy) and of

sex-reassignment surgery, testimonials about the difﬁculties of living abroad, and

activism. Many of the interviewees discuss the incipient state of trans activism in

the region. The term Latina is not discussed and is offered simply as a synonym

for Latin American; there is no mention of Latina women in the United States.

Finally, translatina can be associated with other Spanish-language neol-

ogisms such as translocas and transmachas , which have been used by scholars to

refer to transnational Latin American feminism (A

´lvarez 2009; Costa and A

´lvarez

2009) and to transnational or translocal trans performers and activists, including

drag queens, drag kings, and performance artists (La Fountain-Stokes 2011). Sonia

´lvarez highlights the usage of the term loca as ''madwoman'' in Spanish and

proposes a resistant reinterpretation for contemporary feminists who explore the

transnational dimensions of Latin American women's experience. In my own

work, I have also used the term translocas but embraced the alternate, vernacular,

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and highly stigmatized meaning of loca as effeminate male and seen this epithet

(which is widely used among gay men and trans women as a term of endearment)

as a potential site for resigniﬁcation in a translocal and transnational performance

framework. I have also been interested in the linguistic gender shifts entailed in

the feminized use of the term macha as a variant of macho, already common in

epithets such as marimacha (masculine woman, lesbian, butch), following up on

queer and feminist theorizations by individuals such as Ana Castillo (1995) to see

its connection to contemporary performance artists such as Elizabeth Marrero

(particularly her drag king character of Macha in the Bronx, New York City) (La

Fountain-Stokes 2009) and Gisela Rosario, best known in Puerto Rico for her

punk rock persona of Macha Colo

´n.

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is an associate professor of American culture, Romance lan-

guages and literatures, and women's studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of

Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (2009), Un˜as pintadas de azul/Blue

Fingernails (2009), and Abolicio

´n del pato (2013).

Notes

1. Roger Lancaster (1998) discusses the wide variety and heterogeneity of trans categories

and practices in Latin America.

2. Vek Lewis (2006) offers a critique of Kulick and Prieur, privileging the research of Ce

´sar

O. Gonza

´lez Pe

´rez (Travestidos al desnudo: Homosexualidad, identidades y luchas terri-

toriales en Colima) and Joseﬁna Ferna

´ndez (Cuerpos desobedientes: Travestismo e iden-

tidad de ge

´nero). Also see Viviane Namaste 2011.

References

´lvarez, Sonia. 2009. ''Construindo uma polı

´tica feminista translocal da traduc ¸a

˜o.'' Revista Estudos

Feministas 17, no. 3: 743–53.

Castillo, Ana. 1995. ''La Macha: Toward an Erotic Whole Self.'' In Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays

on Xicanisma, 121–43. New York: Plume.

Costa, Claudia de Lima, and Sonia A

´lvarez. 2009. ''Translocalidades: Por uma polı

´tica feminista da

traduc ¸a

˜o.'' Revista Estudos Feministas 17, no. 3: 739–42.

Degregori, Felipe. 2010. Translatina , DVD (93 min.). Lima, Peru: Buenaletra Producciones.

Kulick, Don. 1998. Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

La Fountain-Stokes, Lawrence. 2009. Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 2011. ''Translocas: Migration, Homosexuality, and Transvestism in Recent Puerto Rican

Performance.'' e-misfe

´rica 8, no. 1. hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-81

/lafountain.

240 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

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Published by Duke University Press

Lancaster, Roger. 1998. ''Transgenderism in Latin America: Some Critical Introductory Remarks

on Identities and Practices.'' Sexualities 1, no. 3: 261–74.

Lewis, Vek. 2006. ''Sociological Work on Transgender in Latin America: Some Considerations.''

Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 12, no. 2: 77–89.

———. 2009. ''Performing Translatinidad: Miriam the Mexican Transsexual Reality Show Star and

the Tropicalization of Difference in Anglo-Australian Media.'' Sexualities 12, no. 2: 225–50.

Namaste, Viviane. 2011. ''Critical Research and Activisms on Trans Issues in Latin America: An

Interview with Vek Lewis.'' In Sex Change, Social Change: Reﬂections on Identity, Insti-

tutions, and Imperialism, 2nd ed., 181–203. Toronto: Women's Press.

Oboler, Suzanne. 1995. Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)presentation in

the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ochoa, Marcia. 2010. ''Latina/o Transpopulations.'' In Latina/o Sexualities: Probing Powers, Pas-

sions, Practices, and Policies, ed. Marysol Asencio, 230–42. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press.

Prieur, Annick. 1998. Mema's House, Mexico City: On Transvestites, Queens, and Machos . Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400154

Translation

A. FINN ENKE

Our telling reaches across chasms of power and privilege. Struggles with willful

unknowing. Stands on fault lines between people most similar. Insists upon

wholeness. This is the work of translation.

—Eli Clare, The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion

Translation, from Latin: to carry or bring across.

Translation is a necessary and profoundly hopeful act for those who trans

gender, for we have been taught that transgender is marked by dysphoria, a word

from Greek that means difﬁcult to bear, difﬁcult to carry. In order to carry or

bring across, we become poets, storytellers, and artists.

Sandy Stone, a founder of trans studies, tells this story: it is 1972 at the

Stanford Gender Dysphoria Clinic, and Sandy is waiting for her appointment, one

of many that she hopes will establish her eligibility for sex reassignment support.

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Another trans woman also waiting pulls a clay pipe out of her purse. Sandy says,

''tell me, if you think of yourself as a woman, why have you chosen to smoke a

pipe?'' The woman responds, ''I am a woman. This is my pipe. Therefore, this is a

woman's pipe.'' Sandy suddenly understands something new (Gabriel 1995: 16).

Meanings collide across time and space, and the deﬁnition of ''pipe'' has changed.

Still, let us not forget that in many parts of the world for at least four centuries,

''pipe'' has acted as a polite translation for ''penis.'' Translation transforms us.

Much is lost in translation. With what do we replace the parts we let go?

From one language to another, translators of poetry must decide: what demands

unwavering loyalty? The meter, the rhyme, the literal word, or the use of space on

the page? Translation creates two things: ﬁrst, something new; and second, the

illusion that there was an original from which the translation sprang. But there is

no original: the poem is a medium, a conveyance. We ask, should our translations

conform to audience expectations or transform them? We dance between, always

doing both, by the very act of being.

Translation trafﬁcs in power. As Hala Kamal reminds us, ''translation is

not merely an act of transferring information, but a process of knowledge pro-

duction'' (Kamal 2008: 274; also see Wieringa, Blackwood, and Bhaiya 2007). In a

world in which gay, queer, and transgender all comingle with imperialist insti-

tutions, translators carry the burden of destruction and creation. Choices must be

made. In Arabic, neither ''gender'' nor ''queer'' has an explanatory equivalent. In

Taiwan, T-Po is not equivalent to the American butch-femme; both pairings are

multilingual and both require further contextualization. In Mandarin, tongzhi

conventionally means common cause, commitment, or comrade; it carries a con-

cept of afﬁnity across Chinese socio-temporal contexts, speciﬁcally using the

tensions of homosexual in/visibilities to arrive at a new meaning commonly

translated into English as ''gay.'' Translators of Japanese manga into English

usually choose to completely obliterate the self-gendering signiﬁers within Jap-

anese ﬁrst-person singular pronouns. Who, then, is the author, and to whom does

the translated text belong?

We remake and even exceed language, but we do not escape it. In English

alone, we constitute ourselves within grammar. To paraphrase Judith Butler, ''I''

still cannot speak ''apart from the grammar that establishes my availability to

you'' (1999: xxiv; see also Stone 1991). Grammar signs gender as well as race, age,

dis/ability, social status. The speaker is never indigenous, pure, or even original.

Communication depends on translation. Yet what happens in the turbulent

distance between mouth and ear?

Gender becomes legible through acts of translation that betray disciplinary

success and failure simultaneously. Perhaps few things point out the failure of

words to convey our arrival in this social body quite so well as transgender.

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Transgender highlights the labors of translation, inhering an implied ''before'' and

''from which.'' The present moment does not tell the story, only that there is one

worth telling.

Transgender —an explicitly imperfect translation —itself carries institu-

tional and imperial discipline: to be named and to name oneself transgender

is to enter into disciplinary regimes that distribute recognition and resources

according to imperial logics. As a term, transgender translates an inﬁnite multi-

plicity into a single disciplinary body. But this project fails, and its failure incites

creative elaboration, the proliferation of stories. Transgender demands above all

the need for more context, more story, and thus the translation into transgender

never arrives and rests. Instead, it begs that we continuously translate from

transgender, provide new contextual elaborations that include time and place and

all the disciplinary regimes through we which have named and been named, the

names that are the precondition of our passing.

The Skin of Transgender

Translation is the skin of transgender,

gender's carriage, its conveyance:

we carry it

we bring it

across time from one place to another

as if there is no friction

in between.

Translation like law does not carry

does not bind

documents across borders:

birth certiﬁcate SSN driver's license passport doctor's note if lucky green card.

Translation like pronoun fails

becomes interpretation, imposition, the transposition of one body on to an other

not one, not two: it multiplies with each border crossed or

not crossed.

There is always friction: meaning not like an object transported

and dropped into a new place, but meaning

like skin

it bears scars, rips and tears, hydrated nourished and

worn.

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It's the story we make of our lives

to get a job to get

hormones to get a ride to get across time to get

home.

It's how we make our name make ourselves

make sense

how we ﬁnd

how we invent

common language

not just words

not just voice

your hands my hands

sign language

act it out

show me

point

skin ﬂexes over adam's apple: whose sign?

A. Finn Enke is an associate professor of history, gender and women's studies, and LGBT studies

at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Enke edited the collection Transfeminist Perspectives

in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (2012) and is working on a graphic novel titled

''With Finn and Wing: Growing Up Amphibious in a Nuclear Age.''

References

Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity .NewYork:

Routledge.

Gabriel, Davina Ann. 1995. ''Interview with the Transsexual Vampire: Sandy Stone's Dark Gift.''

Trans Sisters, no. 8: 14–27.

Kamal, Hala. 2008. ''Translating Women and Gender: The Experience of Translating The Ency-

clopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures into Arabic.'' Women's Studies Quarterly 36, no.

3–4: 254–68.

Stone, Sandy. 1991. ''The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.'' In Body Guards: The

Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, 280–304.

London: Routledge.

Wieringa, Saskia, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya, eds. 2007. Women's Sexualities and

Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia. New York: Palgrave.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400163

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Transmedia

JIAN CHEN and LISSETTE OLIVARES

Transmedia, as it is activated in this inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies

Quarterly, focuses on subversive uses and conceptualizations of media by and for

transgender and gender-deﬁant people in the transnational ''post-digital'' age.

Media activists, artists, and cultural workers, including Allucque

`re Rosanne

''Sandy'' Stone, Cheang Shu Lea, IRANTI-ORG, Tanwarin Sukkhapisit, Beatriz

Preciado, Dees Rees, Yozmit, Micha Ca

´rdenas, Ignacio Rivera, Kit Yan, Wu Tsang,

Felix Endara, Shawna Virago, Sean Dorsey, Sin Kabeza Productions and Coco

Rico, Leeroy K. Y. Kang, Tobaron Waxman, the Electronic Disturbance Theater,

Chris Vargas, Cayden Mak, and Jacolby Satterwhite, have created works that

express dimensions of transgender and gender-nonconforming experience while

also transforming the relationship between the aesthetics, politics, and technol-

ogies of cultural representation. In their transmedia productions, bodies, images,

sounds, materialities, politics, and informatics offer points of social contact and

expressive meaning making rather than static representations and theories. These

practitioners engage transmedia critically by paying attention to shifting networks

of interrelated references, such as masculine and feminine, surface and essence,

migrant and citizen; race, region, ethnicity, and nationality; urban, suburban, and

rural; post- and nonindustrial; human, animal, plant, and thing. Their moving,

networked aesthetics visualize and exploit the linked media forms (performance,

video, ﬁlm, painting, print, games, television, photography, music) and tech-

nologies (computer, typewriter, pen, brush, camera, projector, stage, body, audio

recorder and player, radio, phone) enabled by the globally networked electronic

infrastructure (cables, towers, satellites, and devices), built on the US Cold War's

Internet. Like the illegitimate cyborg offspring envisioned in Donna Haraway's

famous manifesto, these transmedia practitioners are unfaithful to imperial tech-

nological origins (Haraway 1990). For example, Cheang Shu Lea's net videos,

installations, and performances visualize the Internet and the ''digital revolution''

as partially embodied and materialized spaces where racially gendered bit-bodies

morph according to programmed desires and mutating viruses. In Cheang's media

worlds, sex, pleasure, and play are never freed from techno-economies of labor or

the histories of American and Japanese imperial militarism, science, industry, and

culture that shape the origins of high-tech global networks (Cheang 2001, 2009–12).

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Allucque

`re Rosanne ''Sandy'' Stone's ''The Empire Strikes Back'' has been

foundational in assembling transgender archives and discourses in opposition to

medical, academic, and mainstream feminist ''technolog[ies] of inscription''

(Stone [1991] 2006). Stone's attention to the mediation of transgender lives by

dominant institutions and her convergent practices as theorist, artist, and activist

offer interlocking modalities for critical transmedia approaches. In The War of

Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (1996), Stone explains

how the act of listening to a public lecture by Stephen Hawking, ampliﬁed

through microphone, computer, and speakers, can create a communicative

intimacy that trespasses the presumed boundaries of the body and internal self.

For Stone, communications technology and the gendered body itself are virtual

''prostheses'' that provide zones of active social interaction, boundary shifting,

and communicated meaning (ibid.). In response to the epistemic violence of

academic knowledge production, Stone has turned to performance as her primary

medium of knowledge transmission, emphasizing the impact of sharing space,

time, and physical presence in speciﬁc contexts (Stone 2010). During one of her

recent performances, Stone arranged for the simultaneous closure of ActLab's

digital archives, stored on the University of Austin's web servers. This real-time

action in performance produced a layered media insurgency that destabilized

academic paradigms of knowledge production and ownership.

Subversive transmedia exploits, undermines, and overwrites corporate

uses of the same term by ''post''-industrial transnational Hollywood. As a com-

mercial concept, transmedia describes contemporary media products that are

created through models of production and for models of consumption that differ

from mass industrial modes. Transmedia products are hybrids that cross and

connect multiple media narrative threads, genres, and forms. They are produced,

circulated, and consumed across interconnected media industries and tech-

nologies within the United States and transnationally. The hybridity of trans-

media products is the result of the economic consolidation of different national,

regional, and international media industries into linked units in the US trans-

national entertainment chain (Miller et al. 2008). While decentralized networks

of media units allow for diversiﬁed, time-compressed, audience-responsive, and

cost-ﬂexible content production and delivery, US entertainment conglomerate bases

maintain administrative control over hierarchies of creative labor, technologies, and

capital. The hybrid products created through managed transnational media net-

works promise diverse yet coordinated entertainment experiences for different

audiences—and greater proﬁt for media corporations—through multiple avenues

of consumption. With total cost estimated at US$400–$500 million and ﬁlm

production scattered across Los Angeles, Hawaii, and New Zealand, James

Cameron's Avatar (2009) illustrates the concentrated wealth and decentralized

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control needed to produce today's Hollywood blockbuster. New Zealand was an

outsourced and economically incentivized ﬁlming location for Avatar . The

location was also a source of labor and an ecological resource (the basis for the

virtual world of Pandora) for the ﬁlm. As Avatar 's multinational base for digital

production, Peter Jackson's Weta Digital in New Zealand provided the techno-

logical labor and effects that allowed Avatar to remake ﬁlm itself into a 3-D portal

of immersion for weary American audiences and new international audiences.

Avatar's makeup of 80 percent computer-generated special effects, 20 percent live

action grossed US$2.7 billion worldwide in ticket sales alone and provided a

transition into other routes for immersion and consumption, such as DVD, Blu-

ray Disc, video, games, toys, and web tourism. As shown by Avatar , US corporate-

based transmedia resurrects the controlled techno-aesthetic environments of

nineteenth-century commodity culture embodied in the Parisian arcades. The

interpenetration of media industries and technologies produces phantasmago-

rias, or simulated sensory connections between products that overload and

alienate the senses so that consumption becomes passive (Buck-Morss 1991). A

reclaimed transmedia approach recognizes that commercial intoxication relies

on sustaining the out-of-world feeling of having been transported across space

and time. Becoming aware of our participation in these time-space warps, or

''wormholing dynamics,'' can jolt us out of sensory alienation (King 2012). Trans

and genderqueer rebels mobilize transmedia to recover the deleted material

conditions that have enabled the current technological and economic network-

ing of media. What has been called the ''digital revolution'' describes the trans-

formation of late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century mass media technolo-

gies, including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and ﬁlm, by new media

technologies that rely on computational devices and the Internet as a backbone

for communicative networking (Chun and Keenan 2005). The shift from ''old'' to

''new'' media has helped to facilitate a broad transition from mass industrial

economies based in manufacturing in the global North to a new global econ-

omy based on services, leisure, and entertainment. This technological shift has

also supported the expansion of US political and military institutions beyond

the geographic borders of the nation-state (Castells 2009). Critical transmedia

approaches interrupt corporate and state narratives on the purely democratizing

effects of new media and the new ''weightless'' political economy that it has

created. Digital forms are materially grounded in the globally networked elec-

tronic infrastructure that builds on the architecture of the US-born Internet,

which was coinvented by the military, government, scientiﬁc researchers, uni-

versities, and private companies by the 1970s and then given over to privatized

popular use in the 1990s. The ''virtual'' network infrastructure does not only rely

on conductors (cables, towers, satellites), nodes (connecting points, protocols,

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packet switching), and devices (computers, mobile phones, digital cameras). It

also depends on a labor-intensive economy that includes creative work along with

cassiterite mining, semiconductor manufacturing, the the production and laying

of ﬁber-optic cables in regions of Africa, Latin America, and Asia (Ekine 2010).

Revealing the hidden labor of the transnational bodies found on the integrated circuit

is mandatory for a critical understanding of global media networks and commerce.

Jian Chen is an assistant professor of English and afﬁliate faculty of sexuality studies, Asian

American studies, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, and ﬁlm studies at the Ohio State

University. Their/his research focuses on new strategies for transgender, queer, and gender and

sexual nonconforming cultural activism at the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century, with the tran-

sition from cultural politics to cultural economies facilitated by networked media technologies.

Lissette Olivares is a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness Department at the

University of California, Santa Cruz, where she investigates the role of new media in social

movements from a transnational and transhistorical perspective. Olivares's work has been

exhibited in dOCUMENTA(13), Institute of Cultural Inquiry-Berlin, Mix Queer Experimental

Film Festival (NY), Berlin Porn Film Festival, and DonauFestival (Austria), among others.

References

Buck-Morss, Susan. 1991. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Castells, Manuel. 2009. Communication Power . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cheang Shu Lea, director. 2001. I.K.U. Tokyo: Aries, Uplink.

———. 2009–12. U.K.I. www.u-k-i.co (accessed November 14, 2012).

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, and Thomas Keenan. 2005. New Media, Old Media: A History and

Theory Reader. New York: Routledge.

Ekine, Sokari, ed. 2010. SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa . Oxford: Pambazuka.

Haraway, Donna. 1990. ''A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the

Late Twentieth Century.'' In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature,

149–82. New York: Routledge.

King, Katie. 2012. ''Wormholed Critique and Design.'' SF Ecologies: Speculative, Feminist, Science

as Knowledges (blog). ecosfking.blogspot.com/2012/04/wormholed.html (accessed

November 2, 2013).

Miller, Toby, et al. 2008. Global Hollywood 2 . London: British Film Institute.

Stone, Allucque

`re Rosanne. 1996. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical

Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Stone, Allucque

`re Sandy. 2010. ''Curating Academic Insurgencies.'' Performance at The Task of the

Curator Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz, May 14–15.

Stone, Sandy. (1991) 2006. ''The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.'' In The Trans-

gender StudiesReader, ed. Stephen Whittle and Susan Stryker, 221–35. New York: Routledge.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400172

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Transphobia

TALIA MAE BETTCHER

That transphobia exists is uncontroversial. Almost any trans person can attest to

the existence of it based on personal experiences or the experiences of acquain-

tances. And there is documented evidence of sexual violence, physical violence,

and verbal harassment of trans people, and at least the self-reports of trans people

indicate that such behavior often arises from hostile attitudes toward them as

trans. However, the exact rates, nature, and extent of violence are difﬁcult to

determine, in part because there are no reliable statistics on how many trans

people there are and because the various methods for collecting these data have

speciﬁc limitations (Stotzer 2009).

While it is clear transphobia exists, however, it is far from evident what

transphobia is . Provisionally, the term can be deﬁned to mean any negative

attitudes (hate, contempt, disapproval) directed toward trans people because of

their being trans. When taken literally, the word means a kind of fear. But like

homophobia (on which the word is modeled), it is used more broadly. And while

transphobia suggests an analogy with terms like agoraphobia and therefore implies

irrationality (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary deﬁnes homophobia as

''an irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or

homosexuals''

; most dictionaries do not deﬁne transphobia at all), this implication

ought to be rejected. Transphobia occurs in a broader social context that system-

atically disadvantages trans people and promotes and rewards antitrans sentiment.

It therefore has a kind of rationality to it, grounded in a larger cisgenderist social

context (Hopkins 1996).

The question, however, is how much such a deﬁnition can tell us about the

nature of transphobia. I have deﬁned transphobia as directed toward trans people.

In doing this, I have tried to avoid smuggling an actual account of the underlying

nature of transphobia into the deﬁnition. But much depends upon how the

expression trans people is itself deﬁned. If it is deﬁned as ''those who violate gender

norms,'' or as ''those who are problematically positioned with respect to the

gender binary,'' then a very general account of the nature of transphobia is

immediately forthcoming—namely, transphobia is a hostile response to per-

ceived violations of gender norms and/or to challenges to the gender binary.

It is not wise, however, to build a robust account of transphobia into the

deﬁnition. A trans woman may not view herself as violating norms of gender, and

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she may not view herself as beyond the binary. Rather, she may see herself as a

woman living within the binary and in accordance with norms of womanhood.

A robust deﬁnition of this type ironically invalidates her gender identity in order

to function as an account of transphobia. That is, it perversely enacts a verbal

hostility that it fails to explain. I therefore prefer to leave trans people undeﬁned

and open to the multiple, contested meanings. Consequently, while transphobia

is provisionally deﬁned, one of the central components of that deﬁnition (trans

people) is not only undeﬁned but left open to multiple interpretations.

Underlying the attempt to build a robust account of transphobia within

the deﬁnition of the term is the problematic assumption that there is a singular

phenomenon of which there can be a uniform account. Consider that while the

pronoun it can be used to deny the personhood of individuals deemed outside the

binary categories, the expression really a man disguised as a woman effectively

accuses a trans person of pretense by deeming them within one of the binary

categories. Both are instances of verbal harassment, and both can function as

''justiﬁcations'' for physical violence. But that the latter concerns a response to

perceived violations of the binary is surely controversial. Both trans woman and

transphobe may agree that she belongs in the binary. The question, on the con-

trary, is where . Whether there is a singular phenomenon here (hostile responses to

perceived violations of the binary) is therefore far from clear.

And transphobia can be manifested differently in different cultures. For

example, Latin American representations of trans people as deceivers may include

stronger associations with criminality (Lewis 2010). Indeed transphobia can occur

differently in different types of social contexts within a culture. In therapeutic contexts

it is not uncommon for trans people to be viewed as mentally ill. Yet this represen-

tation need not be found in other contexts (say, sex work). The view that ''mental

illness'' is the paradigmatic stigma elides different forms of stigma applied to trans

people for whom access to medico-psycho-therapeutic narratives is irrelevant. And

the controversial expectation that there is a single phenomenon is precisely what helps

promote treatment of speciﬁc kinds of transphobia as somehow exemplary.

Finally, the view that transphobia can be separated from other enactments

of power (such as sexism, classism, racism) is a nonstarter. This means that not all

acts of violence against trans people need be transphobic in nature. A trans

woman might be targeted not because of her trans status but because she is simply

viewed as a sex worker (Namaste 2005). Moreover, at least in some cases, trans-

phobia may be inseparably blended with misogyny or racism in ways that chal-

lenge a single-axis model of power (Juang 2006). Such inseparabilities undermine

the attempt to account for transphobia in a way that excludes or marginalizes

considerations of sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and so forth. This consider-

ation is important because it questions why certain instances of violence should

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be characterized as instances of transphobia (as opposed to instances of racism or

sexism) in the ﬁrst place and what the underlying political agenda sustaining such

characterization is. My conclusion, at any rate, is that while we might have a

deﬁnition of transphobia , the term is not much more than a convenient (and not

altogether innocent) placeholder for the real intellectual work that remains to be

done.

Talia Mae Bettcher is a professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. Her

research is located at the intersections of transgender studies and feminist philosophy. She is

currently working on a book about the nature of gendered personhood and its relationship to

transphobic violence. Some of her articles include ''Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On

Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion'' (Hypatia , summer 2007) and ''Trapped in the

Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance (Signs , winter 2014). With Ann

Garry, she coauthored the Hypatia special issue ''Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory,

Politics, and Gender Realities'' (summer 2009).

Notes

1. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary Online, s.v. ''homophobia,'' accessed December

13, 2013, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/homophobia.

2. While Hopkins discusses homophobia, not transphobia, his idea is useful in this context.

References

Hopkins, Patrick. 1996. ''Gender Treachery: Homophobia, Masculinity, and Threatened Iden-

tities.'' In Rethinking Masculinity: Philosophical Explorations in Light of Feminism, ed.

Larry May and Robert A. Strikwerda, 95–116. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleﬁeld.

Juang, Richard. 2006. ''Transgendering the Politics of Recognition.'' In The Transgender Studies

Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Steven Whittle, 706–19. New York: Routledge.

Lewis, Vek. 2010. Crossing Sex and Gender in Latin America . New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Namaste, Viviane. 2005. Sex Change, Social Change: Reﬂections on Identity, Institutions, and

Imperialism. Toronto: Women's Press.

Stotzer, Rebecca. 2009. ''Violence against Transgender People: A Review of United States Data.''

Aggression and Violent Behavior 14, no. 3: 170–79.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400181

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Trans-poetics

REBEKAH EDWARDS

Where ''trans-'' animates the sufﬁxes to which it is attached and ''poetics'' explores

''how meaning is possible, by whom and at what cost'' (Barthes 1999: 218), ''trans-

poetics'' refers to techniques for communicating ''complex, unstable, contradic-

tory relations between body and soul, social self and psyche'' (Ladin 2013: 306).

Trans-poetic projects often seek to navigate the limits of the (im)possible, writing

the ''resistance of the inarticulate, in a language that situates'' (edwards 2013: 325)

or lending poetic form to ''a body that has been historically illegible'' (Shipley

2013: 197). Such projects may engage relations between the textual and the cor-

poreal, between content and form, between ''signiﬁers and the world they con-

ﬁgure'' (Holbrook 1999: 753).

An example of a trans-poetics relevant to transgender studies is one

articulated in feminist translation studies regarding the inevitability and poten-

tiality of error. As translation is imbricated with cultural/political oppressions,

silences, repressions, and reiterations, the error produced in the discord between

two languages offers clues to the limits of the self: within these errors one encoun-

ters and disrupts the boundaries between self and another (author, text, language)

(Spivak 1993). In the context of gender performativity, error is also conceived

as generative, as the imperfect iteration that allows for the possibility of the

''improper'' (Butler 1993). A trans-poetics making use of both of these under-

standings of error draws on the discord, contingencies, and multiplicities possible

in language in order to narrate and subvert cultural and critical attempts to ﬁx

gender and sexual boundaries.

''Trans-poetics'' refers to the art and the labor of transgender poets, and it

refers to diverse interpretative and compositional strategies attentive to relational

movements between/across/within linguistic, embodied, affective, and political

domains.

Rebekah Edwards teaches in the Departments of English and Women, Gender and Sexuality

Studies at Mills College and Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of Arts. Edwards

is the author of Then's Elsewhere (2010).

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References

Barthes, Roland. 1999. ''The Structuralist Activity.'' In Criticism: Major Statements , 4th ed., ed.

Charles Kaplan and William Anderson, 487–92. New York: Macmillan.

Butler, Judith. 1993. ''Imitation and Gender Insubordination.'' In The Lesbian and Gay Studies

Reader, ed. Henry Abalone, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halprin, 307–20. New

York: Routledge.

edwards, keri. 2013. ''A Narrative of Resistance.'' In Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry

and Poetics, ed. T. C. Tolbert and Time Race Peterson, 317–25. Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books.

Holbrook, Susan. 1999. ''Lifting Bellies, Filling Petunias, and Making Meanings through the

Trans-Poetic.'' American Literature 71, no. 4: 751–71.

Ladin, Joy. 2013. ''Trans Poetics Manifesto.'' In Tolbert and Peterson, Troubling the Line , 299–307.

Shipley, Ely. 2013. ''The Transformative and Queer Language of Poetry.'' In Tolbert and Peterson,

Troubling the Line, 187–198.

Spavik, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. ''The Politics of Translation.'' Outside in the Teaching Machine,

179–200. New York: Routledge.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400109

Trans Species

HARLAN WEAVER

Trans species highlights the ways in which trans formations are connected to and

made possible by relationships among humans and nonhuman animals that

productively disrupt heterosexual gender norms and kinship formations.

From the Latin specie

¯—appearance, form, kind— species has long been

caught up in racisms, colonialisms, and sexual and gender norms. For example,

the eighteenth-century notion of species as interfertility — the ability to produce

viable offspring—introduced by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was

central to nineteenth-century eugenicists' assertions of race as species (Nott 1843).

More recently, Ernst Mayr's well-known 1942 biological deﬁnition of species as

''actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproduc-

tively isolated from other such groups'' (120), while contested, helped solidify

heterosexuality's starring role in species debates. Trans species challenges these

intersecting stories of nature that culture tells itself.

Myra Hird notes that nonhuman living orga nisms ''display a wide diversity

of sex'' (2008: 235), a diversity evident in examples such as the platypus's ﬁve Xand

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ﬁve Y chromosomes and the coral goby's environment-dependent sex changes.

Indeed, for many species, heterosexual sex is impossible, as with fungi whose

thousands of sexes make of propagation a nonheterosexual ﬂourishing. The many

species of trans are species disruptors.

Trans species also describes connections integral to human processes of being

and doing trans. Premarin, a hormonal treatment derived from the urine of pregnant

mares and often used for human feminization, involves ''horses kept in cycles of

gestation and impregnation so as to collect their urine'' (Hayward 2010: 228); this

entwining of bodies and violences makes many trans embodiments possible. Trans

species encounters also commingle ontologies and identities. Eva Hayward describes

the ways in which ''a transitioning woman is enﬂeshing, enfolding elements of her

environmentwithinherself...aspiderinherweb''(ibid.:238–39),whileHarlan

Weaver writes about how his relationship with his pit bull–type dog facilitated his

safety in public spaces when he was ''vulnerable as a visibly transgender person,''

helping to make his gender possible (2013: 689). Trans species reveals how these

coconstitutive identities and ways of being happen through species differences.

Imbricated ontologies and mutually constitutive identities reveal trans

species as a mode of connection. Trans species promotes hybrid fruit and rhizo-

matic extensions that make new becomings possible, becomings that reveal inti-

macies inconceivable under the genus regime. Trans species is trans making, in that

it demonstrates how the illicit tendrils of trans formations weave new webs that

join multiple and diverse bodies and beings, making them kin in spite of kind.

Harlan Weaver is a visiting research scholar at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine,

and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. Recent publications include ''Becoming in

Kind: Race, Gender, and Nation in Cultures of Dog Fighting and Dog Rescue'' (American

Quarterly, September 2013) and ''Monster Trans: Diffracting Affect, Reading Rage'' (Soma-

technics, September 2013).

References

Hayward, Eva. 2010. ''Spider City Sex.'' Women and Performance 20, no. 3: 225–51.

Hird, Myra. 2008. ''Animal Trans.'' In Queering the Non/Human , ed. Myra Hird and Noreen

Giffney, 227–48. London: Ashgate.

Mayr, Ernst. 1942. Systematics and the Origin of Species . New York: Columbia University Press.

Nott, J. C. 1843. ''The Mulatto a Hybrid—Probable Extermination of the Two Races if Whites and

Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry.'' Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 29, no. 2: 29–32.

Weaver, Harlan. 2013. ''Becoming in Kind: Race, Gender, and Nation in Cultures of Dog Fighting

and Dog Rescue.'' American Quarterly 65, no. 2: 689–709.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400100

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Transxenoestrogenesis

EVA HAYWARD

Trans-: Latin trans, across; through; transversal.

Xeno-: Greek xe

´nos, a strange guest; other; a different kind of difference; diver-

gence; see Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis , an Afro-futurist science ﬁction trilogy

about the interbreeding of humans and aliens.

Estrogen: Greek oistros, literally a gadﬂy —a biting insect; and hence, by extension,

a provoking person; ﬁguratively, a provocation of passion and sexual desire, as in

the condition of estrus, the cyclical female animal's attraction of rutting males for

coitus; with sufﬁx -gen , meaning ''producer of.''

Genesis: Greek gignesthai, produced; a mode of formation: symbiogenesis; root.

—New Oxford American Dictionary

Xenoestrogenic, even without the preﬁx trans-, is already an overgrown, weedy

keyword sinking heterogeneous taproots into the histories, politics, and embodi-

ments of life on planet Earth. Hence my recourse to etymology. It is an adjectival

form of xenoestrogen: that is, an estrogen anthropocentrically and racially marked

as ''foreign'' or ''alien,'' which includes those estrogens belonging to plants (phy-

toestrogens) and fungi (mycoestrogens) as well as various kinds of synthetic

estrogens (e.g., Bisphenol A). The xenoestrogenic tangles with the more familiar

rootstock of steroidal estrogens— estrone, estradiol, and estriol— that have come

to deﬁne the female sex hormone. It therefore twines itself with the lives of

transwomen who situate themselves within the milieu of hormonal transi-

tion or ''hormone replacement therapy'' (HRT).

Preﬁxing trans -toxeno- produces fruitful tension. Trans- further con-

catenates the oversimpliﬁed alienations and - phobias connected to xeno - by enacting

''movements-across-into-strangeness'' that foster new conjugations, allowing xeno-

to suggest alternate worldings rather than marking a discontinuous zone of incom-

mensurable and inaccessible difference (King 2012). Trans -ing xeno- unsettles

the oversimpliﬁed Others necessary for the production of stratiﬁcation and

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disallowance, without in the process destroying difference and the ethics of encoun-

ter. Transxenoestrogenesis , a word with preﬁxes like nerve endings, recapitulates the

syntax of sensate life folding over itself, invaginating itself, to encounter its own

materiality.

Premarin, the brand name of a popular and widely prescribed xenoestrogen

ﬁrst introduced to the market in 1941, is a portmanteau word derived from

PREgnant MARes' urINe, because the hormone is manufactured from ''conju-

gated equine estrogens'' (CEE) isolated from the urine of female horses that are

gestating fetuses. Used in the treatment of postmenopausal and post-hysterec-

tomy symptoms, regulation of the female reproductive cycle, osteoporosis,

ovarian failure, prostate cancer, and certain intersex conditions, Premarin also

has been used transxenoestrogenically by transwomen following the now anti-

quated yet nevertheless still employed Standards of Care for hormonal transition

issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and its

predecessor organization, the Harry Benjamin Gender Dysphoria Association.

The manufacture of Premarin remains controversial, because it relies on the

forced use, suffering, and dying of horses. Cramped in small stalls, kept indoors

for six months of the year, mares are forcibly impregnated so that their urine can

be collected for the manufacture of Premarin. Animal rights groups have pro-

tested these conditions, inﬂuencing policy and compelling changes in industrial

practice that have beneﬁted the well-being of horses exploited for Premarin

production while not yet winning their liberation.

Attending to the roots of conjugate , Donna Haraway notes that the ''yoking

together'' of ''molecules and species to each other in consequential ways'' is

fundamentally constitutive of Premarin (2012: 307). In Haraway's conceptuali-

zation, the singular—for instance, subject, species, or woman — is necessarily

conjoined (conjugated) with the multiple through corporeal involvements that

place demands on the social. Kinship, relationality, and affect are always already

''naturecultural.'' Conjugating with Haraway, transxenoestrogenesis can be con-

sidered a hothouse of ﬁliations and accountabilities. The cultivation and

exploitation of equines has been built into the biopolitics of transwomen. Thus,

historically, human bodies hormonally sex-transitioning from male to female

have always been trans-species (''tranimal'') bodies (Kelley 2014 [in this issue]).

This is a more general state of affairs than commonly recognized, given that

estrogens —produced by mostvertebrates, some insects, and a number of plants—

trans (an active verb, like queer ) the boundaries of species, phyla, and kingdoms.

For example, phytoestrogens in red clover ( Trifolium prantense) affect testosterone

levels in grazers, resulting in changes to herd fecundity. There is nothing particu-

larly novel about Premarin's trans-conjugating sex transition for transwomen as a

kind of becoming-with-horse.

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Premarin reﬁgures morphology and sensoria in transwomen: olfactory

nerves, optical lens, and the body's haptic and acoustic registers are altered;

ﬁngers touch differently; transxenoestrogenated breasts begin to lactate, leaking

estrogen-dense milk. Some transwomen feed their breast milk to their infants,

further unleashing Premarin's effects along human lineages. We transwomen are

not alone in experiencing transxenoestrogenic effects. Premarin and its many

xenoestrogenic kin found in foods, medicines, fertilizers, cosmetics, sanitary

products, and other elements of material culture leak into habitats, environments,

and ecosystems. They pass through the bodies of human consumers and non-

human foodstuff animals into urine, milk, vomit, feces, and blood, seeping into

septic waters and leeching into ﬁelds, fertilizing vegetal and bacterial growth,

entering into new biochemical conjugations that make their ways into the bodies

of others that, in turn, consume them. Here, in the regenerative bowels of nat-

ureculture, Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis is well underway.

National Geographic deploys the rhetoric of moral sex-panic in a spate of

recent articles with titles such as ''Sex-Changing Chemicals Found in Potomac

River'' and ''Animals' Sexual Changes Linked to Waste, Chemicals,'' that connect

xenoestrogenic pollution to the apocalyptic undermining of sexual differences

(see Kier 2010). Rhetoric aside, polar bears, alligators, frogs, mollusks, ﬁsh, and

birds are numbered among more than two hundred animal species around

the world that are indeed already responding physically to hormone-altering

xenoestrogenic pollutants in their environments (Ah-King 2013). A joint report

issued by the Scientiﬁc Committee on Problems in the Environment (SCOPE)

and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) concludes

that endocrine disruption eventually can be expected in all animals in which

hormones initiate physical changes, including humans (see Hayward 2011).

Transestrogenic xenogenesis outpaces Darwinian natural and sexual

selection and in so doing reinvigorates the promise of transgender politics. Sexual

difference—already a ''difference engine'' driving change—is monkey-wrenched

by toxicity and pollution to propagate different differences rather than differ-

ence as usual (Chen 2012; Helmreich and Greenforst 2012). Neither utopic nor

dystopic, transxenoestrogenesis invites the realization that bodies are lively and

practical responses to environments that change over time, even when those

environmental changes involve exposure to carcinogens, neurotoxins, asthma-

gens, and mutagens, to possibilities of cancer, diabetes, immune system failure,

and heart disease. But where danger lies, promise might also be found: in the

double binds of biochemistry, some phytoestrogens and mycoestrogens promote

heart health and cancer prevention in humans; such is the emergent nature of the

conditions of life and death.

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Is there a way for transgender studies to reevaluate ecological destruc-

tion—such as the sex-changing response —in order for us to greet the future

organisms that we are all already (and have always been) becoming? Transxeno-

estrogenesis, a purposely unmetabolizable term proposed as a key concept for a

twenty-ﬁrst-century transgender studies, can be characterized as a toxic, expres-

sive, resilient, and ethico-politically problematic form of species symbiosis that

undoes sex and embodiment as we know it. It names both a threshold of emer-

gence and a mode of upheaval. As much an environmental concern as a transgen-

der one, transxenoestrogenesis is not a forecast of disaster but rather a reminder

that we are already living in ruination. Transgender is noninnocent; xeno - still

gives rise to -phobias ; estrogens are unavoidable; genesis remains biblical, and

Eden is dirty—Adam and Eve are increasingly undone as industrialism continues

to release its efﬂuvient progeny into our garden states. Things can get worse, and

probably will; but life for earthlings is already precarious. Transxenoestrogenesis

names but one form of our shared vulnerability to one another, our bodies open

to the planet.

Eva Hayward teaches in the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University

of Cincinnati. Her essays have appeared in Cultural Anthropology , differences , Women's Studies

Quarterly, and Women and Performance.

References

Ah-King, Malin, and Eva Hayward. 2013. ''Toxic Sexes: Perverting Pollution and Queering Hor-

mone Disruption.'' O-Zone 1: 1–14.

Chen, Mel. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect . Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Haraway, Donna J. 2012. ''Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin in Multispecies Response-ability.''

Women's Studies Quarterly 40, no. 1–2: 301–16.

Hayward, Eva. 2011. ''When Fish and Frogs Change Gender.'' Independent Weekly , August 3. www

.indyweek.com/indyweek/when-ﬁsh-and-frogs-change-gender/Content?oid=2626271.

Helmreich, Stefan, and Tue Greenforst. 2012. ''Species.'' Frieze d/e , no. 6. frieze-magazin.de/archiv

/kolumnen/species/.

Kelley, Lindsay. 2014. ''Tranimals.'' TSQ 1, no. 1–2: 226–28.

Kier, Bailey. 2010. ''Interdependent Ecological Transsex: Notes on Re/production, 'Transgender'

Fish, and the Management of Populations, Species, and Resources.'' Women and Per-

formance 20, no. 3: 299–319.

King, Katie. 2012. Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell . Durham,

NC: Duke University Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400190

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Umbrella

T. BENJAMIN SINGER

The umbrella metaphor emerged along with the category transgender in the

United States in the 1990s. An early version of the ''transgender umbrella'' is found

in a Human Rights Commission of San Francisco report on the Investigation into

the Discrimination against Transgender People (Green 1994), a document drafted

to educate city ofﬁcials adjudicating a ''gender identity'' civil rights ordinance.

Conceived by the San Francisco–based therapist Luanna Rodgers, this model

consisted of a hand-drawn umbrella with an open canopy stretched over a now

dated set of terms: ''crossdresser ('drag'),'' ''transvestic fetishist,'' ''transvestite,''

''transgenderist,'' ''transsexual,'' and ''man/woman.'' As the product of classiﬁca-

tory imaginaries produced by ''trans-101'' trainers, nonproﬁts, government-

funded social service programs, and international human rights organizations, all

transgender umbrellas contain terminology that reﬂects generational, geographic,

political, social, and cultural differences. The contexts of use for this heuristic also

vary; they include trans-101 trainings, public health programming and reports,

legal policy documents, community conference workshops, children's books,

and more.

In the two past decades, the umbrella diagram has spread nationally

(United States) and internationally to become a widely utilized educational tool.

Given that its original purpose was for political advocacy, the image suggests

sheltering trans-identiﬁed and gender-nonconforming individuals from the

hard rain of discrimination. By gathering nonnormative sex and gender terms

underneath its canopy, the umbrella visually casts an aggregative categorical

imaginary that includes all sex/ual and gender-nonconforming identities and

expressions. In so doing, the umbrella implies that all formations of sex and

gender are not only possible but also taxonomically containable. While it draws

upon the appearance of a ''natural'' or ontologically prior grouping, the umbrella

is produced through a classiﬁcatory imaginary that constitutes the population it

purports simply to represent.

The aggregating aspect of the transgender umbrella is predicated upon

historically shifting understandings of the category transgender. This history is

complicated because the term references both a speciﬁc identity and a con-

solidation of various sex- and gender-nonconforming individuals. With the

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publication of Leslie Feinberg's inﬂuential pamphlet Transgender Liberation: A

Movement Whose Time Has Come (1992), the collective architecture for trans-

gender was solidiﬁed. Feinberg's manifesto resonated with an early 1990s social

imaginary that infused the category transgender with the collective energy of

social movement —enabling a range of different bodies to congregate underneath

a single umbrella. Without this sense of political collectivity, it would not have

been possible to visually render transgender as an umbrella instead of as a con-

tinuum of gender-nonconforming identities and behaviors or as a particular

mode of being.

The umbrella that sorts and classiﬁes all sexual and gender nonconfor-

mity underneath a singular canopy is not without controversy. As anthropolo-

gist David Valentine argues, the very ''ﬂexibility'' of the category transgender

constitutes its ''capacity to stand in for an unspeciﬁed group of people'' and

to encompass ''individual identity and simultaneously [to represent] gendered

transgressions of many kinds'' (2007: 39). Realignments of identities via this

particular transgender imaginary can productively differentiate trans-identiﬁed

people from those who are nontrans gay or queer. However, these same ''ﬂexible''

sorting practices sometimes obscure the speciﬁc intersections of classed, raced,

geographic, and cultural dimensions of personhood. As anthropologist Megan

Davidson explains: ''Different constructions of the category transgender, who

it includes and excludes, are not simply negotiations of a collective iden-

tity but . . . negotiations about the boundaries of a social movement and that

movement's efforts toward social change'' (2007: 61). Such negotiations around

inclusion, exclusion, and erasure occur in and through differing conceptions of

the category transgender, even as those differences are often ''elided in public

consciousness by the category transgender and the notion of a uniﬁed umbrella

implied within it'' (ibid.).

Erasures happen when individuals who are placed under the umbrella do

not imagine themselves to belong (e.g., some gay men in drag). Erasures also

occur through colonizing impulses that include culturally speciﬁc terms like hijra

or waria. Such categorical appropriations constitute what Evan B. Towle and Lynn

M. Morgan call ''the transgender native,'' a ﬁgure that collapses historical and

cross-cultural speciﬁcities of sex and gender into a catch-all ''third gender'' cat-

egory (2006: 469). This move obscures the differential contexts of historically

situated or non-Western subjects; it also ensures that coercive mechanisms of

Western sex/gender systems remain unexamined in exchange for a reassuring

fantasy that gendered utopias exist elsewhere.

The umbrella is no different from other models sutured to the visibility

and erasure problematic that shadows all emergent categorical formations. As

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such, the transgender umbrella and its aggregative imaginary is useful in that it

enables disparate sexual- and gender-nonconforming people to coalesce for

individual and political identiﬁcation, community mobilization, resource

accrual, and the harnessing of social power. But given the potential exclusions and

erasures produced by an all-encompassing classiﬁcatory practice, a caution

remains. Umbrellas should arrive with a disclaimer: One size does not ﬁt all.

Umbrella politics necessitates a mindfulness of categorical sorting practices itself

in that it differentially, and sometimes detrimentally, impacts upon personal and

political identity formation in addition to social movement building.

T. Benjamin Singer is a Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at

Vanderbilt University. His work has appeared in The Transgender Studies Reader , the Journal of

Medical Humanities, and Discourse.

References

Davidson, Megan. 2007. ''Seeking Refuge under the Umbrella: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Orga-

nizing within the Category Transgender.'' Sexuality Research and Social Policy 4, no. 4:

60–80.

Feinberg, Leslie. 1992. Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come . New York:

World View Forum.

Green, James. 1994. Investigation into Discrimination against Transgendered People. San Francisco:

Human Rights Commission of San Francisco.

Towle, Evan B., and Lynne M. Morgan. 2006. ''Romancing the Transgender Native.'' In The

Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 666–84. New York:

Routledge.

Valentine, David. 2007. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category . Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400199

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Voice

ANDREW ANASTASIA

Voice is an apropos keyword for transgender studies, as the ﬁeld rests on the

demand that ''the embodied experience of the speaking subject'' subtend any

analysis of transgender phenomena (Stryker 2006a: 12). Speech is propelled into

the world through bodily actions, which is why a more metaphorical effort

to ''claim our voice'' is synonymous with agential self-deﬁnition. ''Voice,'' used

metaphorically, signiﬁes multiple meanings at once: a sound that represents a

person, the agency by which an opinion is expressed, and the expressed will of a

people. This is why the keyword is frequently invoked to narrate the struggles of

transgender studies' formation as a ﬁeld. For example, in one of multiple ﬁgu-

rative uses of ''voice'' in the forward to the 2006 Transgender Studies Reader,

Stephen Whittle (2006: xv) notes that trans scholars ''have enabled the coherent

voices of trans people to be heard throughout the academy.'' This discursive

coherence has been a necessary strategy to combat logics of pathologization,

through which trans* voices have sounded like ''confused ranting of a diseased

mind'' (Stryker 2006b: 249). In the struggle for coherence, however, metaphorical

references to ''voice'' privilege its discursive connotations, which relegates the

embodied voice to a service role of rendering audible the coherent thought.

As transgender studies approaches its second iteration, claiming our dis-

cursive voice is less urgent. Voice , as a keyword for the next generation, demands

that we listen, like musicians, to the voice qua voice—not merely as the message.

This is not to say that our trans* voices can or wish to escape the gridding act of

''making sense''; the voice certainly has something to say about the body's age, sex,

race, nationality, or ability. How others make sense of a trans* voice, especially

relative to one's physical appearance, can provoke great anxiety or pleasure. The

voice, however, does not always vector toward the word; it can pierce us in

unexpected ways, turning us toward (or away from) another in an acoustic and

affective register. Voices enter our bodies through the ear and/or as felt vibrations

and act as vocal vectors — means of escape from stratiﬁcation and suppression.

These vectors project outward toward the ear of another. One can never predict

how our voices will be heard, and unpredictable reception is part of the voice's

value.

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In 2005, music critic John Hodgman interviewed trans-identiﬁed artist

Antony Hegarty for a New York Times article he titled ''Antony Finds His Voice.''

In the piece, Hodgman attempts to make sense of Hegarty's voice, which he

admits ''is difﬁcult to describe,'' with a sound that ''keens in the upper registers,

somewhere between male and female.'' Hegarty's voice is often likened to that

of an angel (Hodgman 2005) or described as belonging to another world (see

Currin 2009). These attributions use metaphor to get at the affective experience of

hearing a voice one cannot quite recognize (as male, female, or human). Hegarty's

trans* voice is a powerful instance of nondiscursive ways to trouble and blur

normative assumptions about sex and gender, human and creature. Trans* voices

can fail to make sense in spectacular ways when our voices no longer provide

adequate evidence for the bodies that emit them. In those spectacular failures, our

ghostly utterances, we ﬁnd the forms of resistance that beckon from the future of

transgender studies.

Andrew Anastasia is a doctoral candidate in rhetoric and composition studies at the University

of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His dissertation is a qualitative, multicase investigation of teachers'

and students' descriptions of ''teaching discomfort'' in ﬁrst-year writing classrooms.

References

Currin, Grayson. 2009. ''Another World.'' Pitchfork , August 4. pitchfork.com/features/articles

/7634-another-world.

Hodgman, John. 2005. ''Antony Finds His Voice.'' New York Times, September 4. www.nytimes

.com/2005/09/04/magazine/04ANTONY.html?pagewanted =all&_r=0.

Stryker, Susan. 2006a. ''(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies.'' In

The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 1–17. New York:

Routledge.

———. 2006b. ''My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing

Transgender Rage.'' In Stryker and Whittle, Transgender Studies Reader , 244–56.

Whittle, Stephen. 2006. Foreword to Stryker and Whittle, Transgender Studies Reader , xi–xv.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400208

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Whiteness

SALVADOR VIDAL-ORTIZ

Constructions of whiteness are geopolitical, hierarchically placed, and structured

around class and status. To insert the study of whiteness into trans studies means

to develop a critical lens of seemingly disparate elements, like beauty, access,

visibility, and acceptance within, for instance, the history of transgender peo-

ple seeking services and gaining access to them (in the mid-twentieth century)

and leadership and activism (at the present time). Furthermore, to think of it

on a global scale demands a recognition that gendered attributes of maleness

or femaleness are intercepted by whiteness. In many instances, constructions of

gender are about being white, being perceived to be white, or sometimes they are

deeply ingrained in perceptions of beauty as white. We can see this in cosmetic

interventions for trans women, for instance.

Whiteness is evident in transgender communities, transgender studies,

and transgender history not only in terms of color (particularly notions of white-

ness as lightness or paleness) but also, and more importantly, in terms of how

''color'' sustains hierarchies of leadership, authority, and credibility. In other

words, while it is tempting to see whiteness as skin color, whiteness is a structuring

and structured form of power that, through its operations, crystallizes inequality

while enforcing its own invisibility. In US society, an economy of value around

light-skinned trans people is often noticeable in contemporary scholarship or

activism. Scholars like Avery Tompkins, who bring whiteness studies and trans

studies together, note that it is through the silences in which whiteness operates

that trans* communities, representations, and thus visibility retain a white homo-

geneous perception—both among members of such communities and to

observers (Tompkins 2011: 155–56.).

Since the study of whiteness coincided very much with the development

of transgender studies, the two are intertwined in this given cultural moment

(Stryker 1998; Roediger 1999). Both intend to show previously unmarked social

locations—albeit with different weights of power. Whiteness turned the eye back

into racial formation systems by shifting from multicultural, abstract discussions

of race into discussions about white dominance and its reproduction. Meanwhile,

the emergence of transgender studies sometimes noted the normative (white, het-

erosexual, and cisgender male privilege) position of those deﬁning transsexuality

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and gender reassignment procedures (thus limiting those who would have access to

sociomedical services). But most importantly, trans studies also revealed the

unmarked position of the gender normative: the group once called non-

transsexual people is referred to now as cisgender people. Both studies based on

transgender issues and whiteness studies help to indicate the need for thinking of

race and gender/sexuality as axes of power. White privilege and cisgender priv-

ilege have received a lot of attention as social locations that run the risk of pro-

viding universalizing statements about their constituents—in whatever social

movement they are located. Trans discussions in both academic and activist

spaces voice an intent of diversity and inclusion or demands for the end of

oppression based on racism and discrimination, while they simultaneously use

language in everyday interaction (in tactics of recruitment, socialization, and

scholarly writing) that construes such spaces as predominantly white (see Be

´rube

2001). For instance, in contemporary trans* spaces, the perception of having the

choice about being genderless, gender ﬂuid, or genderqueer, is often tied to white

privilege, especially when some members of communities of color may under-

stand their trans experience as nonidentity, as expressions of gayness, or as in a

space between gay and trans (Valentine 2007). I do not seek to establish an

essentialist, oppositional view of trans* that splits people of color and whites but

do so in order to illustrate the systemic forms of naming and sustaining trans* as

something deﬁned hierarchically, even if without a conscious intent.

Beauty is also a key, intertwined element of whiteness in transgender

representations. Perceptions of being a legitimate transgender person were duti-

fully noted in the twentieth century (Meyerowitz 2002). In the 1950s and until the

1970s, it became evident that certain ethno-racial groups were not intelligible as

trans, as for instance the perception that ''Puerto Ricans'' (a very heterogeneous

group ethno-racially and in terms of socioeconomic status) did not look to be

trans but ''fags'' (Billings and Urban 1982; Vidal-Ortiz 2008). Black constructions

of beauty often fell outside the perception of beauty in transitioning as well, as

African American transgender individuals enounced their desire for transition

before Christine Jorgensen but did not achieve such recognition. For instance,

today, being a Latina or Asian undocumented immigrant who is trans embodies a

completely different experience from that of being a white trans person in aca-

demia or heading a NGO. While tokenistic efforts to mention trans people of

color are often part of the production of whiteness in transgender studies (Vidal-

Ortiz 2009), the leadership of most contemporary movements involving trans

rights, studies, and activism is predominantly white. This is also evidenced at an

international level, where forms of access to transitioning (surgical procedures in

particular) and forms of visibility for trans* people operate with whiteness as an

ideal (Aizura 2009, 2011).

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A lens on whiteness forces contemporary transgender politics to confront

transgender normativity (and citizenship), in which whiteness is imbricated

in complex ways. Critically encountering whiteness in trans movements and

studies has direct-action and social-movement implications in that it forces the

discourse of community and membership to levels that surpass liberal multi-

cultural attempts for inclusion and diversity.

SalvadorVidal-Ortiz is an associate professor of sociology at American University in Washington,

DC. He coedited The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men (2009).

References

Aizura, Aren Z. 2009. ''Where Health and Beauty Meet: Femininity and Racialisation in Thai

Cosmetic Surgery Clinics.'' Asian Studies Review 33, no. 3: 303–17.

———. 2011. ''The Romance of the Amazing Scalpel: 'Race,' Labour, and Affect in Thai Gender

Reassignment Clinics.'' In Queer Bangkok , ed. Peter A. Jackson, 143–62. Hong Kong: Hong

Kong University Press.

´rube

´, Allan. 2001. ''How Gay Stays White and What Kind of White It Stays.'' In The Making and

Unmaking of Whiteness, ed. Birgit Brander Rasmussen et al., 234–65. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Billings, Dwight B., and Thomas Urban. 1982. ''The Socio-Medical Construction of Transsexu-

alism: An Interpretation and Critique.'' Social Problems 29, no. 3: 266–82.

Meyerowitz, Joanne. 2002. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Roediger, David R., ed. 1999. Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White .New

York: Schocken.

Stryker, Susan. 1998. ''The Transgender Issue: An Introduction.'' GLQ 4, no. 2: 145–58.

Tompkins, Avery. 2011. ''Intimate Allies: Identity, Community, and Everyday Activism among

Cisgender People with Trans-Identiﬁed Partners.'' PhD diss., Syracuse University.

Valentine, David. 2007. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category . Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador. 2008. ''Transgender and Transsexual Studies: Sociology's Inﬂuence and

Future Steps.'' Sociology Compass 2, no. 2: 433–50.

———. 2009. ''The Figure of the Transwoman of Color through the Lens of 'Doing Gender.'''

Gender and Society 23, no. 1: 99–103.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400217

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Wrong Body

ULRICA ENGDAHL

The notion of ''wrong body'' consists of a dichotomous explanation of the

transgender experience as a state of ''being in the wrong body.'' Wrongness is here

understood in relation to how the body is gendered, connoting that the body is

wrongly gendered in relation to a self-identiﬁed gender identity.

The wrong-body conception is criticized from feminist, queer, and trans

political/theoretical points of view. The critique regards the gatekeeping conse-

quences this conception has within a medical discourse of true transsexualism. The

diagnosis is deﬁned within the International Statistical Classiﬁcation of Diseases and

Health Problems, tenth ed. ( ICD-10) as: ''A desire to live and be accepted as a

member of the opposite sex, usually accompanied by a sense of discomfort with, or

inappropriateness of, one's anatomic sex, and a wish to have surgery and hormonal

treatment to make one's body as congruent as possible with one's preferred sex''

(World Health Organization 2010: F64.0 Transsexualism). And within the Diag-

nostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth ed., text revision (DSM-

IV-TR) as: ''A strong and persistent identiﬁcation with the opposite gender. There

is a sense of discomfort in their own gender and may feel they were 'born the

wrong sex.' '' (American Psychiatric Association 2000: Gender identity disorder).

Diagnostic criteria regulate access to treatment and legal recognition of self-

identiﬁed gender identity. Although the recently published DSM -5 drops ''gender

identity disorder'' in favor of ''gender dysphoria,'' it still uses ideas of ''wrong body,''

expressed, though, in a way that does not necessarily put the wrongness with the

body but that does put it somewhere along the line between expectations from

others and an inner experience and its expression: ''For a person to be diagnosed

with gender dysphoria, there must be a marked difference between the individual's

expressed/experienced gender and the gender others would assign him or her''

(American Psychiatric Association 2013: gender dysphoria).

The theoretical critique regards the assumption of essentialism that

underlies the wrong-body conception. The body is assumed wrong in relation to

an inner, real, and authentic gender identity, thus giving the impression of an

essence that the body constrains, producing a reiﬁed image of both body and self

as static and separate entities and thereby correlating an essentialism of geni-

tal materiality that disputes the realness of transgender experience. The idea of

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authenticity underlies essentialism and produces norms of naturalness and real-

ness. Essentialism therefore reinforces the norms of a gender binary, resulting in

misrecognition of gender-varied bodies and expressions, risking stigmatization,

discrimination, and exclusion. Hence the critique mainly concerns: the master

narrative of the wrong body that overshadows gender-variant body experiences as

valid; the reference to gender and/or genital essentialism; the reiﬁcation of body

and self as static and separable entities; and the reproduction of gender binary

norms.

The wrong body is envisioned as a state in which gender body and gender

identity do not match; hence a disparity between body (materiality) and self

(subjectivity) is embodied in the narrative, entertaining dichotomous disjunc-

tions such as the body and its expression, the body and its perception, the body

and surrounding gender norms, and sex and gender, which implicitly places sex

with (material) genitalia and gender with its (social) expression. The underlying

assumption lies with the gender binary imaginary, which is upheld by the elas-

ticity of gender categories—that is, the tendency to understand gender expression

as male or female by exclusionary interpretation, equalizing nonmale with female

and vice versa (Halberstam 1998: 20, 27) —and by the pretense-reality dichotomy,

interpreting transgender expression as pretense and genital status as reality, hence

denying ﬁrst-person authority to transgender identity experience (Bettcher 2009).

Conceptualizing wrong body in this way involves making a distinction between

materiality (the body) and subjectivity (the self ), implying that these are sepa-

rable things rather than being inherently inseparable. This in turn leads to other

ways of speaking and thinking that reproduce this disjunctive dichotomy, such as

''the body and its expressions and perceptions,'' or ''the body and its surrounding

gender norms.'' This dichotomy structures the very distinction we typically make

between sex and gender, which implicitly places sex (genitalia) on the side of

material reality and gender (identity or expression) on the side of immaterial-

ity and, potentially, unreality — or worse, pretense, deception, or error. This

framework ultimately denies ﬁrst-person authority to the experience of trans-

gender identity. (Bettcher 2009).

Phenomenology offers another explanation of trans body experience

that builds from overlapping understandings of self, body, sex, and gender. One

phenomenological way of reading the wrong-body narrative is through the

concept of ''the lived body'': ''a uniﬁed idea of a physical body acting and expe-

riencing in a speciﬁc sociocultural context; it is body-in-situation'' (Young 2005:

16). The emphasis on body-in-situation underlines the situatedness of a wrong-

body experience, hence opposing a permanently ﬁxed understanding, relating the

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wrongness to situations of misreadings. Gayle Salamon's concept, ''a felt sense of a

body'' (2010: 2), emphasizes the impact that cultural interpretations have for the

meaning of a speciﬁc bodily sensation. Materiality and discursivity, hence, are

reciprocally dependent on each other's interpretative forces to make meaning.

Neither exists outside the others' meaning (ibid.: 40). Embodiment is understood

through an intertwining of subjectivity, materiality, and discursivity.

Wrong body as lived body expresses the situatedness of trans body expe-

rience as wrong, hence relativizing it. Wrong body as trans embodiment expresses

subjectively felt bodily meaning interacting with cultural interpretations of

bodies, where the subjective and the cultural are not always congruent. This way

the gender binary is replaced with gender variance as a frame for understanding

gender, offering a more ﬂuid understanding of the trans body.

Ulrica Engdahl holds a PhD in gender studies. Her doctoral thesis concerns the concepts of

justice, recognition, and identity in relation to a trans* context. Her research interests are

transgender studies and ethics, in particular the ethics and politics of recognition, identity,

and visibility.

References

American Psychiatric Association. 2000. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

4th. ed., text revision. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.

———. 2013. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . 5th ed. Arlington, VA:

American Psychiatric Publishing.

Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2009. ''Trans Identities and First Person Authority.'' In ''You've Changed'': Sex

Reassignment and Personal Identity, ed. Laurie Shrage, 98–120. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Female Masculinity . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Salamon, Gayle. 2010. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality . New York:

Columbia University Press.

World Health Organization. 2012. ''ICD-10 Version:2010.'' International Statistical Classiﬁcation of

Diseases and Related Health Problems. apps.who.int/classiﬁcations/icd10/browse/2010/en

(accessed March 7, 2014).

Young, Iris Marion. 2005. On Female Body Experience . New York: Oxford University Press.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400226

ENGDAHL * Wrong Body * Keywords 269

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X-jenda



S. P. F. DALE

The term x-jenda

¯began appearing in the late 1990s in publications as well as in

independently produced documentaries created by and featuring transgender

individuals in the Kansai area of Japan (centered around the cities of Kyoto,

Osaka, and Kobe).

Since then, the term has spread to the extent that it is now

recognized within the Japanese (primarily online) queer community, is featured

in write-ups about sexual minority/LGBT issues in Japan, and appears as a gender

option on materials circulated at queer-focused events such as ﬁlm festivals. The

deﬁnition of x-jenda

¯is one that although generally taken for granted remains

ambiguous as well as open to individual interpretation. It is generally understood

to refer to a gender identity that is neither female nor male, although how such an

identity is conceived varies greatly.

X-jenda

¯is ostensibly a loan word (a word of foreign origin) in Japanese,

with jenda

¯being the Japanese transliteration of the English ''gender'' and its use in

an academic context highly mirroring that of the anglophone academic sphere.

The term jenda

¯has not, however, caught on at a popular level in Japan and tends

to be used primarily in academic and political discourse. Jenda

¯is not a term that

one ﬁnds on forms requiring personal information; in such cases, seibetsu (often

interpreted as referring to biological/physiological sex) is used. X-jenda

¯can be

taken to signify that one's gender is neither female nor male but ''x.'' However,

although an ostensible loan word is used, the term x-gender is not used (or rather,

has not up to the present been used) in cultural contexts outside Japan. The

difference in the connotations between the term gender , used in an anglophone

context, and jenda

¯in Japanese draws attention to the multiple meanings that

translation can create and points to the differences in the reception of a term that

cultural context fosters. This also goes for terms such as toransujenda

¯(trans-

gender) and applies not only to a Japanese context but to other nonanglophone

contexts that utilize ''universal'' terms such as queer , gay , and so on, terms that

seem universal but that are actually adapted to local contexts and as such are not

as homogenous as we may presume them to be.

The term x-jenda

¯ﬁrst emerged after the concept of GID, or gender identity

disorder, (seido

¯itsu seisho

¯gai) was ofﬁcially recognized in Japan in the late 1990s.

GID has since become popularly recognized and has dramatically impacted not

only how transgender identities are thought of but how gender as well as sexuality

270 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

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Published by Duke University Press

is seen. As a result of this, most inexplicitly female/male ways of being have been

subsumed by the concept and reframed in a medical/psychological discourse.

The medicalization of transgender ways of being in Japan as such came about

relatively later than in European and North American countries, and this has

impacted the path that transgender politics has come to take.

Most x-jenda

¯individuals frame their identity using terms such as FTX

(female to X), MTX (male to X), or XTX (used by intersex individuals or those

who say that they have never identiﬁed as a speciﬁc gender), following the model

of sex assigned at birth to sex transitioned to that is used by transgendered

individuals (i.e., MTF, FTM). Some individuals who identify as x-jenda

¯liken it to

''genderqueer'' or ''gender bender'' and describe x-jenda

¯as a Japanese version of

these concepts. Others view x-jenda

¯as a convenient category that includes a

variety of identities that do not conform to the male/female gender binary. There

are also individuals who view x-jenda

¯as a subset of GID and who push for the

medical diagnosis of x-jenda

¯.X-jenda

¯is a modern identity construct, one that also

takes as its basis global transgender discourses such as that of transgender and

GID; in the online (Japanese) discourse, x-jenda

¯is often framed within the global

transgender or GID discourse. As such, it is not necessarily viewed as a local

construct but rather as a universal identity. Websites such as Wikipedia do not

always provide cultural context; a page about transgender in Japanese, for

example, will list x-jenda

¯as a sub-category, without stating the locality of the term

(see Wikipedia 2013).

X-jenda

¯symbolizes for some the rejection of a system that judges indi-

viduals based on their sex/gender. However, it also has the potential to reify

stereotypical gender roles and expectations in its deﬁnition. What is woman/man/

female/male—and how does x-jenda

¯distinguish itself from these categories? The

answer is one that has ramiﬁcations for personal as well as social conceptions of

gender.

S. P. F. Dale is a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of global studies, Sophia

University (Japan). Recent publications include ''The Role of the 'Foreign': Examining the Use of

the 'Foreign' in Japanese Transgender and Gender Identity Disorder Discourse'' (in Japanese,

AGLOS, October 2012).

Note

1. This entry provides a very brief overview of x-jenda

¯. For a more in-depth article, see

Dale 2012.

DALE * X-jenda

¯* Keywords 271

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Published by Duke University Press

References

Dale, S. P. F. 2012. ''An Introduction to X-Jenda

¯: Examining a New Gender Identity in Japan.''

Intersections, no. 31. intersections.anu.edu.au/issue31/dale.htm.

Wikipedia (Japanese). 2013. ''Toransujenda

¯.'' ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%88%E3%83%A9%

E3%83%B3%E3%82%B9%E3%82%B8%E3%82%A7%E3%83%B3%E3%83%80%E3%

83%BC (accessed December 12, 2013).

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400235

272 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

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... On transness and racism, cf. Bey (2017), Chaudhry (2019),Krell (2012) andVidal-Ortiz (2014). On transgender and imperialism, see e.g.Haritaworn (2012) and Towle and Morgan(2006). ...

The article calls attention to a mismatch between the multiple and often seemingly incommensurable understandings of 'gender', circulating both within trans and non-trans gender scholarship. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which 'gender' is assumed and utilized in feminist ethnography. I argue that the pressing implications that transgender theory and experience have for epistemic habits and ethnographic praxis are yet to be properly acknowledged. Using personal experiences as a non-passing transfeminine ethnographer, I show how a masking of contradicting understandings of gender regularly takes place both in everyday research situations and on levels of academic writing. This, I argue, contributes to upholding cisnormativity in ethnography.Keywords: ethnography, transgender, methodology, feminism'Nainen', 'naisena', mitä sillä tarkoitat? Feministinen etnografia, transtutkimus ja läpimenemättömyyden käyttöArtikkeli käsittelee sekä trans- että ei-transsukupuolen tutkimuksessa kiertäviä 'sukupuolen' määritelmien moninaisuuksia ja näiden keskinäisiä ristiriitoja. Tekstin painopiste on erityisesti tavoissa, joilla sukupuolta ymmärretään feministisessä etnografiassa. Artikkelissa väitän, että transteorian ja -kokemusten implikaatioita episteemisille ja etnografisille käytännöille ei ole tähän mennessä huomioitu kunnolla. Hyödynnän omia kokemuksiani transfeminiininä etnografina näyttääkseni, miten ristiriitaisten sukupuolikäsitysten häivyttäminen tapahtuu sekä kentätyötilanteissa että tieteellisessä kirjoittamisessa. Peittämisen käytännöt ylläpitävät osaltaan etnografian cisnormatiivisuutta.Avainsanat: etnografia, transsukupuolisuus, metodologia, feminismi

... A handful of scholars have written insightful pieces on whiteness as it relates to sexually minoritized and transgender individuals. Terms such as "gay," "lesbian," and "trans" have been shown to be associated with white cultural scripts thereby making LGBTQ+ people of color invisible (Follins & Lassiter, 2017;Greene, 2000;Han, 2007;Hunter, 2010;Moussawi & Vidal-Ortiz, 2020;Nadal et al., 2017;Snorton, 2014;Vidal-Ortiz, 2014). Additionally, data indicate that trans and gender non-conforming people as well as LGBQ people of color experience discrimination, stigma, and victimization at rates well exceeding their white counterparts (James et al., 2016;Sutter & Perrin, 2016;Walker et al., 2021). ...

Brooke de Heer
Meredith Brown
Julianna S Cheney

Prior research and the #MeToo movement have recognized the complexities of sexual consent and how it contributes to experiences of sexual violence. A heteronormative perspective often dominates discussions on sexual violence at the expense of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexual minoritized individuals' (LGBTQ+) experiences. Utilizing focus groups with LGBTQ+ people to discuss sexual consent, themes relating to sex education, defining sex in queer relationships, trauma and victimization, and overlapping gender and sexual orientation identities emerged. Findings are presented in the context of feminist and queer theoretical perspectives with particular focus on power inequity.

... For example, despite drawing on postcolonial, feminist, queer, and critical race theories (Stryker & Currah, 2014), trans studies remains saturated by whiteness with the lives of trans people of colour often incorporated as an addendum, whilst much of its research remains concentrated in the North Atlantic (Ibid.; Ellison et al., 2017;Vidal-Ortiz, 2014). These failings lead Ellison et al. (2017, p. 163) to question how the field 'always already depend[s] on an abstraction of the racialisation of space as foundational to the production of gender and sexuality'. ...

James Todd

In this paper, I explore how trans people's lives have been conceptualised and researched in human geography. I begin by contextualising trans people's lived experiences in Britain, before recognising trans studies as a distinct field that must continue to shape geographies of trans lives and ontologies. I then consider more recent research in queer geographies which foregrounds trans lives under the 'trans geographies' banner. I examine how space has been conceptualised in such research and demonstrate the methodological and conceptual absences and failings and problematic approaches that geographical research often perpetuates, arguing that work remains to ensure our research works with and is responsive to or developed by trans people. The paper concludes by calling upon geographers to recognise the diversities and potentialities of trans people's everyday lives and develop intersectionally‐attentive and reciprocal geographical research around trans lives, bodies, and spaces.

Cristina Khan
Kolbe Franklin

This chapter maps the development of the field of trans studies, detailing how this interdisciplinary field emerged and developed into a coherent area of study in the 1960s. We begin by detailing the development of terms and concepts relevant to the field. We then detail the case of Agnes, pertaining to Garfinkel's 1967 publication. The following section chronicles trans activism and mobilizations from the 1960s to the 1980s. In this section, we survey challenges to biologically determinist approaches to sex, gender, sexuality, and embodiment as they appeared in the social sciences. We then turn to the framework of medicalization, showing how early interventions objectified trans subjects by pathologizing non‐normative identities and expressions. Following our review of these literatures, we discuss two major paradigms in trans studies: that of gender difference and gender deviance. Then, we attend to the contributions of queer theory and Butler's deployment of performativity. We survey critiques of a human rights‐based approach to trans advocacy, noting the tendency of this framework to dilute activist efforts, often producing a homogenous representation of trans individuals and communities. We conclude by highlighting new directions in trans studies, specifically the on‐going development of transfeminism.

Chris A. Barcelos

Despite improvements in access to transition-related medical care, many transgender people still face numerous barriers to paying for gender-affirming procedures. Crowdfunding websites have gained immense popularity as a strategy for trans people to raise money for transition-related healthcare expenses. Using descriptive statistics and thematic content analysis, this paper illustrates how fundraising campaigns for medical gender transition both reveal and reinforce health and social inequalities. Although trans people crowdfund for a variety of transition-related needs, the majority of online campaigns are used to fund chest surgeries among young, white, binary-identified trans men in the United States. Most campaigns fall dramatically short of their fundraising goals. In addition, campaigns use medicalized, normatively gendered transition narratives that privatize inequality in marginalized communities. The article concludes with a consideration of how to incorporate a 'revolutionary etiquette' in crowdfunding for transition healthcare.

Benjamin William Vincent

The transgender population has been subject to a troubled history of ethically and methodologically flawed research practices. Whilst interest and ethical standards have both risen, there remains little specific methodological consideration of research with transgender participants. This article draws on practical experiences of doing research with transgender communities, and insider group status, to construct six categories to consider when working on trans-focused research. These categories include the importance of transgender history, the assurance of transparency, the significance of nuanced language use, the benefits of feminist methodological contributions, the value of intersectionality and the necessity of respecting trans spaces. The article concludes by reflecting on the overlapping and non-exhaustive nature of these categories, and wider structural concerns that may trouble knowledge production more generally.

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286691800_Whiteness

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