Papers by Gina Gwenffrewi
European Journal of Women's Studies
In this essay we highlight the value of transfeminist theory for understanding the digital public... more In this essay we highlight the value of transfeminist theory for understanding the digital public sphere. Transfeminism allows us to challenge the devaluation of femininity that affects all women and femmes, while specifically challenging the marginalisation of people whose gender expression does not match societal stereotypes of the gender and sex binary, particularly those who experience oppression on multiple axes. Building on existing intersectional approaches to social media, we demonstrate how transfeminism’s capacity to deconstruct binaries, such as online/offline and public/private, and the essential concepts it provides us, such as transmisogyny and networks of care, are crucial for understanding the operation of contemporary transphobia as well as possibilities and opportunities for resistance and solidarity. Using two recent cases in the UK, we firstly consider the circulation of transphobic discourse in the hybrid media system through the onslaught of abuse faced by Trad...
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly
This autoethnographic article attempts to capture the distress of a trans woman in Scotland at th... more This autoethnographic article attempts to capture the distress of a trans woman in Scotland at the transphobia in the legacy media's coverage of the J. K. Rowling furore in June 2020. Through the use of a frame narrative, the article analyses some of the transphobic elements of Rowling's essay published on June 10, 2020, originally titled “TERF Wars,” which prompted an online backlash and a subsequent cycle of negative legacy media coverage against trans people. The article deconstructs two opinion pieces in the Scotsman and the National that depict Rowling as a victim and trans women as abusive and/or delusional, with an accompanying association of trans women with virtual spaces, set against cis women inhabiting real-world spaces. The newspapers' subsequent, respective refusal to publish counter articles criticizing the opinion pieces is then described, with reference to the legacy media's more general cancel-culture narrative, described by Sara Ahmed as a “mechani...
Women and the Abuse of Power, 2022
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2021
Within transgender studies, Jan Morris casts a problematic shadow, with Aren Aizura identifying h... more Within transgender studies, Jan Morris casts a problematic shadow, with Aren Aizura identifying how “Morris's entire literary and historical oeuvre . . . [is] a tacit articulation of a British colonial ideology.” Yet this position appears to be based on Morris's works between the 1950s and 1970s, up to and including her memoir Conundrum, and represents arguably only the first of three periods in Morris's writing. This essay argues that two subsequent periods diversify our understanding of Morris as a complex, transcultural figure: her broadly leftist, anticolonial writing on Wales and the Welsh language (1980s–90s), and then in the twenty-first century when Morris increasingly appears to question the colonial, nationalist, and cisheteropatriarchal ideologies that have shaped her previous writing. This essay concludes that Morris's body of work provides valuable evidence as to the complex interplay of Welsh, British, and European conceptions of gender that characteriz...
This thesis includes the analyses of texts by, or about, trans women of colour. As a white schola... more This thesis includes the analyses of texts by, or about, trans women of colour. As a white scholar, I am conscious of my privileged position within an academic setting in having this opportunity. I write with a platform that several of these women, and many others who might have had such a platform themselves in a fairer society, lack access to. Aware of this position of power and privilege that I occupy, I state here, at the outset, that I do not claim to speak for or on behalf of the trans women of colour in this thesis. Instead, my research displays and analyses their words, in relation to some of the forms of oppression these women face as a result of a socioeconomic and political system with white supremacy at its heart.
Uploads
Papers by Gina Gwenffrewi