"Transgender Studies, or How to Do Things With Trans*"

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2004

Transgender Theory: Complicating Feminist and Queer Theory As a trans theorist and trans person myself, I recognize the importance of trans theory, especially as a student who has to constantly seek out ways to study transgenderism and transsexuality in the academy; trans theory should not be something one has to search for, but should be readily available as a viable resource for any student wishing to study gender and sexuality. Gender variance affects everyone, not just trans individuals. Some of the questions this paper will be answering are: What is trans theory? Why is trans theory important? Where does trans theory belong in academia? Does transgender theory belong in feminist theory, where many trans-identified individuals have felt historically marginalized? Or does transgender theory belong in queer theory, where queer has been associated most prominently with sexual identity and not gender identity? I am giving voice to the tension that exists within feminist theory and queer theory and transgender theory's place within it. Transgender theory does not currently have a home within academia. Transgender theory belongs in the institution and the best place for it may just be a place of its own. This paper could help establish trans theory as a relevant, significant, and important place within the academy. Using standpoint theory, I am arguing that trans theory cannot be fully incorporated by feminist and queer theory and needs institutional grounding to stand alone within academia.

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2019

Nearly fifteen years after the publication of GLQ's 2004 forum "Thinking Sex/ Thinking Gender," tensions continue between studies of gender and sexuality. The ongoing institutionalization of the category transgender, through the codification of transgender studies as a field of inquiry and increased attention to trans and gendernonconforming communities in the nonprofit sector, both clarify and complicate the ways scholars can and should study "gender" and "sexuality." The 2004 GLQ forum ventured into this terrain positing gender/sex/sexuality as simultaneously separate and related. The articles in the forum refuse to answer the question of whether and how "transgender" can fit neatly into what we conceptualize as "queer theory." While that specific question is beyond the scope of this essay (or any singular project), I am interested in how studies of "sexuality" -particularly queer studies and queer theory -can address the needs of trans and gender-nonconforming communities, and gender (in)justice more broadly.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2014

What will now surely be known as the Transgender Studies Reader 1, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle and published in 2006, gave a name to the field. With its door-stopping heft and 768 pages, it literally weighed in on the field's existence. The equally substantial and perhaps even more sweepingly ambitious Transgender Studies Reader 2 (hereafter TSR2), coedited by Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, follows and complements the first volume, collecting together new and recently published articles and book excerpts and charting the multiple directions of the flood of work published over the past several years. While TSR1 traced the conceptualization of gender variance historically, from nineteenthcentury sexology through foundational theoretical, autoethnographic, and political texts of a century later, TSR2 charts the field's emerging trends and lines of analysis. While TSR2, organized into ten thematic sections of five essays each, strives for broad coverage, other recent collections take more topical approaches. The past year also saw the publication of Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (hereafter TP), edited by A. Finn Enke, which was honored with a Lambda Literary Award in 2013. TP assembles twelve essays that reflect on what Enke characterizes as ''the productive and sometimes fraught potential'' of the relationship between feminist studies and transgender studies (1). Two exciting journal special issues devoted to transgender studies have also appeared in the past couple of years. A thematic issue of Feminist Studies titled ''Race and Transgender'' (hereafter ''RT''), edited by Matt Richardson and Leisa Meyer, includes seven essays, poetry, an art essay, and an interview that together bring transgender studies and critical race theory into dialogue. And a special issue of L'Espirit Createur, the international journal on French and francophone studies, titled ''Transgender France'' (hereafter ''TF''), edited by Todd W. Reeser, makes note of the French theorists who have inspired transgender theorists (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari) and includes twelve essays, in English and French, that bring transgender analysis to French and francophone texts and contexts. A review of these collections gives me the opportunity to take account of this exciting interdisciplinary field at this moment of its explosive growth and to consider the inspiring work taking place under its rubric. I cannot hope to do justice to these collections in their entirety and certainly cannot capture the richness and range of the eighty-two articles published in them. What follows is a selective tour through these new volumes, a series of transects through the field that maps its animating themes and questions.

Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2021

This special issue began with a simple provocation: “Where do we find the transvestite and the transsexual?” The ascendance and mainstreaming of transgender and its offshoots in its Anglo-American idiom represent more than a shift in nomenclature. While transsexual and transvestite were central categories that organized trans experience across a wide array of geographies, genders, and racial and class coordinates during the twentieth century, these categories have receded into the background of anglophone activism and academia. Trans stud-ies, which has been dominated by US and English-based scholarship, has largely moved on from transsexuals in favor of ostensibly more open-ended and pro-liferating models of gender variance. Transvestites, for their part, have never occupied the center of the field of trans studies. Rendered anachronistic, both groups are more vulnerable than ever to long-standing stigmas with a new tem-poral twist. They are viewed as either tragic figures who could never be their “true” selves, in the case of transvestites, or hyper gender-conforming figures limited by the time in which they lived, in the case of transsexuals; the forward march of transgender has buried the fact that there are many living people who still identify with and live under those signs.

Sex Roles, 2010

Hypatia Reviews Online

The academy has not lagged far behind the increasing social visibility of trans people in North America. The two volumes of The Transgender Studies Reader (Stryker and Whittle 2006; Stryker and Aizura 2013), and the launch of Transgender Studies Quarterly have helped establish transgender studies as a serious, academic enterprise, with many other works critically taking up the specific perspectives of trans and gender nonconforming people (some examples are Enke 2012; Hines 2013). Trans studies are undertaken in various forms, within various departments, on campuses all over Canada and the US. The University of Arizona plans to launch a master's program in transgender studies. And the University of Victoria has announced an inaugural Chair in Transgender Studies. Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities, is a valuable contribution to the field.

Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, 2022

The institutionalization of transgender studies as a field comes just as the academy has decided that “fields” are a less relevant and more cumbersome aspect of professional academic organization that prevents the kind of theoretical and empirical work needed to make scholarship relevant to contemporary society. A number of areas of intellectual inquiry have, accordingly, shifted to a “post-discipline” model of academic organization. But what would it mean to think of transgender studies as a post-discipline? First, it would mean a turn away from a focus on field-building within the humanities. Second, it would mean insisting upon transdisciplinary collaboration despite the academy’s failure to encourage such collaboration. But perhaps most importantly, it would mean a turn toward addressing the material conditions of transgender existence and the issues transgender people face in the world. In short, it would mean reorienting ourselves toward an applied transgender studies.

A ddressing a gathering of archival professionals in 1970, Howard Zinn asserted that "[archives are] biased towards the important and powerful people of the society, tending to ignore the impotent and obscure: we learn most about the rich, not the poor; the successful, not the failures; the old, not the young; the politically active, not the politically alienated; men, not women; white, not black; free people rather than prisoners; civilians rather than soldiers; officers rather than enlisted men" (Zinn 1977: 21). While these observations may have been received as an indictment when he delivered this speech, our growing awareness of archival biases has catalyzed a great deal of archival activism. Indeed, those of us who champion archives of oppressed communities can rightfully claim that things have certainly improved in the decades since Zinn's address. Yet his overarching point remains no less profound: leveraging the power of archives is not "the politicization of a neutral craft, but the humanizing of an inevitably political craft" (20).

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2019

Over the last decade, transgender studies has benefited from an explosion of interest within academia. Sociology is not immune to these developments in a field of inquiry that has existed for some time. But what does it mean for sociologists to become immersed in a topic that claims no disciplinary boundaries, no agreed-upon methodological strategies, and even a lack of consensus on how to define ''transgender''? Further complicating this field is the fact that it is quickly moving. As Barbara Risman shared in a recent Author Meets Critic session during the 2019 Southern Sociological Society conference, her book was ''dated'' before it even hit the shelves because in the time between data collection and publication so much had already changed in trans studies. Echoing this thought, by the time this essay goes to print, there likely will be new books out in the field that challenge the observations shared here, thus making this essay a tad dated, too. Coupled with the quickly moving nature of the field of trans studies, to refer to one's self as a sociologist of trans studies is still risky business. Often subsumed within the sociology of gender studies, trans studies shares affinities with sexuality studies in that these areas of inquiry are treated as boutique topics reserved for the occasional sociologist who might be interested in quirky areas of study (see also Gamson and Moon 2004). Consider the leading journals in sociology-American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology. As of this writing, ASR and AJS have each published one article that centralizes trans people or trans studies. 1 This provokes questions about what it might mean for generalist sociologists to embrace trans studies as something other than an offbeat topic. Yet not all sociologists agree upon a basic premise that defines the field: trans