The Flourishing of Transgender Studies

Abstract

For a decade, trans studies has been described as "emergent." This issue shows its arrival. Review of recent contributions that mark this moment: Stryker's Transgender Studies Reader 2; Enke's Transfeminist Perspectives; Matt Richardson and Leisa Meyer's special issue of Feminist Studies "Race and Transgender"; + a Francophone text. early work in field often concerned identity, a lot of autoethnographic and self-representational work by trans subjects asserting their voice new work moves away from identity, to critique notion of a coherent transgender identity. Aizura (TSR2) says we need a theory "that turns 'trans' in an anti-identitarian direction," and one more attentive to "where and how bodies escape of act clandestinely outside those categories - and at moments in which the categories of immigrant, transgender person, man, and woman become incoherent and inconsistent" (135). Enke also wants to see "trans" and "feminist" "do more flexible work ... opening broadly in all directions." (287) Instead of transgender identity, we have transgender analysis "Many scholars in these collections put transgender to use as a mode of analysis rather than as an identity category" (288) examples "transgender is a way of seeing; it is also, in some new work, a way of knowing." (289) "transgender is widely relevant to understanding the constructedness of gender and the normativizing power of the gender binary that governs everyone's lives" but scholars in the field remain attentive to the lived experience and material circumstances of transgender and gender nonconforming people. concern with neoliberalism, surveillance, securitization. a lot of work is contemporary but also new work on historical possibilities of the concept of transgender in the past: Some use the concept of transgender to name gender-variant pheomena in the historical record Mary Weismantel "Towards a Transgender Archaeology" TSR2 Deborah Miranda "Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California" TSR2 Gary Ferguson "Early Modern Transitions: From Montaigne to Choisy" TF Irving, "Elusive Subjects: Notes on the Relationship between Critical Political Economy and Trans Studies" Robert Hill "Before Transgender: Transvestia's Gender Spectrum, 1960-1980" "What are the temporal and conceptual borders of transgender history? Who are its subjects?" (293) some scholars using transgender in the past "bend and break the methods of disciplinary history" (293)