Geographies of vulnerability: Mapping transindividual geometries of identity and resistance

Abstract

Queer, feminist, and non-representational geographies have highlighted the ways that a predetermined and self-contained idea of the subject limits the options for theorising the politics of identity and resistance. Transgender lives speak to this problem in new and productive ways, alerting us to the constitutive vulnerability of individual bodies and ideas – a vulnerability that does not map neatly onto a passive/active binary of political agency and identity. This paper asks how a commitment to constitutive vulnerability might open up a space to think differently about the relationship between identity and resistance, by foregrounding processes of individual and collective becoming as the site of knowledge generation. It appeals to two readerships: to geographers already committed to non-representational theory, with the suggestion that taking identity seriously as an operative concept is not irreconcilable with the tenets of process-oriented ontology, and to queer and feminist geographers with the suggestion that process ontology offers a way to untangle some of the knotty and persistent problems of identity-based social analysis. Drawing on Simondon's philosophy of transindividuation, it suggests a reconfigured geometry of subjectification, such that identitarian and representational claims are rendered incidental to the problem of individuation of political terms. This possibility is addressed in relation to a singular mode of transformative becoming – an account of gender transition – and in relation to a broader transgender and radical femme politics. The paper maps out a productive resonance between concepts of vulnerability, femininity, and resistance – in a reading that refuses not only the passive/active binary of political agency, but also the essentialist logics within which these concepts are habitually framed. This paper therefore explores the possibilities of a conceptual orientation to constitutive vulnerability for moving beyond anxious reproduction of existing orders of knowledge.