Trans (gender) trouble

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we tease out and implicate what we term the queer (cissexist) theoretical imagination suggesting an incommensurability of sorts between that of queer theory and that of trans subjectivity. The incommensurability renders a reductive framing of transness, in cissexist terms, that privilege transgression (often of a superficial sort) of gender over basic trans, transgender, and transsexual survival and wellness. In the end, we encourage nontrans scholars to theorize, in greater detail, the queerness of nontransness and the material means by which cissness secures its hegemonic cultural power.

KEYWORDS:

• transgender studies
• queer theory
• gender

Notes

1 Viviane Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transgendered and Transsexual People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 9.

2 These trans trouble areas were initially proposed by Benny LeMaster in a discussion forum published in Journal of Applied Communication Research. Here, the authors collaboratively develop these theoretical areas with greater focus. These theoretical areas reflect the lead author’s process of shifting from queer to trans theory in their own communication research and as a trans scholar. Said differently, the lead author implicates their own published research in these critiques as they, too, have performed each of these cissexist renderings in their own queer theorizing as a trans person who first came to this work through (cis) queer theory. See Jimmie Manning, and others, “Queering Communication Studies: A Journal of Applied Communication Research Forum,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 48, no. 4 (2020): 413–37. doi:10.1080/00909882.2020.1789197.

3 See Nikki Sullivan, “Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s),” in The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 552–64 (New York: Routledge, 2006); Jay Prosser. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

4 V. Varun Chaudhry, “Centering the ‘Evil Twin’: Rethinking Transgender in Queer Theory,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 25, no. 1 (2019): 45–50. doi:10.1215/10642684-7275278; Susan Stryker, “Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity,” Radical History Review 2008, no. 100 (2008): 146–48, doi:10.1215/01636545-2007-026; Prosser, Second Skins.

5 For perspective, the same hesitation may be leveraged against nonqueer scholars who “queer” cultural texts absent any focus on queerness.

6 Cáel M. Keegan, “Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* about Queer Studies now?,” Journal of Homosexuality 67, no. 3 (2020): 392. doi:10.1080/00918369.2018.1530885.

7 For a critique on antitrans appropriations of feminist thought, see Susan Stryker and Talia M. Bettcher, eds., “Trans/Feminisms,” special issue, Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1–2 (2016).

8 Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 114–23.

9 David Valentine, “Sue E. Generous: Toward a Theory of NonTransexuality,” Feminist Studies 38, no. 1 (2012): 209, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23269176. Valentine spells “transexual” with one “s” to mark a political distinction made between trans subjects who self-identify as such and medicalized renderings of “transsexual.” See note 1.

10 Valentine, “Sue,” 208.