Trans masculinities

ABSTRACT

The aim of this special issue is to enable a dialogue between masculinity studies and transgender studies and attempt to find common areas of inquiry and mutual knowledge production in such conventionally divided arenas. The contributions to the issue explore a multiplicity of masculinities, which are seen as situational positions that can be deployed and activated by a variety of bodies, and in this way attempt to de-essentialize masculinity as grounded in a cis-male body. In this introduction, we discuss how masculinity studies have approached transgender issues, its general lack of interest in trans masculinities, as well as how transgender studies have related to masculinity theorizing.

KEYWORDS:

• Masculinity
• trans
• transgender
• trans masculinity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lucas Gottzén is Associate Professor at the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University; Affiliated Researcher at the Centre for Gender Studies, Karlstad University; and Editor-in-Chief of NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies. Research interests primary concern gender, youth and violence, particularly focusing on relations between affect and space in men’s violence against women.

Wibke Straube is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies, Karlstad University. Wibke’s work focusses on gender dissidence and links to feminist media studies and cultural studies drawing on feminist film theory, affect theory and feminist posthumanities.

ORCID

Lucas Gottzén http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3605-8664

Notes

1. Outside of references to authors who use the term ‘transsexual’, we prefer to use the term ‘trans’ in order to define a gender position that is moving ‘away from’ birth-assigned sex (Enke, 2012, p. 5). However, in some of the literature referenced in the editorial, the authors have used the terms ‘transsexuality’ or ‘FTM’ for female-to-male transitions and in those cases we kept their terminology while also needing to emphasize here that terms shift quickly in this political field of transgender studies and are constantly renegotiated and revised. ‘Trans’ or ‘transgender’ are our preferred signifiers for the time being in their critical stance towards gender pathologization, gender-binary ideology and their claim towards gender multiplicity.

2. Cis is a term describing a person who has not transitioned socially and/or medically. While this term as most categories is a simplification of the complexities of gender positioning the term ‘cis’ presents an attempt to address social privilege and its otherwise unmarked position. In some of the references used in this editorial, we relate to literature pre-2010 where the term ‘bio men’, ‘bio gender’ was more commonly used instead of the now more contemporary ‘cis men’ (Straube, 2014).

3. Terminologies are repeatedly under revision and readjustment in this emerging field of Transgender Studies and trans activism. While FTM was in the early 2000s still a commonly used term, it is nowadays dated due to its incorrectness regarding gender identity. While some trans people have pre-transition defined with their birth-assigned sex the majority has not or never fully, as for instance, the term FTM seems to suggest, female-to-male. A critique in linearity and ‘arrival’ is another issue which we have no space for expanding on here. However, more contemporary terms for people identifying as male but having been assigned female at birth are trans man or trans masculine.