Refusing to Make Sense

Abstract

This article moves from the premise that ‘lesbian’ is a gendered embodiment marked and put in flux by century-long sexual politics and semiotics and asks how do we begin to map not only its own terrain but the incoherence generated by its intersections with transsexuality/transgender? The author suggests that it is precisely the power of Trans to not make sense that provides it with its most provocative power to disrupt and displace epistemological regimes and asks that we shift our attention from what we teach in Lesbian-Trans Studies to how we teach these studies. The article concludes by suggesting that it is in surprising our students with the failure to ‘know’ that we can reveal how knowledge is really a regime of received ideas, ideologies, prejudices and opinions, a way of not knowing that one does not know.

Key Words:

• Transsexuality/transgender
• Judith Butler
• categorical incoherence
• lesbian postmodernism
• the privilege of unknowing
• pedagogical surprise
• anti-heteronormativity
• bodies and essentialism