![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This introductory essay argues that trans rhetorics are a crucial method for grappling with the speed, scope, and ascendance of contemporary fascism. Yet, rhetorical studies have yet to robustly engage with trans methodologies and epistemologies, a refusal with dire consequences for academic labor in this climate and the future of the field. Pushing against the scarcity logics that render “trans issues” as “niche” or a “cultural war,” this essay develops a way of reading fascist energizing. Through the concept affective metabolism, I argue trans people are imagined as resources to exhaust, alongside others captured by grievance politics. Consequently, fascist energizing is a way of metabolizing fear into authoritarian control, with consequences for trans people alongside laborers in communities for reproductive justice, climate, and disability justice.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks QJS editor Stacey Sowards for her support of this forum, and her editorial labor in securing reviewers and copy edits. I also am grateful to V. Jo Hsu, for their solidarity, spoon sharing, and reading drafts. Thanks also to readers of earlier versions of this essay, including Constance Gordon and Gregory Seigworth.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 “‘Courage is Contagious’: Zooey Zephyr & Justin Jones on the GOP’s Silencing of State Lawmakers,” Democracy Now!, 28 April, 2023, https://www.democracynow.org/2023/4/28/justin_jones_zooey_zephyr.
2 The sheer magnitude and speed of these legislation are difficult to keep up with. My primary source includes the “Trans Legislative Tracker” in addition to state-level advocacy organizations that were compiling data on a state, county, and city level.
3 Constance Gordon, “Criminalizing Care: Environmental Justice under Political and Police Repression,” Environmental Communication 18, no. 1–2 (2024): 138–45.
4 Ryan Devereaux, “An Insider’s View of the Montana Legislature’s Attacks on Trans Rep. Zooey Zephyr,” The Intercept, April 28, 2024, https://theintercept.com/2023/04/28/montana-trans-zooey-zephyr/?utm_campaign=theintercept&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.
5 Sarah Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 158.
6 Paisley Currah, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2022), 15.
7 Trans Legislation Tracker.
8 Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore, “Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, no. 3/4 (2008): 11–22; Stryker and Nikki Sullivan, “King’s Member, Queen’s Body: Transsexual Surgery, Self-Demand Amputation, and the Somatechnics of Sovereign Power,” in Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 49–63; Nicholas L. Clarkson, “Terrorizing Transness: Necropolitical Nationalism,” Feminist Formations 32, no. 2 (2020): 163–82; Clarkson, “Incoherent Assemblages: Transgender Conflicts in US Security,” Surveillance & Society 17, no. 5 (2019): 618–30.
9 GPat Patterson, “Because Trans People Are Speaking: Notes on Our Field’s First Special Issue on Transgender Rhetorics,” Peitho 22, no. 4 (2020); K.J. Rawson and Cristan Williams, “Transgender*: The Rhetorical Landscape of a Term,” Present Tense 3, no. 2 (2014). Leland G. Spencer and Jamie C. Capuzza, Transgender Communication Studies: Histories, Trends, and Trajectories (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015); Isaac West, Transforming Citizenships: New Articulations of the Law (New York: New York University Press, 2014).
10 Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” New Left Review 1, no. 227 (1998): 33–44.
11 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “A Modest Proposal for a Fair Trade Emotional Labor Economy,” Transform Harm, n.d., https://transformharm.org/hj_resource/a-modest-proposal-for-a-fair-trade-emotional-labor-economy/.
12 E Cram, “Queer and Trans Ecologies as Care Practice of Indispensability,” Environmental Communication 18, no. 1–2 (2024): 21–7.
13 For some core ideas, see Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Aren Z. Aizura, Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Sex Reassignment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy,” Feminist Formations 25 (2013): 8–34; Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004).
14 E Cram, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2022); Morgensen, Spaces; Nyan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012); Joanne Barker, ed., Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity: US Security Culture and the New Reproductive Regime (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019); Shui-yin Sharon Yam and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, “Against Gender Essentialism: Reproductive Justice Doulas and Gender Inclusivity in Pregnancy and Birth Discourse,” Women’s Studies in Communication 46, no. 1 (2023): 1–22.
15 These include: V. Jo Hsu, “Framing the Activists: Gender, Race, and Rhetorical Disability in Contested Illnesses,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 110, no. 2 (2024): 198–220; Erin J. Rand, “The Rosa Parks of the Trans Bathroom Debate: Gavin Grimm and the Racialization of Transgender Civil Rights,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 110, no. 1 (2023): 51–73; Leland G. Spencer, “Pink and Blue in a Yellow Box: National Geographic’s Special Issue on Gender Identity,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107, no. 3 (2021): 261–83; E Cram, “‘Angie Was Our Sister:’ Witnessing the Transformation of Disgust in the Citizenry of Photography,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 4 (2012): 411–38.
16 Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
17 When I did this search, I received fifty-six article hits, including “T” as an acronym, which I did not count toward the four-essay total. To contrast, “queer” produced 2711 results.
18 This is one example of what Naomi Greyser, names as “block and flow,” the dynamics of oppressive conditions for academic knowledge production. “Un/Blocked: Writing, Race, and Gender in the American Academy,” American Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2023): 335–57.
19 Although in my memory, conversations about gender, race, and geography preceded the Distinguished Scholars controversy, in its wake, we witnessed many attempts to account for the whiteness, Global North, and cishetero masculine dominance in the field. These formal, informal, and hashtag-based conversations have been crucial to think about differences in what citation means and does. And the way studies often account for gender categorically is as Gen Z says, “cringe.” By which I mean that as a field we seem to have gender “figured out” until someone asks, “how are you also imagining trans people here?”
20 Jules Gill-Peterson, “The Cis State II,” Sad Brown Girl, June 3, 2022, https://sadbrowngirl.substack.com/p/the-cis-state-ii.
21 For example, see Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
22 Lisa Lowe, “Comprehending Fascism in Our Time,” Verso, May 3, 2024, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/making-comprehensible-fascism-in-our-time.
23 Under trans of color critique, I include Marquis Bey, Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022); Bey, Black Trans Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022); Jian Neo Chen, Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); micha cárdenas, Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022); Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
24 Cram, Violent Inheritance.
25 Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservativism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1993), 398. I also write about this in the context of security culture in Cram, “Pulse: The Matter of Movement,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 3, no. 3 (2016): 147–50.
26 Andrea Chu, “The Free-Speech Debate Is a Trap,” New York Magazine, December 22, 2023, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/free-speech-debate-free-palestine.html.
27 Elizabeth S. Corredor, “Unpacking ‘Gender Ideology’ and the Global Right’s Antigender Countermovement,” Signs 44, no. 3 (2019): 615; see also Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender (New York City, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024).
28 Corredor, “Unpacking ‘Gender Ideology,’” 615, citing Bishop Óscar Alzamora Revoredo.
29 See Fixmer-Oraiz’s Homeland Maternity, engaging how motherhood and reproduction are intimately linked to nation building.
30 T.J. Billiard, “‘Gender-Critical’ Discourse as Disinformation: Unpacking TERF Strategies of Political Discourse,” Women’s Studies in Communication 46, no. 2 (2023): 235–43.
31 Naomi Greyser, On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, & Affective Geographies in Nineteenth Century North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
32 V. Jo Hsu, “Irreducible Damage: The Affective Drift of Race, Gender, and Disability in Anti-Trans Rhetorics,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2022): 63.
33 Hsu, “Irreducible Damage,” 63.
34 C. Libby, “Sympathy, Fear, Hate: Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism and Evangelical Christianity,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3 (2022): 426.
35 Libby, “Sympathy, Fear, Hate,” 427.
36 Annie Hill, Trafficking Rhetoric: Race, Migration, and the Making of Modern-Day Slavery (Columbus: The Ohio State Press, 2024).
37 BBC, “What’s Happening with Scotland’s Gender Reform Plans,” December 8, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-60221034.
38 Andrew McDonald, “Why Scotland and Westminster Are Going to War over Trans Rights,” Politico, September 19, 2023, https://www.politico.eu/article/scotland-westminster-dispute-court-transgender-rights/.
39 Gill-Peterson, “The Cis State II;” Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, Transgender Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2021); Jules Gill-Peterson, “General Editor’s Introduction: The Trans Marxist Issue,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 11, no. 2 (2024): 181–5.
40 Kay Gabriel, “Inventing the Crisis,” N+1 Magazine, Spring 24, Issue 47, https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/politics/inventing-the-crisis/.
41 John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
42 Examples might include Jason Moore’s “capital in nature,” or Arturo Escobar’s “nature regime,” both of which center the role of nature in producing capital relations of value. These approaches are distinct from the more popular and insufficient frameworks of “new materialism” in mapping these historical, regional, and global processes. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso Books, 2015); Arturo Escobar, “After Nature: Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology,” Current Anthropology 40, no. 1 (1999): 1–16; Cram, Violent Inheritance, especially 213–14 in note 9.
43 Cram, Violent Inheritance.
44 See Constance Gordon, E Cram, and Tiara R. Na’puti, “Powermapping ‘Stop Cop City’: Abolition Ecology for Possibilities beyond Enclosure,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 110, no. 4; E Cram, “Field Notes from COVID Time: Teaching Normate Burnout Culture through Energy, Disability, and Race,” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 2, no. 3 (2021): vii–xvi.
45 Morgan DiCesare and E Cram, “Transfeminist Possibilities and Remembering the 1970s,” Women’s Studies in Communication 46, no. 2 (2023): 249.
46 In pairing these as a “reservoir,” I intend to say that the crisis and its impacts for bodies, gender, race, and sexuality is a matter of cultural and political struggle. See Meg Perret, “‘Chemical Castration’: White Genocide and Male Extinction in Rhetoric of Endocrine Disruption,” NiCHE, June 9, 2020, https://niche-canada.org/2020/06/09/chemical-castration-white-genocide-and-male-extinction-in-rhetoric-of-endocrine-disruption/#Notes; Giovanna DiChiro, “Polluted Politics? Confronting Toxic Discourse, Sex Panic, and Eco-Normativity,” in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, ed. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 199–230; Linda L. Layne, “In Search of Community: Tales of Pregnancy Loss in Three Toxically Assaulted U.S. Communities,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 29, no. 1/2 (2001): 25–50; E Cram, Martin P. Law, and Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Cripping Environmental Communication: A Review of Eco-Ableism, Eco-Normativity, and Climate Justice Futurities,” Environmental Communication 16, no. 7 (2022): 851–63.
47 Cram, “Queer and Trans Ecologies.”
48 Cram, “Queer and Trans Ecologies.”
49 Beatrice Alder-Bolton, “‘Imagine What We’ll Build for One Another’: An Interview with Jules Gill-Peterson,” The New Inquiry, June 23, 2022, https://thenewinquiry.com/imagine-what-well-build-for-one-another-an-interview-with-jules-gill-peterson/. Emphasis in original.
50 This phrase is indebted to Christa Olson, who used a different term to describe one whose personal identity and professional work on queer or trans politics do or do not align.
51 Benajmin Wallace-Wells, “What Is Ron DeSantis Doing to Florida’s Public Liberal-Arts College?,” New Yorker, February 22, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/what-is-ron-desantis-doing-to-floridas-public-liberal-arts-college.
52 Roxanne Szal, Aviva Dove-Viebahn, and Karon Jolna, “Key Gender Studies Staff Resign from New College of Florida, ‘The State Where Learning Goes to Die,’” Ms. Magazine, August 19, 2023, https://msmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/clarkson-resignation.pdf.
53 Hampshire College, “Hampshire College Offers Admission to Students at New College of Florida,” March 9, 2023, https://www.hampshire.edu/news/hampshire-college-offers-admission-students-new-college-florida.
54 Margery A. Beck, “Pronouns and Tribal Affiliations Are Now Forbidden in South Dakota Public University Employee Emails,” AP News, May 24, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/pronouns-tribal-affiliation-south-dakota-66efb8c6a3c57a6a02da0bf4ed575a5f.
55 Beck, “Pronouns and Tribal Affiliations.”
56 See in depth Robert Less and Tristan Ahtone, “Land Grab Universities,” High Country News, March 30, 2020, https://www.hcn.org/issues/52-4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities/.
57 This is one way of reading Hsu and the drift of pathologization.
58 With gratitude to V. Jo Hsu for help with this language and their generosity around spoon sharing.
59 Hil Malatino, Trans Care (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Malatino, Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022); Cram, “Burnout.”