Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer Studies Now?

ABSTRACT

This essay maps the epistemological terrain trans* studies may face as it is widely incorporated into queer studies programs, often housed within women’s studies departments. Over the past two decades, queer studies and women’s studies have rapidly professionalized, producing new modes of disciplinary power that may seek to either include or cite trans* studies, often without fully welcoming its specific material and political investments. Under such conditions, trans* studies may find itself heard largely as a but—an epistemic blockage, a distraction from proper objects, a hindrance to customary methods—that must be disciplined.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender
• trans* studies
• discipline
• queer studies
• LGBTQ studies
• feminism
• women’s studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In what follows, I use trans to indicate a set of resistantly gendered/sexed identifications that includes both transgender and transsexual, while I use trans* to indicate a broader formation including the theories, cultural productions, political imaginaries, bodies, and material praxes historically created by trans populations. My usage of the asterisk here is consistent with the entry for “asterisk” in the inaugural issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, in which Avery Tompkins (2014) described the function of the asterisk as “to open up transgender or trans to a greater range of meanings” beyond a set of discrete identities (p. 26). The asterisk also indicates that the presumed referent of trans is not settled: While the older fields of WGS and LGBTQ/queer studies have developed more entrenched, centralized referents (e.g., something called “women” and something called “gay and lesbian”) that each field has struggled to deconstruct/displace, there is no clear field-specific consensus on the referred object of trans. Trans* thus indicates an unsettled condition that reflects historically racialized, classed, and gendered intracommunity politics about who counts as a trans subject, while simultaneously pointing at a range of undetermined potentials for interdisciplinary theoretical elaboration.

2. I use “discipline” throughout this piece to indicate a number of interrelated effects: First, I use it in reference to Foucault’s theory of discipline in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison as a primary mode of modern power conducted by and within institutions, most notably carceral and educational spaces, to achieve self-regulation of the body’s movements and affects. Second, I use it to indicate the many “disciplinary measures” arrayed at trans bodies within the academy. In his recent award-winning study, Being and Becoming Professionally Other: The Lives, Voices, and Experiences of U.S. Trans* Academics, Erich N. Pitcher found broadly punitive measures directed at trans academics, who are largely perceived as “in but not of” the university and who are exposed to a wide range of exclusionary and hostile interpersonal, management, and policy practices. Pitcher described the positionality of trans academics as “always already within a series of interstices: possible and impossible, real and imagined, inside and outside, visible and invisible” (2018, p. 1), a “betwixt” state that defies the categorical and methodological imperatives of disciplinarity. Third, I use “disciplinary position” in suggestive reference to the erotic practices of BDSM, which ironically require more consent than the regulatory and punitive schemas carried out within the academy. Lastly and most obviously, I use “discipline” to refer to the expectation that knowledge production be conducted in rigidly determinative ways that allow certain bodies to attain the privilege of professing status, while others are subjugated beneath or moved outside the borders of the resulting discourse.

3. We might describe this double-bind, to use Sara Ahmed’s phrase, as an “affinity of hammers” (2016, p. 22): a situation in which the disciplinary aspects of both women’s and queer studies can result in a dual “hammering” that chips away at trans lives simultaneously and from several different directions. Ahmed noted that such a hammering can be turned back on its sources as a tool—a goal I seek here.

4. For an unfolding account of this trajectory, see the 2002 collection Women’s Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change (R. Weigman [Ed.], Durham, NC: Duke University Press) as well as the 2008 reader Women’s Studies on the Edge (J. Wallach Scott [Ed.], Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

5. In Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break From Feminism, Halley (2006) described sexual subordination feminism as the dominant form of feminism in the United States, which is “persistently a subordination theory set by default to seek the social welfare of women, femininity, and/or female/feminine gender by undoing some part or all of their subordination to men, masculinity, and/or male or masculine gender” (p. 4). Halley wrote that this subordination model has three main components: “A distinction between something m and something f; a commitment to be a theory about, and a practice about, the subordination of f to m; and a commitment to work against that subordination on behalf of f” (pp. 4–5). Later, Halley observed how gay identity politics have borrowed aspects of this subordination formula from feminism (p. 28, 109–111), asserting a model in which homosexuality is subordinated to heterosexuality as F is subordinated to M.

6. Bettcher described the situation of the trans subject within the story of social construction like this: “Consider: If all the world’s a stage on which we all play a part, trans individuals play actors. For somebody frustrated at being constructed as an actor, the mere claim that everybody is actually an actor would, by itself, erase the distinctive and oppressive way in which one was specifically constructed as an actor; it would provide no help in undermining being specifically constructed as an actor; and it would reinforce the claim that one was indeed an actor while obscuring the fact that such a reinforcement was being made” (p. 398).