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

More than 10 years ago, trans activist and scholar Green (2005, p. 291) argued in the journal Men and Masculinities:

While many writers mention transsexualism (albeit superficially) in their analyses of gender, my research shows that so far, only Holly Devor, Henry Rubin, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, all sociologists, have (separately) designed, conducted, analyzed, and published studies focusing on transsexual men.

Even though Green primarily referred to sociological research, and there were at the time some few others who had conducted research on trans men apart from the ones mentioned above, his comment must be said to be an accurate description of masculinity studies in general and its gaps.¹ The same year, Richard Ekins and Dave King – in a chapter on transgendering in the Handbook of studies on men and masculinities (Kimmel, Hearn, & Connell, 2004) – made a similar comment.

… although there are occasional references to transgender in the masculinity literature (Connell, 1995/2005; Petersen, 1998), this literature has largely ignored the area of transgender. (Ekins & King, 2005, p. 380)

It could be worthwhile to look closer at the literature that Ekins and King refer to. Petersen (1998) approaches transsexuality from a poststructuralist perspective. By giving some brief examples of research on ‘genderblenders’, the transgender movement of the 1990s and ethnographic accounts of third genders, he attempts to destabilize gender binaries and emphasize the fluidity of desire and sexual self-identification.

Connell briefly discusses transsexuality in Gender and Power (1987), particularly drawing on early sociological literature, such as the work of Garfinkel (1967/1984) and Kessler and McKenna (1978). Connell (1987) primarily uses these studies not so much to explore or theorize different trans experiences, but to emphasize that ‘our conception of what is natural and what natural differences consist of, is itself a cultural construct, part of our specific way of thinking about gender’ (p. 76) and that ‘it is even possible for a whole new gender category to be constructed, as with the emergence of “the homosexual” in the late nineteenth century and perhaps “the transsexual” now’ (p. 81). While these short passages open up for a discussion about trans men and trans masculinities, Connell’s theorizing of masculinity instead focused otherwise on cis²-male bodies. According to her, masculinity is defined as a ‘configuration of gender practice’, that is, as a ‘social practice that constantly refers to bodies and what bodies do, it is not social practice reduced to the body’ (Connell, 1995/2005, p. 71). As an embodied practice, masculinity tends to become something that cis-male bodies do in Connell’s work. At the same time, there is an openness in the theory to see masculinity as set of norms or ideologies apart from male bodies, and, consequently something that also cis women and cis female bodies can accomplish, as much as any other gendered human being independent from their sex assigned at birth, their sexual orientation or their gender positioning. This then includes cisgendered people as much as butches, femmes, queer men, trans men, trans women and non-binary people. Connell nevertheless pays little attention to this issue in this work.

Recently, however, Connell has written about transsexual women and feminism (e.g. Connell, 2010, 2012), discussions that are relevant for theorizing trans masculinity. As in much of her other scholarship, she emphasizes the material aspects of gender. While she acknowledges the importance of poststructuralist transgender research, she offers an alternative to this literature, which she argues has a tendency ‘to degender the groups spoken of, whether by emphasizing only their non-normative or “transgressive” status; by claiming that gender identity is fluid, plastic, malleable, shifting, unstable, mobile and so on; or by simply ignoring gender location’ (Connell, 2012, p. 864). She argues that transsexuality (and in our understanding also transgender and trans) is not simply an issue about identity, but about a variety of material and practical experiences and preconditions (this also echoes Jay Prosser’s claims to the materiality of trans experience in Second skins, 1998). In everyday life, trans people need to relate to different social institutions, such as the patriarchal state, the economy, the family, the labour market, educational institutions and the medical profession. In addition, Connell calls attention to differences between trans people in the ‘global metropole’ and the ‘global periphery’. For instance, by paying attention to the specifics of non-Western trans people such as for instance, hirjas in India and burnesha in Albania. These often have epistemologies and ontologies that differ from trans experiences and trans embodiments in Western contexts. Connell also points out the importance of inquiring who is able to transition and could afford medical interventions, which is a crucial point as the majority of trans people, especially in non-Western contexts, live and work in financially precarious situations due to employment discrimination and/or lack of access to education. To extend on Connell’s point on trans people’s global situations further, it is important to us as editors of this issue to point out that the definition of transsexuality, and to a certain extend also the depathologizing and politicized terms ‘trans’ or ‘transgender’, are caught up in the Western medical regime, its binary and normative as much as pathologizing approach towards transing and non-binary bodies. There is a plurality of non-Western gender formations that continue to exist despite the experiences of historical colonization process and the contemporary influence of a Western gender-binary and medicalized paradigm (cf. Aizura, Cotten, Balzer/LaGata, Ochoa, & Vidal-Ortiz, 2014). Huong Nguyen’s contribution to this issue also demonstrates the importance of ‘decolonizing’ trans masculinities, as she points out that the understanding of gendered practices in the area of gender non-conforming embodiments are locally specific and vary strongly depending on the national and regional context.

To state that masculinity studies have paid little attention to trans masculinity, and/or transing bodies in general is unfortunately not an exaggeration. There are, however, some early studies that included trans men (e.g. Devor, 1989; cf. Ekins & King, 2006; Kessler & McKenna, 1978). Literature explicitly focusing on the experiences of trans men emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s (trans femininity has so far not been a topic in this field). These studies include the ones Green (2005) mentioned above, such as the studies by Devor (1997), Rubin (1998, 2003) and Vidal-Ortiz (2002), but also by Cromwell (1999) and Hale (1998). But while this literature discusses and theorizes men and masculinity, few relate to masculinity theory and masculinity studies literature. We suspect this is due to the field’s problematic approach to the unmarked category of cisgendered masculinity, and the lack of interest in transing and queer embodiments.

An early exception is Vidal-Ortiz (2002), who uses Connell’s (1987) discussions about gender and embodiment in order to understand individuals with experiences of ‘FTM’ transition.³ In his reading of Connell, there is a close connection between the body, bodily experiences and ‘the male as self’. He contends that ‘FtM’s experiences of being seen as men […] are not currently accepted patterns of identity’ since what he calls ‘ideal masculinity’ is built on renouncing ‘feminine traits’ (Vidal-Ortiz, 2002, p. 192). Due to their embodied history, trans men are at risk of falling into the gender configuration that in Connell’s (1995/2005) terminology is referred to as subordinated masculinity, that is (together with ‘gayness’), the repository of whatever is symbolically expelled from hegemonic masculinity.

Another scholar that relatively early used masculinity literature in order to study trans men is Wickman (2001, 2003). He emphasizes the importance of the development of two gender studies fields in the 1990s that changed our understanding of gender and sexuality, queer theory and masculinity studies. He demonstrates that trans men became more visible in academic, activist and popular discourses during the late 1990s. In his argument, this connects to an increased societal sexualization and commodification of the male body as an aesthetic object, which emphasized bodily volatility.

It should be noted that the relative scholarly lack of interest in trans men and masculinities has not only been evident in masculinity studies, but in feminist research in general. Cromwell (1999, p. 9) points out that ‘the few feminist theorists who have approached the topics of transgenderism have done so from a male-focused viewpoint’. That is, the primary interest has been on cis female and lesbian bodies and (non-trans) femininities. Trans men, and trans people in general, outside transgender studies discussions, have in the best cases been targeted either in relation to ‘subversive and/or normative gender (re)productions of gender’ (Raun, 2016, p. 69). In worse scenarios, they have been targeted as traitors and failed subjects (Grosz, 1994; Jeffreys, 2005; Raymond, 1979). But in the less transphobic discourses, the problematic dualism prevailed that trans men have been seen as a threat to feminism or as a paramount example of a radical questioning of systems of gender and sexuality (Hines, 2002). As Raun (2016) elaborates in his work, this focus on trans as either/or has foreclosed an understanding of trans that allows for its multiplicities.

Early studies on trans men and trans masculinity had two primary theoretical approaches. Within the social sciences, ethnomethodological and interactionist perspectives were influential. Inspired by Garfinkel’s (1967/1984) case study of a transsexual woman and her possibilities of ‘passing’ as female, Kessler and McKenna (1978) explored transsexuals (including some trans men) in order to demonstrate how not only trans people but also non-trans people accomplish gender and that gender is something that has to be learnt in everyday interaction. In their study of ‘gender blenders’, Ekins and King (2006) combined the ethnomethodological understanding that not only gender but also the norm of (binary) sex is socioculturally and historically produced (which is of course also the perspective of feminist materialism and poststructuralism; e.g. Butler, 1990) with Giddens (1984) notion of ‘double hermeneutics’. They demonstrate how medicine has been fundamental for how the sex of individuals is defined. Similar interactionist perspective is found in later studies, such as Abelson’s (2014) research on trans men, masculinity and spatial safety, and Schilt’s (2010) study on trans men’s experiences of gender inequality in working life, where she details the interactional process of ‘achieving social maleness’ (p. 48), that is, the work of being recognized as a man by others. Schilt shows how trans men may gain acceptance and privileges as men, but also that many experience marginalization and discrimination if they choose to live openly as transgender.

As within gender and sexuality studies in general (but in contrast to masculinity studies), many transgender studies scholars, including those focusing on men, have also been heavily influenced by feminist poststructuralism and queer theory (e.g. Cromwell, 1999; Hale, 1998; Rubin, 2003; Wickman, 2001). There is however somewhat of an unease of having a too strong exclusively discursive approach to trans men and trans masculinity. Prosser (1998) has been discussing and critiquing Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity as non-materialist and too fluid to encompass trans experience. Similarly, Rubin (2003) combines a Foucauldian genealogical analysis with phenomenology, since the former ‘cannot do justice to the experience of interiority or to the experience of being embodied. It tends to undermine the authority of individuals and contributes to their marginalization’ (p. 23). Here we see a connection to Connell’s (2012) more recent discussions about transgender as social and material practice.

Few scholars have bridged the fields of masculinity studies and trans studies as successfully as cultural studies scholar Jack Halberstam in his seminal work Female masculinity (1998). While the early social sciences scholars mentioned above primarily focused on transition and trans men, Halberstam proposes an expanded understanding of trans, which includes a variety of expressions such as tomboys, butches and drag kings and critically investigates their roles in popular culture. With the concept female masculinity, Halberstam attempts to destabilize the relationship between men and masculinity that characterizes masculinity studies in its tendency to ascribe masculinity as something primarily (or solely) cis-male bodies accomplish. As Ekins and King (2005) put it, ‘[w]hereas the majority of the men and masculinities literature concerns itself with variants of masculinity considered in relation to males, Halberstam breaks the link’ (p. 388). Very little scholarship has been devoted to transing and queer masculinities and another very significant yet little recognized contribution is the remarkable anthology Beyond masculinity. Essays on queer men and masculinity (2008), edited by Hoppe. As the field of masculinity studies is still lacking any other anthologies including research accounts on trans masculinity, several essays in this anthology are leading examples for a reinvention and transformation of the field of masculinity studies.

Situational and processual masculinities

Research of trans masculinity may help masculinity studies to learn, as Sedgewick (1995) has remarked, that sometimes masculinity has got nothing to do with men. There is a tendency within masculinity studies ‘that everything pertaining to men can be classified as masculinity, and everything that can be said about masculinity pertains in the first place to men’ (p. 12). Sedgewick therefore argues that ‘it is important to drive a wedge in, early and often and if possible conclusively, between the two topics’ (Sedgewick, 1995) and instead explore and acknowledge the ways other bodies than cis-male bodies do masculinity. Even though Sedgwick’s words are repeatedly taken up within masculinity studies, there is a strong tendency to take the link between masculinity and cis-men for granted. In this issue, the authors engage with various forms of trans masculinities which helps to highlight that masculinity is something that not only some specific bodies (those assigned male at birth) have or own, but as a position that is more situational and which can be deployed and activated by a variety of bodies.

As editors of this issue, we are coming to this topic from the two different fields addressed here. Lucas Gottzén is a masculinity studies scholar and as a cis-man he has a strong interest in reformatting this research field and re-evaluating its foundations as cis-normative. As a transgender studies scholar and a non-trans, non-binary person, Wibke Straube has for a long time been distanced towards this field due to its cis-normative, scholarly canon. While some of the authors of this issue are newcomers to the field of masculinity studies and/or trans studies, others have a long-standing engagement in these fields.

Sofia Aboim, coming into transgender studies via a long-standing engagement with the field of masculinity studies, addresses in her essay the importance of building bridges between different areas of gender critical studies. By providing examples from an ongoing study, she explores trans men’s subjectivities and doings of gender. Similarly, Robin Bauer creates important dialogues between trans and masculinity studies, by showing how meanings of masculinity shift in contexts where masculinity is partially detached from ‘male’ bodies. More precisely, Bauer engages with how self-defined butches, transgender butches, genderqueers transmen as well as femmes use queer BDSM (a term refering to bondage/discipline, dominance/submission and sadomasochism) practices to play with, appropriate, eroticize and transform notions of masculinity through embodied, sexual practices.

By providing examples from different historical and cultural settings, this special issue demonstrates the contingent discourses around transgender and the multiplicity of trans experience. Huong Thu Nguyen, for instance, explores lived experiences of masculine performing people (assigned female at birth) whose gender characteristics blur the boundaries between lesbian and transgender among the Bahnar ethnic group in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Julian Honkasalo, in contrast, examines the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American eugenic, criminological and medical discourses that led to the classification of ‘boyhood effeminacy’ as a psychopathology. They show how much of the early, clinical research on children attempted to identify and redirect the child’s ‘cross-gender behaviour’ into a more masculine and heterosexual behaviour, and which came to be the basis of the addition of Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Finally, Karen Hammer explores a similar ‘psychiatric gaze’ by analysing representation of butches in American films. The psychiatric gaze is a pathologizing look onto the body that troubles not only heteronormative but also cis-normative registers.

We hope that the articles and discussions in this issue contribute in the process of rethinking the onto-epistemologies of the Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities, as well as to create closer relations between two fields within gender studies. Ultimately, we would be delighted to see more research that engages in a multiplicity of masculinities, de-essentializes them from the cis-male body and if studying the cis-male body not leaving it any longer as the ‘unmarked’ norm but being specific about the social positions of the research subjects.

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.