Beginnings are difficult. Beginnings are difficult, because the beginning often is not just a starting place, a convenient entry point, but often is taken to be the origin. Presenting something as the original not only blots out what came before but presents everything that follows as somehow contained within or derived from that initial point (think the Big Bang). “Queer and trans studies began in the 1990s.” That statement in many ways rings true, since many of the texts still cited as starting points for these fields were published then and much that gave rise to these areas of study did coalesce over that decade. In this sense, the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler is at the beginning of that beginning, giving shape to and propelling the intellectual conversations that would take shape as queer and trans studies. Historical beginnings, though, are also retrospective, decided on after a movement of one kind or another has become established and it looks back to give itself a history – including a starting point. In this sense, Sedgwick and Butler are celebrated figures who’ve come to be presented as foundational after-the-fact. Exploring their scholarship during the 1990s and early 2000s, and its resonance for what came afterward, though, does offer some important intellectual entry points for engaging these fields.

This chapter turns to Sedgwick’s and Butler’s work as a way of detailing some ideas, questions, formulations, and conceptual difficulties that have become important to queer and trans studies over the last three decades. Sedgwick engages with the entangled relations between sexuality, knowledge, and feeling and Butler with the coconstitutive connections among gender, sexuality, and notions of embodiment. Both are avowed feminists and antihomophobic thinkers, both understood their academic work as arising out of and embroiled in activism and contemporary political struggles, and both foreground how the taken-for-grantedness of certain ideas about personhood and social difference significantly limit our ability to see the world and access non-dominant possibilities for being in it. These thinkers also insist on the non-universality of dominant notions of gender and sexuality – that ideas about the naturalness of particular configurations of identity and desire simply are not true in all times and places. However, they also often de facto center whiteness and normalize imperial dynamics even as these scholars also indicate commitments to antiracist and anticolonial intellectual and political work. Butler’s and Sedgwick’s critiques of what were commonsensical ideas about gender and sexuality still raise powerful questions about bodies, identity, and collective movements, even as later scholarship puts pressure on the implicit frameworks that shape how those questions are posed and addressed in their work.

It Was Gender All Along

In Gender Trouble, Butler begins by investigating the idea that there is a meaningful unified category of “women” for which feminism as a political movement can speak. They engage the assumption that “there must be a universal basis for feminism, one which must be found in an identity assumed to exist cross-culturally.” That presumption also quite often is accompanied by “the notion that the oppression of women has some singular form discernible in the universal or hegemonic structure of patriarchy or masculine domination.” However, the claim that patriarchy operates more or less the same way everywhere – and that women, as the objects of that oppression, share an inherent set of experiences and interests – is itself imperialistic. It “support[s] highly Western notions of oppression” while also “construct[ing] a ‘Third World’ or even an ‘Orient’ in which gender oppression is subtly explained as symptomatic of an essential non-Western barbarism.”¹ If there’s a shared womanness resulting from the ways patriarchy operates all around the world, why is it, Butler asks, that Euro-American feminist accounts of that oppression so often cast non-European places and people of color as so much more patriarchal? Or, put another way, how do notions of a shared patriarchy, and shared womanness, reinforce racializing and colonial assumptions about non-European and nonwhite backwardness and savagery? Challenging the existence of such a global, transcultural patriarchy, though, leaves one with the question, what exactly unites the people categorized as women?

One way of approaching this issue is to say that while their social circumstances may differ, women are united in a shared femaleness, having a particular kind of sexed body (one of two models in which human bodies come). Having a female body – sex – is distinguished from how that body gains social meaning in cultural practices – gender. Butler observes that this distinction between sex and gender was “intended to dispute the biology-as-destiny formulation,” the assumption that certain particular kinds of social practices (like femininity and ways of being a mother) simply follow naturally from having a female body.² As Butler argues, though, “If gender is the cultural meaning that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders.” This logical disjunction raises the question, “what is ‘sex’ anyway”? Differentiating sex and gender leaves the former with no way of shaping the latter, thereby leaving unclear what sex is supposed to mean with regard to gender. Butler observes, “sex proves to have been gender from the start.”³ In making this statement, they’re indicating that ideas about the body as having a natural, presocial form are themselves an expression of cultural narratives and, thus, a function of gender. In this way, gender provides a way of naming not so much culturally differing assumptions about the meanings and social roles of sexed bodies as the entire system of culturally and historically produced meanings through which bodies are divided into two types called sex. Butler indicates, “gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result gender is not to culture as sex is to nature: gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture.”⁴ Gender as a process of socially categorizing and differentiating bodies in ways that make them socially meaningful creates the categories of sex, which then are treated as if they referred to something that simply was given outside of all language, culture, or history.

Rather than understanding man and woman as commonsensical categories that correlate to necessary identities in human reproduction, Butler reverses that logic, viewing the naturalization of “the heterosexual matrix” as significant in shaping how gender is constructed. They argue, “The institution of a compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality requires and regulates gender as a binary relation in which the masculine term is differentiated from a feminine term, and this differentiation is accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire.”⁵ Heterosexual here refers to more than desire for someone of “the opposite sex”; it’s an institutionalized ideological system in which desire is supposed to take only one form that also correlates with family formation and household-making (the nuclear family) and in which the companionate, monogamous hetero-couple is understood as the fundamental building block of social life. This series of interdependent and cross-referencing assumptions depends on there being two binarized genders envisioned as tied to reproductive bodily types. From this perspective, other configurations of desire appear as perverse deviations, also defined in terms of binarized genders: “for heterosexuality to remain intact as a distinct social form, it requires an intelligible conception of homosexuality and also requires the prohibition of that conception in rendering it culturally unintelligible.” Homosexuality, defined in terms of same-sex object-choice, then, is not so much outside the system of compulsory heterosexuality as produced as a category within that system – a category that also relies on notions of sexed bodies but that is demonized as aberrant and unnatural within that system. As Butler notes, “lesbian desire is no more and no less constructed than other modes of sexuality.”⁶

In developing the notion of sex as an effect of gender, Butler challenges what they refer to as the “metaphysics of substance” – the idea of a kind of being or identity that we could reference that exists totally apart from existing social frameworks.⁷ They characterize the metaphysics of substance as “humanist conceptions of the subject [that] tend to assume a substantive person who is the bearer of various essential and nonessential attributes.”⁸ Such conceptions posit the existence of an experience of embodiment or personhood that is prior to or outside of historically and culturally situated social meanings. For example, with regard to Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that “one is not born a woman,” suggesting a kind of personhood that precedes social gendering, Butler asks, “Are there humans who are not, as it were, always already gendered? The mark of gender [including the gendered construction of bodies as sexed] appears to ‘qualify’ bodies as human bodies.” Butler indicates that in other feminist critiques of gender oppression and compulsory heterosexuality, “there appears to be a truer reality, an ontological field of unity against which these social fictions are measured.”⁹ Dominant ideologies of gender and sexuality are seen as layered over or obfuscating a realm of experience that defies such cultural inscriptions. However, as with the discussion of the problems of defining sex as distinct from gender, Butler argues that the sense of such a before or beneath is the result of existing social systems of meaning: that such systems actively produce that sense of the natural, the given, the presocial. In Bodies That Matter, Butler seeks to respond to criticisms that their theorization of gender does not account for the materiality of the body by addressing the ways that the idea of accessing a sense of the body beyond language and culture is itself a function of how embodiment is materialized through language and culture. Butler observes, “The body posited as prior to the sign [by which it is referenced or figured] is always posited or signified as prior.”¹⁰ Asserting, in language, the existence of a body and form of bodily experience that precedes and exceeds all acts of cultural naming creates, in language, a sign of that supposed otherness/alterity – generating an image or impression of such beforeness or outsideness rather than simply designating a thing that exists in an asocial way. In this vein, Butler insists, “it is no longer possible to take anatomy as a stable referent that is somehow valorized or signified through being subjected to an imaginary schema,” like cultural forms and psychological investments/identifications; “[o]n the contrary, the very accessibility of anatomy is in some sense dependent on this schema and coincident with it.” In this way, the materiality of embodiment cannot be understood outside the ways extant cultural norms and modes of power produce the lived effects of how we see, feel, and envision our bodies and those of others, which we treat as if they were empirical and obvious – the “material effects” of such social dynamics “are taken as material data or primary givens.”¹¹

If there is no inherent, natural body or set of bodily relations that provide the basis for social relations, then dominant ideas about the body, gender, and desire, Butler argues, come to seem natural through routine repetition – being continually performed. That ongoing performance, or performativity, is what constructs and maintains identities, bodies, social relations, and personal experience in ways that enact the heterosexual matrix and its genderings. In current popular usage, performative tends to mean false or surface, a kind of act for others, as in the idea of performative activism. Butler, though, uses the term to conceptualize identities of all kinds as produced and reproduced through the ways they are enacted in everyday circumstances. Butler observes, “In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed”: “identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” They later add, “gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity … not to be conceived [of] as a noun … but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort.”¹² If there is no individual sense of a body or a kind of individual personhood that precedes the enactment of gender, then there is no subject who chooses or decides to live out a particular gender. What seems like the expression of an inner or innate sense of self, or of the supposed natural tendencies that follow from having a particular kind of sexed body, is actually, Butler indicates, the built-up effects of performing socially constructed forms of gender. In Bodies That Matter, Butler supplements their notion of performativity with the idea of citationality. They suggest that “agency” is “a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power.”¹³ The example of a judge’s ruling often serves as a go-to for Butler to explain how this process works. The justice “speaks in the name of the law,” although not creating it, and in doing so, the judge “‘cites’ the law.” The judge’s judgment takes part in a “signifying chain” predicated on “the authority of the law” even as legal meanings and implications may be altered in the repetition or citation – “reworking a set of already operative conventions.” That “citational legacy” provides the framework in which both conformity and resistance take place, shaping what will appear as an intelligible claim or experience.¹⁴ In this way, people can be said to live their gender and sexuality in ways that cite existing norms, even while that very reiteration also can provide the occasion for reworking and shifting them: “The ‘I’ who would oppose its construction is always in some sense drawing from that construction to articulate its opposition.”¹⁵

While socially intelligible personhood depends on such a continuing performance/citation, that dynamic does not mean that gender is always enacted in ways that reinforce the obviousness and naturalness of those norms. The central role of repetition in realizing those norms means that they are subject to shifts and slippages that bring their givenness into question. Through the everyday performance of gender, “‘the normal,’ ‘the original’ is revealed to be a copy,” a copy – a reiterated reproduction – that has no original – no ground in some identity, set of sensations, or biological mandate that lies outside of the historically and culturally specific “matrix of power” in which all of these gendered experiences take place.¹⁶ In perhaps one of the most famous and most misunderstood moves in Gender Trouble, Butler turns to drag to illustrate these points. In their argument, drag “become[s] the site of parodic contest and display that robs compulsory heterosexuality of its claims to naturalness and originality”: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency.”¹⁷ Drag provides a concrete example of the ways one might conceptualize gender less as emanating from an internal core of selfhood or from the supposed predispositions of one’s “sex” than as a collection of social meanings produced and reproduced through their enactment. In turning to drag as a metaphor for visualizing the idea of gender performativity, though, Butler can make processes of gendering seem like a form of theater, a volitional act on the part of a subject who actively chooses to put on the signs of a gender and who equally can choose to take them off – whose subjectivity and experience of personhood is not integrally tied up in the gender they perform. Instead, for Butler, gendered selfhood and embodiment emerge through ongoing participation in a matrix of sustained and interdependent cultural forms, but those forms themselves are malleable and change over time, as revealed by the ways they need to be performed in order to be realized.

As noted earlier, Butler challenges the feminist claim to the idea of a universal patriarchy and a unified sense of womanhood, but when addressing compulsory heterosexuality and processes of gendering, Butler often speaks as if there were only one set of norms governing such cultural processes, usually figured as “the law” (drawn from the psychoanalytic and structuralist thinkers with whom Butler engages). However, even as Butler often uses the law, singular, to conceptualize how identity is generated and experienced, they also make an effort to address the multiplicity of modes of domination. Butler asserts, “it seems crucial to rethink the scenes of reproduction and, hence, of sexing practices not only as ones though which a heterosexual imperative is inculcated, but as ones through which boundaries of racial distinction are secured as well as contested.”¹⁸ Race, gender, and sexuality are intertwined, such that “to claim that sexual difference is more fundamental than racial difference is effectively to assume that sexual difference is white sexual difference, and that whiteness is not a form of racial difference.”¹⁹

In considering how persons negotiate the system of norms in which they find themselves and by which they come to know and experience themselves, Butler at times introduces an implicit queer/trans split in their thinking about opposition to that system. They tend to privilege kinds of performativity that readily can be seen as crossing or contesting dominant terms, rather than as identifying with them. In this vein, queer becomes a way of marking forms of personal identity and political organizing that aim to disrupt dominant understandings of gender and sexual normality, and that aim also involves seeking to mark the limits of queer – what it effaces, occludes, and renders unspeakable. Simply “legitim[izing] homosexuality” does not transform existing systems of sex/gender, instead reinvesting in “the force of normalization” and requiring “a queer resignification” that can “expand and alter” existing modes of “normativity.” Butler suggests that drawing attention to processes of normalization, and how they shape possibilities for identification and action, is a necessary element of political work and should be part of the self-reflexive intellectual aims of queer analysis. They note that “the genealogical critique of the queer subject will be central to queer politics to the extent that it constitutes a self-critical dimension within activism, a persistent reminder to take the time to consider the exclusionary force” of the terms and de facto norms that very activism mobilizes.²⁰ However, the text implicitly contrasts such a self-reflexive political consciousness with a desire to embody social norms – a tendency Butler repeatedly attributes to trans women of color. In discussing the film Paris Is Burning and its focus on house-ballroom culture in New York, Butler highlights the representation of Venus Xtravaganza, a trans Latina who is part of that scene and who viewers learn was murdered by a man with whom she had sex. In the film, Venus expresses her desire for gender-affirming surgery, which she describes as allowing her to live a life of suburban couplehood, and Butler reads this desire, including the pursuit of surgery, as an “uncritical miming of the hegemonic.”²¹ Moreover, they argue that Venus’s vision for herself is of a piece with the notion of realness that is part of the categories and ways of judging performance in the balls themselves: “The citing of dominant norms does not, in this instance, displace the norm; rather it becomes the means by which that dominant norm is most painfully reiterated as the very desire and the performance of those it subjects.”²² If queer subjects challenge norms by emphasizing their constructedness and the force of their imposition, trans subjectivity appears here as merely identifying with and confirming the naturalness of those norms. Trans women of color in Butler’s account seem too invested in white, bourgeois, heterosexual ideals to perform identity in ways that would challenge or displace them.

In Undoing Gender, though, Butler revisits and revises this problematic way of framing transgression and subversion. They highlight the immense difficulties of creating a “livable life” when a person or group is treated as impossible within dominant social frameworks, particularly focusing on gender nonnormativity and trans identities. At the outset, they pose the question of the relation between having a recognized kind of gender and having one’s personhood acknowledged: “If I am a certain gender, will I still be regarded as part of the human? Will the ‘human’ expand to include me in its reach”?²³ Some genders will remain unintelligible – cast as unreal, fake, impossible – in a system in which gender continues to be understood as deriving from one’s supposed biological sex (which one nonconsensually is assigned at birth). Persons who live such genders will not be seen as fully persons, but, instead, as a kind of monstrous deformation of the human. With regard to that process of enforced ascription (your real gender follows from your real sex which usually follows from others’ assessment of your genitals), Butler notes, “I would hope that we would all remain committed to the idea that no one should be forcibly compelled to occupy a gender norm that is undergone, experientially, as an unlivable violation.”²⁴ Butler affirms “experiential” gender separate from whether that experience supposedly idealizes existing gender norms. Moreover, while continuing to point toward the importance of “expos[ing dominant cultural forms and ideals] as nonnatural and nonnecessary” in order to “def[y] normative expectation[s],” Undoing Gender offers new intellectual support for the significance of being recognized. To want to be seen as real by others and fully valued as a person, including in terms of one’s gender, cannot be dismissed as merely a desire for assimilation: “it seems crucial to realize that a livable life does require various degrees of stability”; “What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is livable only for some.” The “desire for norms that might let one live,” then, is not equivalent to an uncritical identification with normative ideals (which also engages some of the questions about the limits of the critique of normativity raised in my introduction).²⁵ The argument for greater access to gender-affirming medicine, which Butler makes, need not be seen as at odds with critiques of various kinds of gender normalization (including those enacted in the process of being diagnosed as having gender dysphoria, which for many is the precondition for getting funded access to gender-affirming hormones, surgical interventions, and technologies). Butler indicates, “I want to maintain that legitimation is double-edged: it is crucial that, politically, we lay claim to intelligibility and recognizability; and it is crucial, politically, that we maintain a critical and transformative relation to the norms that govern” what will be understood as recognizable.²⁶

Trans Experience and Gendered Power

If gender is performative, as Butler argues, what does that mean for understanding trans experiences of embodiment, particularly with respect to the process of transition itself? Some trans scholars have questioned how Butler’s work addresses the physicality of the body and the complex ways that trans people negotiate that sexed materiality as part of affirming their gender, and they have pointed to the ways that trans subjectivity and embodiment can function as a figure within queer visions of anti-normativity in ways that efface the experiences of trans people. Others have suggested that the felt sense of being in a sexed body that does not reflect one’s gender itself points to the ways the social meaning of bodies is not reducible to a self-evident, presocial materiality that the body simply has. Such work also addresses the kinds of historically and culturally situated frameworks at play in representing trans identities. Further, scholars have challenged the racial and imperial assumptions that can be part of efforts to describe and theorize trans experience, as if it were a unified category or as if all those who would be understood as gender-nonconforming in Euro-American terms will necessarily understand themselves as trans.

Queer discussions of embodiment can remake what otherwise would be seen as accounts of trans experience into examples of gender indeterminacy in ways that advance critiques of heteronormativity but leave aside the lived experiences of many trans people. As Viviane Namaste suggests, “what merits attention is the fact that some individuals have transgressed a sex/gender binary,” and the focus on such supposed transgression creates “neglect of everyday life for transgendered people.”²⁷ Rather than suggesting that trans people somehow illustrate the limits of the dominant sex/gender system, scholarship should start from “the mundane assumption that [transsexual/transgendered] people exist” and “examine the workings of discourse [and institutional] practices that inscribe, efface, and order transgendered lives, bodies, and experiences.”²⁸ In perhaps the most famous trans critique of Butler’s account of performativity, Jay Prosser argues that “transition has become the lever for the queer movement to loosen the fixity of gender identities,” making what are seen as “gender crossings” into “a key queer trope” of the absence of a natural basis for the heterosexual matrix and the possibility of a wide range of kinds of nonheteronormative genders and sexualities. What is lost in the process, though, is “the referential transsexual subject,” the person whose desire for transition is not about challenging gender norms but about addressing the nonalignment of their experienced gender with their physical sex.²⁹ The effort, from a trans perspective, to align gender and bodily characteristics can be mischaracterized from a queer perspective as merely confirming conventional gender ideals (as in Butler’s reading of Paris Is Burning). In his study of transsexual men, Henry Rubin notes, “Ordinary lives, unmarked by suspicion and hostilities, should not be confused with gender conformity.”³⁰ In this vein, Julia Serano observes that many transsexuals “feel that the transgender movement tends to privilege those identities, actions, and appearances that most visibly ‘transgress’ gender norms,” which has “led to the creation of another oppositional binary of sorts, pitting those transgender people who identify outside the gender binary (and who are therefore presumed to challenge gender norms) against transsexuals (who are accused of supporting the gender status quo by transitioning to their identified sex).”³¹

From this perspective, transgender can be seen as aligned with conceptions of gender performativity that fail to recognize the transsexual aim of transition, to simply be and be recognized as the women or men that they are – “feeling at home in my own sexed body.”³² In “An Affinity of Hammers,” Sara Ahmed suggests, “An existence can be nullified by the requirement that an existence be evidenced. The very requirement to testify to your existence can end up being the very point of your existence.”³³ Trans critiques of Butlerian notions of performativity draw attention to the physicality of transition, the importance of differentiating the sexed body from a person’s felt gender (in order to understand the potential dissonance between them and the need to bring them into alignment – affirming felt gender), and the realness of that sense of felt gender (a trans woman is a woman, a trans man is a man). Prosser argues that Butler’s emphasis on modes of psychological identification and projection “refigures sex from material corporeality into phantasized surface.” If sex is just an embodied projection of ideologies of gender, how can such a theory capture the difference between physical sex and felt gender that is crucial to trans experience? Prosser asks, “If there is no sex left over, no immanent sexed part to the self that is not already gender, what substance is there for the transsexual to change”?³⁴ Attending to this difference between physical body and internal understanding is also necessary for engaging what Serano terms “cissexual privilege.” Referring to “people who have only ever experienced their subconscious sex and physical sex as being aligned,” cissexual – or cisnormativity – provides a way of talking about the effects of the “double standard that promotes the idea that transsexual genders are distinct from, and less legitimate than, cissexual genders.” In order to understand how that delegitimization works, there needs to be a recognition of the ways that sexed embodiment may differ from felt gender. Serano suggests that absent such recognition, queer conceptions of performativity can enact an “ungendering” of trans people by not recognizing the sex affirmed through the process of transition.³⁵

However, even while critiquing what they suggest is a tendency in queer studies to foreground the critique of the gender binary at the expense of attending to trans experiences (which may “produce the feeling that one is being made into an impossibility”), some trans studies scholars remain concerned about the ways accounts of gendered realness also can end up “naturalizing sexist gender differences.”³⁶ Instead, such accounts emphasize the need for intellectual frameworks that can “illuminate the experiences of transgender people and give an account of our claims to sex and gender,” including attending to the meanings of gender categories – like woman – as used and felt within different contexts, while also refusing the kinds of “reality enforcement” with respect to essentialized ideas of sex/gender that are used to deny trans people’s narration of their own bodies and identities.³⁷ Riki Anne Wilchins presents her own transition in terms of the imposition of gendered meanings on her body. She notes, “Trans-identity is not a natural fact. Rather, it is a political category we are forced to occupy when we do certain things with our bodies.” Drawing on Butler’s work, she further argues, “There is an entire social apparatus whose sole purpose is to determine, track, and maintain my sex. Perhaps sex is not a noun at all. Perhaps it is really a verb, a cultural imperative … in the face of which none of us have a choice.”³⁸ Wilchins does not characterize her own transition as coming to occupy a material sex in which she is at home, but instead, she presents it as a way of navigating processes of sexing – the making of “sex” within the “social apparatus” through which gendered meanings are circulated and institutionalized.

Taking trans experiences as the model for gendered embodiment, rather than treating them as an exception or aberration, becomes a way of challenging cisnormative notions of realness by expanding and texturing Butler’s analysis of how cultural construction works. Gayle Salamon observes, “the body one feels oneself to have is not necessarily the same body that is delimited by its exterior contours, and that is the case even for any normatively gendered subject.” There is no given embodiment that is outside a person’s experience of their body as lived within particular social circumstances. Salamon notes, “we only have recourse to our bodies through a body image, a psychic representation of the body that is constructed over time,” adding, “The body image is always contextually situated, in relation to other bodies and to the world, and its construction is a social phenomenon.” In this way, “What social construction offers is a way to understand how that felt sense arises, in all its historical and cultural variations, with all its urgency and immediacy.”³⁹ The most intimate feelings of embodiment are, at all levels, social, and they emerge out of our experiences of living in the world and the ways our bodies gain meaning (including to ourselves) through such living, which is always in a historically and culturally situated context. For this reason, a person’s phenomenological – felt/lived – experience of sex/gender cannot be judged against some supposed asocial truth of the body: “what constitutes something as real is not its [supposedly presocial] materiality but a horizon of possibility, an openness to all the different experiences that it represents to any given person” within specific, located circumstances.⁴⁰ The effort to attend to the trans everyday, to possibilities for living an ordinary life in ways that are not organized around contesting normativity per se, also can draw on Butler’s notions of performativity in order to consider the possibilities of the law and citizenship for trans people. Isaac West suggests the importance of “avoid[ing] equating the demand to be recognized as a citizen with an uncritical adoption of norms.” He argues, “The charge of assimilation holds only if discourse and legal subjectivity are figured as fixed processes divorced from particular contexts and located within cultural logics with inalterable scripts whereby culture is reproduced without a difference,” rather than considering “the radical potential of performative contradictions” in the enactment of legal norms and claims to citizenship rights and belonging. In this way, West argues, trans assertions of citizenship can play on, across, and between legal norms in order to try to secure conditions of ordinary livability.⁴¹

Gender identity, though, takes shape in relation to a range of social dynamics, such as race, nationality, imperialism, and global capitalism. Such interdependence can be seen in typical ways of representing trans identity and the process of transition, as well as in the connections between gendered ideals and whiteness. For example, the figure of a desire for and journey toward home through transition appears prominently in accounts of trans experience, particularly those that seek to challenge or refuse notions of gender performativity. However, what do such narratives assume about mobility and belonging, how they operate, and who has access to them? Nael Bhanji observes, “The journey home of the transsexual may come at the expense of a recognition that others are permanently dislocated from home – that they occupy the inhospitable territories in between,” particularly those who are migrants and refugees.⁴² Immigration and diaspora are often caused by war, poverty, and oppression and often lead to racism, xenophobia, and criminalization in the places to which migrants have moved. Describing transition as a process of movement, a crossing in order to come home, then, can erase the experiences of unhomeliness and nonbelonging faced particularly by trans migrants of color coming to Europe and the United States, suggesting the need for greater attention to the work performed by “the spatial and geographical figures that animate understandings of transition and gender reassignment.” Addressing the ways trans people use international travel to bypass particular state-mandated programs of diagnosis and surveillance that can regulate access to gender-affirming medical treatment, Aren Aizura observes, “Mobility here does not simply mean having the economic resources to travel overseas .… It implies the capacity to produce a fantasy of oneself as a consumer of medical procedures and the good life rather than a patient defined by the limitations of publicly available health care.”⁴³ In addition, the pharmaceuticals often used in processes of transition and gender affirmation are themselves embedded within uneven global capitalist formations. As Michelle O’Brien notes, “When I give myself an injection of Delestrogen, I am locating myself and am located within global flows of power. I am connected to the complex political, economic, and social histories of how these drugs were manufactured and by whom .… I am participating within the system of transnational capital.” She adds, “The politics of our bodies – as trans people, as drug users, as people living with HIV – require a sophisticated grasp of multiple contradictions. We are dependent on the very systems that oppress us,” a realization that she suggests leads toward kinds of analysis that are not about “purity” but about understanding the complexities of “relationships of participation, resistance, complicity, and challenge.”⁴⁴

Somewhat exoticizing representations of nonwestern and Indigenous peoples also can play a significant role in forms of (white) trans self-articulation. For example, trans writers have drawn on the idea of the third gender as a way of challenging dominant ideologies. This concept was developed by anthropologists to refer to kinds of identity in non-Euro-American societies that do not fit dimorphic notions of sex/gender. As Evan B. Towle and Lynn Marie Morgan note, this invocation by Euro-Americans of third genders or of specific nonwestern categories of identity, such as the hijra in India or the Lakota winkte, “seek[s] legitimacy in narrow or sanctified appropriations of [other] cultural histories [and] practices” in ways that “reify [and] romanticize presumed gender variability in non-Western societies.”⁴⁵ Not only do such appropriations offer a thin and decontextualized sense of how such gender dynamics and systems work, as Towle and Morgan argue, they position such societies as backward or bygone predecessors to the modern Euro-American present while also failing to investigate more fully the historically situated processes of cultural construction that give rise to gendered meanings in the society they seek to critique – the one they themselves inhabit. Towle and Morgan suggest that such projections also tend to leave aside the operation of imperial dynamics in the present and the struggles for self-determination by the peoples who serve as the material for this mode of trans comparison.

In this way, work in trans studies can be seen as further building on Butler’s feminist critique of the supposed universality of women’s experience and of an undifferentiated patriarchy. Trans movements can assert their own forms of universality that displace differences in how institutionalized systems of power impose and regulate sex/gender, particularly with regard to race and racialization. As C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritoworn have argued, trans people of color generate greater value in death than they do care and consideration in life. Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance celebrations circulate tabulations and images of those killed in ways that imply a shared trans vulnerability to violence that is meant to rally support for greater legal protections for trans people. However, “[i]mmobilized in life, and barred from spaces designated as white (the good life, the Global North, the gentrifying inner city, the university, the trans community), it is in their death that poor and sex working trans people of color are invited back in; it is in death that they suddenly come to matter.”⁴⁶ The representation of trans people of color who have been murdered, largely trans women, becomes a vehicle for advancing an ostensibly encompassing transgender political agenda that largely does not address the circumstances in which those so featured live and in which they seek means to survive. Trans of color deaths are construed as a function of a generic transness, having little to do with structural racisms, impoverishment, and criminalization. Further, people of color are viewed as failing to perform normative sex/gender in ways that mean that their experiences of gendered embodiment – and the ways gender regulation and discipline operate as part of racist oppression – do not necessarily fit within a transgender political or intellectual framework primarily organized around gaining recognition and resources for gender-crossing or transition.⁴⁷ In decolonizing trans/gender 101, b. binaohan observes that, as a Filipino bakla, “It had never really occurred to me … that the trans community was under the impression that it was including people like me”: “when we look globally, we can locate a bunch of people and identities who, when reading reports/studies/research, are often labeled as ‘trans women,’ but, of course, this is an ill-fitting and, more importantly, imperialist translation of a great variety of genders.”⁴⁸ In this vein, Jian Neo Chen suggests that “[t]rans of color expressions and practices use the surplus that constitutes racial gender embodiment as the material for social struggle, reconstruction, and transformation.”⁴⁹ The presumed excessiveness and deviance of people of color’s modes of gender identity/expression – the “surplus” that is outside of ideals oriented around white bodies and social forms – becomes the basis for trans of color self-identifications and worldmaking, which cannot simply be incorporated into a de facto white-centered vision of transgender identity or rights. Moreover, uses of transgender can separate gender and sexuality as categories in ways that misrepresent the self-understandings of people of color. Tracking the ways the term transgender gained prominence by being circulated within social service and activist organizations in the late 1990s, David Valentine illustrates how that process aimed to coalesce the kind of “political and social entity that is needed in contemporary U.S. discourses of civil rights and identity politics.”⁵⁰ He demonstrates how many people of color who understood their own gender and embodiment through the category of gay were classified by others as transgender, thereby seeking to include people into a struggle for rights and institutional recognition conducted on others’ terms.

A good deal of scholarship in trans studies has sought to shift from chronicling the choices and experiences of trans people (who may or may not understand themselves in such terms) to developing a transfeminist analysis of overlapping and interdependent systems of power in which sex/gender is made, monitored, and regulated.⁵¹ Dean Spade illustrates how centering the experiences of the most marginalized gender-nonconforming people (including the undocumented and incarcerated) leads to a shift from a focus on a delimited set of persons who can be categorized as transgender to consideration of the kinds of disciplinary and population-making power exercised by the state and service institutions in generating, regulating, and policing modes of gender and gendered realness. Such administrative systems do not so much neutrally catalog the qualities of the people in them as “actually invent and produce meaning for the categories they administer,” like gender and race, and “those categories manage both the population and the distribution of security and vulnerability.”⁵² As Andrea Ritchie suggests with regard to policing, “What is determined disorderly or lewd is often in the eye of the beholder, an eye that is informed by deeply racialized and gendered perceptions,” and she later adds, “failure to meet individual police officers’ subjective expectations of gender appropriate behavior is read as embodying ‘disorder,’ giving rise to a minimum of intensified scrutiny that often escalates to verbal and sexual harassment, detention, and citation or arrest,” expectations “rooted in white supremacist heteropatriarchy.”⁵³ As with Butler’s analysis, the kind of “critical trans politics” Spade articulates addresses processes of “subjection,” “how we know ourselves as subjects through these systems of meaning and control – the ways we understand our bodies, the things we believe about ourselves and our relationships.”⁵⁴ Unlike Butler, though, the discussion of how those institutional frameworks construct forms of identity is less focused on individuals’ experience of themselves as subjects than the collective effects of political, economic, judicial, and social service systems that produce increased vulnerability for particular persons and groups as a result of how those identities work in interdependent ways. Such an attention to institutional frameworks and how they provide the terms of intelligibility for everyone’s gender retains a sense of identity as performed within dominant systems of meaning while deemphasizing individual acts as sites for opposing such systems.

Mapping the Closet and Feeling Queer

In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick begins with the chapter “Axiomatic,” arguably the most important piece in the formation of queer studies as a scholarly field, laying out a series of foundational principles that will guide her analysis. Rather than providing a firm basis for broad claims, though, these ideas are meant to be experimental: “A point of the book is not to know how far its insights and projects are generalizable.” Sedgwick presents her argument as an exploration, suggesting that a key part of the kind of intellectual work she’s doing is not to know beforehand exactly where these ideas will go – what they’ll encompass and what kinds of relations will come to be important. This sense of what we might call conceptual indeterminacy, perhaps even promiscuity, is quite different than an approach where the social structures and dynamics to be discussed are already clearly delineated. In the same vein, the first of Sedgwick’s axioms is, “People are different from each other.” She explains, “It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact. A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, and sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions.” These categories may provide important information about social positioning and point toward ways of mapping how power works, but, Sedgwick suggests, not only can they not capture the full variety of personal feelings, desires, and self-understandings, they can efface the presence of less generalizable terms and concepts that people use to make sense of themselves, others, and their relations to them – what Sedgwick calls forms of “nonce taxonomy.” For example, something like categories of sexual identity – homosexual and heterosexual – can erase the fact that “[e]ven genital acts mean very different things to different people,” including what counts as a sexual act, the role of fantasy in forms of desire, the importance of having a longstanding intimate connection or not, and relative emotional attachment to particular kinds of acts or scenarios.⁵⁵ Sedgwick aims to open intellectual room for recognizing and engaging unexpected dynamics and for viewing as significant ways of being, individual and collective, that do not necessarily fit existing rubrics of scholarly and political analysis.

Many of the rest of the axioms she offers seek to create this kind of capaciousness for the study of sexuality, including with regard to what will be seen as belonging to that category or as relevant in understanding whatever may be classified as such. The effort to determine whether one’s sexual identity and kinds of desire arise from some sort of biological programming or the social context of maturation – “seemingly ritualized debates on nature versus nurture” – occurs against the backdrop of “gay-genocidal nexuses of thought,” the desire to eliminate gayness. Seeking to adjudicate how any given person becomes gay, Sedgwick argues, cannot be separated from the larger social aim of trying to specify an origin that can be treated/eradicated. Similarly, efforts rigidly to distinguish sexual identity today from the forms homoerotic desire took in the past are equally deadening and dead-ended: “The historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity.”⁵⁶ Here she’s referring to the idea, often attributed to Michel Foucault (as discussed in the Introduction), that in the late nineteenth century a conceptual shift occurred from there being persons who committed particular outlawed sexual acts with persons of the same sex (such as anal intercourse) to there being a kind of person who innately desired erotic connection with people of the same sex – the homosexual. Moreover, that supposed fundamental change in understanding the meaning and social implications of desire itself is largely split into two versions: the defining of the homosexual as a gender invert (desiring other men in the ways a woman would and taking on other feminine characteristics – such as in the image of the sissy); and the notion of homosexuality as purely a matter of object-choice (the sex of the person with whom you want to have sex) separate from anything having to do with gender per se.⁵⁷ These two models of homosexuality also can be presented as part of a historical development, the former gender-based model eventually giving way to the latter/later object-choice-based one. However, Sedgwick cautions that all these attempts to indicate a definite change in how sexual acts and sexual subjectivity are understood – the idea that “homosexuality as we conceive it today” is fundamentally distinct from some set of assumptions about acts, gendered orientations, or desires in a previous historical period – tend to impoverish our sense of the complexities of both the past and the present, creating the impression of “a coherent definitional field rather than a space of overlapping, contradictory, and conflictual forces.” Further, such contradiction and conflict among models (“the unrationalized coexistence of different models”) does a great deal in shaping how discourses of sexuality and the dynamics of power in which they participate actually operate in the past and present.⁵⁸

Sedgwick emphasizes the incongruity among notions of (homo)sexuality and the importance of attending to such incongruity in understanding how heteronormativity operates. For example, she distinguishes between minoritizing and universalizing understandings of (homo)sexual identity, “between seeing homo/heterosexual definition … as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority” and “seeing it … as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities.”⁵⁹ She suggests that the pervasive slipperiness between minoritizing and universalizing frameworks – particularly the ways they incoherently inhabit and animate each other – makes the issue of sexual desire and identity central to a series of other significant, and slippery, distinctions that figure prominently in dominant Euro-American ways of understanding personhood, embodiment, and social well-being. These binaries include natural/unnatural, healthy/diseased, public/private, secret/visible, authentic/artificial, and voluntary/addictive. The issue is how dynamics of knowledge and ignorance around sexual matters also attach to other, often seemingly unrelated matters of disease, perversity, degeneracy, and social danger. Do these ostensible challenges to social order and well-being have to do with a determinate group that can be isolated and contained (minoritizing)? Or do they threaten to engulf the entire population (universalizing)? Can those who endanger public welfare in this way be known, and if so, how? That structure of slipperiness, incoherence, and simultaneity is “the closet,” in Sedgwick’s terms. To attempt to specify who or what kind of hidden relation carries morally suspect meanings or intentions also potentially brings with it a feared proximity to those very forms of deviance, degeneration, and unnaturalness by which you can get tainted if you get too close. As Sedgwick observes, “to know and be known [as the problem] become the same process,” later adding:

As a structure of knowledge and social relations, the closet does not so much contain an identity as create the volatile and changing circumstances by which deviancy and perversity can be seen as lodging in particular persons and always potentially threatening to infect the populace from its ostensibly hidden locations.

While personal feelings, relations, and desires may unfold within larger social dynamics, Sedgwick suggests that they often do not line up with dominant terms or notions of identity. In Tendencies, Sedgwick turns to queer as a means of conceptualizing those wayward forms of identification, sensation, and narration. As part of considering how “queer representation” gets “smuggled” into mainstream forms of representation, she reflects on her own emotional attachments as a child:

Valuing and drawing attention to how things do not line up is a central part of what Sedgwick sees as the power of queer analysis. It challenges dominant notions of normality – with regard to (homo)sexuality, gender, the family, etc. – by treating those ideals as fusing together collections of disparate parts that conceptually can be disaggregated and analyzed for the ways they need not line up with each other and quite often don’t. To do queer work is to render “those culturally central, apparently monolithic constructions newly accessible to analysis and interrogation” by showing “the ways in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other.” In this vein, Sedgwick observes, “what’s striking is the number and difference of the dimensions that ‘sexual identity’ is supposed to organize into a seamless and univocal whole.” Against this homogenizing assemblage, Sedgwick suggests that queer can reference “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, or anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”⁶²

For example, meaningful forms of desire allegedly are defined by sexual object-choice, are part of someone’s core sense of themself, and provide the basis for long-term relationships. However, in her discussion of the depiction of masturbation in Jane Austen’s fiction, Sedgwick highlights how autoeroticism is an incredibly common form of erotic practice and fantasy that fits none of those assumptions. Attending to the portrayal of this kind of desire peels away erotic activity and imagination from the conglomeration of pieces that are supposed to adhere to each other as sexual identity; masturbation “today completely fails to constitute anything remotely like a minority identity.” Perhaps even more notably, addressing the prominence of masturbation and the masturbator as part of “the Victorian multiplication of sexual species” helps highlight the ways conventional ideas of sexual subjectivity have “all but boiled down to a single, bare … dichotomy” of homo versus hetero. Sedgwick’s effort to “make available the sense of an alternative, passionate sexual ecology,” then, works by separating the presence of forms of desire, pleasure, and fantasy from their presumptive embedding in or subordination to the homo/hetero binary or the question of sexual object-choice.⁶³

Rather than simply affirming non-straight identity, Sedgwick repeatedly underlines the importance of contesting the ideological and institutionalized assumptions that create conceptual units like the family. The idea of “family” agglomerates together “a surname; a sexual dyad; a legal unit based on state-regulated marriage; a circuit of blood relationships; … an economic unit of earning and taxation; … a mechanism to produce, care for, and acculturate children; a mechanism for accumulating material goods over several generations; a daily routine; a unit in a community of worship; a site of patriotic formation.” Instead of trying to reconfigure the ideal of family, “the most productive strategy (intellectually, emotionally) might be, whenever possible, to disarticulate [these parts from] one from another, to disengage them – the bonds of blood, of law, of habitation, of privacy, of companionship, and succor – from the lockstep of their unanimity in the system called ‘family’”: “Redeeming the family isn’t, finally, an option but a compulsion; the question would be how to stop redeeming the family.”⁶⁴ One way that Sedgwick does so, in “Tales of the Avunculate,” is through tracing the ways the figures of “uncle” and “aunt” in gay subcultures refer both to kinds of sexual dynamics (penetrative versus receptive) and to relations of care. That discussion, though, opens up to broader consideration of how these figures contest assumptions about the insulated centrality of the nuclear family, expanding beyond the parent–child unit as the singular site of intergenerational affection and childcare. Speaking of the roles of aunts and uncles, she also notes that, since they “are adults whose intimate access to children needn’t depend on their own pairing or procreation,” “it’s very common, of course, for some of them to have the office of representing nonconforming or nonreproductive sexualities to children.”⁶⁵ Sedgwick’s queer method emphasizes the critical potential of foregrounding not-easily-categorized deviations from standard models of identity and kinds of relations and attachments that do not line up with conventional assumptions about what “sexuality” means and how it works.

In Touching Feeling, Sedgwick further develops this impulse to dwell in forms of sensation and experience that move in ways that exceed what she characterizes as dualistic thinking – hidden versus revealed, dominance versus subversion, acceptance versus repudiation. While scholars embrace Michel Foucault’s critique of what he terms “the repressive hypothesis,” Sedgwick indicates that a great deal of work in queer studies continues to focus on versions of repression. The idea that certain kinds of acts, desire, subjectivity are repressed, Foucault suggests, positions the person who reveals such supposed repression as a heroic figure of liberation in ways that actually reinforce the forms of power that produce those acts, desires, and forms of subjectivity as meaningful – what seems like freedom from power (calling for an end to repression) just reinvests in the unquestioned givenness of those same terms and social categories.⁶⁶ Sedgwick suggests that scholars still emphasize “a negative relation” to power in which dominant forms work to inhibit or stifle alternatives and in which the aim of politically engaged scholarship is to reveal those patterns of force.⁶⁷ Instead of aiming to expose such oppressions and calling for movement beyond these repressive structures, Sedgwick offers beside as another option. She seeks to open more room for thinking about how people engage in a wide range of ways with existing social frameworks: “desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.”⁶⁸ As opposed to thinking about subjectivity and emotional experience in relation to “a single bar,” what Butler often describes as “the law” and its repressive/prohibitive effects, Sedgwick emphasizes how the physiological sensations and psychological dynamics of affect both point toward the importance of social context in the emergence of individual feelings and how that context does not mechanically determine the character and texture of such feelings.⁶⁹ Even extremely negative and apparently destructive forms of affect, such as shame, might be thought of less as merely an effect of homophobic denigration (“‘toxic’ parts of a group or individual identity that can be excised”) than as a part of how identity is shaped and experienced that might be subject to “reframing, refiguration, transfiguration,” even eroticization.⁷⁰ Such feelings should not be dismissed as pathological or simply internalized self-hatred, but seen as potentially enabling kinds of relation and attachment – and as connecting to an unpredictable spectrum of other feelings – that do not necessarily line up with politically engaged intellectual models of proper identity or how to enact radical lifeways.

Sedgwick’s turn to affect is about creating additional possibilities for tracing how people, including marginalized and minoritized subjects, live within existing categories and institutional systems, how they work with and on such forms – touch them – but in ways that neither simply reaffirm those forms’ givenness nor necessarily outright refuse them. This approach attends to feelings phenomenologically – how they are experienced as part of being in the world – rather than diagnostically, as symptomatic of the operation of a kind of social structure whose dynamics are treated as more or less already analytically known beforehand.⁷¹ In this way, Sedgwick suggests that queer analysis can revalue a range of everyday forms of feeling, understanding them as worthy of discussion less because they are inherently nonnormative than because attending to them challenges ideas about how feelings, experiences of embodiment, and identifications are supposed to line up in (hetero)normative ways.

Minoritarian Feeling and the Limits of Closet Thinking

For Sedgwick, the closet represents how minoritizing and universalizing framings of (homo)sexuality are run into each other in ways that generate flexible forms of heterosexual privilege and that amplify the sense of sexual deviance as a proliferating and dangerous contagion. Conversely, queerness and affect offer ways of displacing this dynamic by emphasizing how feelings and identities don’t (need to) line up in predictable ways. Later scholars, though, have raised questions about how other kinds of minoritized identities fit into this understanding of the closet. Sedgwick’s formulation of the homosexual question – and, thus, of the closet – tends not ask how race and ongoing histories of empire shape the dynamics of denigration, secrecy/visibility, and feared contagion she describes. In addition to exploring further the possibilities of affect for queer intellectual and political work, including negative feelings like depression and rage, scholars also have considered the ways that desire and sensation – including queer forms – do not necessarily challenge existing systems of power and privilege but, instead, can serve as the vehicle for materializing and normalizing such systems.

How do racially minoritized queer and trans people negotiate their minoritization and the ways that straightness and whiteness are made to line up? José Esteban Muñoz describes such self-making as achieved through disidentification, which he characterizes as “the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” – such as through their nonwhiteness, non-Angloness, and non-straightness. Those strategies involve “working on and against” dominant ideals, images, and institutions by “scrambl[ing] and reconstruct[ing] the encoded message … in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recruits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications.”⁷² Disidentification collects and refashions various cultural materials and imaginings to create more livable kinds of subjectivity, individual and collective. Muñoz refers to that everyday labor as worldmaking, which “slic[es] into the façade of the real that is the majoritarian public sphere. Disidentificatory performances opt to do more than simply tear down the majoritarian public sphere. They disassemble that sphere … and use its parts to build an alternative reality.”⁷³ In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed suggests that to be oriented is to repeat familiar ways of doing things that have become familiar through their repetition. She notes, “Within the concept of direction is a concept of ‘straightness.’ To follow a line might be a way of becoming straight, by not deviating at any point”: “to be ‘in line’ is to direct one’s desires toward marriage and reproduction; to direct one’s desires toward the reproduction of the family line.” In this way, the nuclear family enacts a “process of alignment” that brings intimacy, reproduction, and placemaking into conjunction.⁷⁴ Such ways of creating lines of straightness extends to racial identity. Ahmed argues, “race would follow the vertical line of the conventional family tree. Genealogy itself could be understood as a straightening device, which creates the illusion of descent as a line,” and in doing so, whiteness comes to appear “as if it were a property of bodies.”⁷⁵ The family line plays a vital role in lining up racial identity as a status or set of qualities simply passed through families, and together, these intertwined alignments (normative reproduction and racial identity) make the historical and everyday dynamics of Euro-American social organization seem like just the common-sense facts of human procreation.

While these analyses of disidentification and (re/dis)orientation might be described as significant elaborations of Sedgwick’s discussion of the process of assembling and disassembling social norms, rereadings of her use of the figure of the closet have been more directly critical of the absences and gaps in Sedgwick’s account. They draw attention to how her framing of the closet largely edits out the formative roles played by race and empire in Euro-American ideologies of sexuality. Based on the idea of a lurking sexual perversity that has yet to be revealed, and that therefore threatens to contaminate others, the closet presumes a baseline of normality imperiled by the potential eruption of deviancy and/or its surreptitious corruption of the otherwise innocent/healthful. Yet, not only have people of color been seen as sexually aberrant due to their nonwhiteness, that supposed abnormality in terms of desires, intimate relationships, and family formations has been cast as illustrative of backwardness – as a sign of nonwhite barbarity from which Euro-Americans have progressed. As Greg Thomas argues, “The West can and does regard itself as universal without averting its gaze at all, for the dark body of the non-West is coded as an eternal sign of the inferior evolutionary development of non-white humanity.” Thus, in emphasizing the closet – and the dynamics of homo/heterosexual definition that swirl around its shifting dimensions – as central to understanding modern Western culture, Sedgwick indirectly reinvests in a West and the rest framework that, in Thomas’s terms, “rhetorically purifies sexuality of race, ignoring the history of racialization, which is simultaneously a history of sexualization.”⁷⁶

Attending to such ongoing histories of racialization involves considering how the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality is itself immersed within whiteness, how people of color are positioned as premodern, and how the relation between minoritizing and universalizing discourses works differently once one takes colonialism and the color-line into account. Euro-American ideas of sexuality and sexual normality emerge within social formations already defined by racial difference, such that, as Marlon B. Ross argues, the “homosexual subject” appears as “racially retarded” since “the perceived racial difference of an African or Asian male could be used to explain any putatively observed sexual deviance.” Beyond the figure of the closet, then, there is a need to attend to the “alternative sexual modernities” both generated by these processes of racialization and lived by people of color whose erotics, intimacies, and self-understandings do not simply follow the terms of dominant discourses of (white) sexual identity.⁷⁷ The figure of the closet also underemphasizes the extent to which articulations of (white) homosexuality rely on citations of and identifications with nonwhite persons and groups, who become a legitimizing metaphor for (white) sexual minorities – a similar dynamic as discussed earlier with regard to trans identities. As Hiram Pérez argues, “The privacy of the closet, of the epistemological and ontological spaces designated as inside, depends upon the publicity of the brown body,” from which white bodies are civilizationally differentiated while the brown body simultaneously serves as a figure of a premodern sexual license or freedom with which white queers can identify. Pérez further observes, “The consolidation of white privacy (shame, humility, civilization) remains contingent upon colonial and white supremacist violence, while covering the lost (primitive, shameless, perverse) sexuality projected onto the savage(d) body.”⁷⁸ Insofar as queer theory presents itself as resisting modes of heteronormalization, depictions of nonwhite others, Pérez suggests, are mobilized in ways that position them stereotypically as signs of unrestricted pleasure and the performance of an unconstrained shamelessness rather than as distinct, complex selves who are also engaged in processes of theorizing and who are subject to various forms of white oppression and aggression (including through what seems like celebratory identification). Conversely, as Jin Haritaworn illustrates, charges that people of color are homophobically and transphobically hateful collude in gentrification and criminalization by presenting them as impediments to (white) love and self-expression and, thus, needing to be monitored, policed, and displaced to make spaces safe for (white) queer and trans communities. Haritaworn argues that “in the panics over ‘dangerous places’ in queerly gentrifying cities such as London or Berlin, [white] queers from all over the global north become residents the minute they arrive, while those [communities of color] who have been there for generations are erased from dominant multicultural maps.” Instead, they are treated as “a perpetrator population” that is “always already seen as hateful, where hate functions as a racialised psy[chological] discourse.”⁷⁹

In a related vein, white queers present themselves as inheritors of Indigenous sexual and gender diversity in ways that erase the contemporary existence of Indigenous peoples as well as nonnatives’ participation in ongoing modes of settler colonial occupation. Scott Morgensen observes that nineteenth-century discourses “represent[ed] white subjects [categorized as sexually deviant] as degenerates who had regressed to earlier stages of racial evolution,” adding that many contemporary white queers have reclaimed that portrayal, “mak[ing] primitivity a resource that settler subjects access when asserting their national belonging.”⁸⁰ In casting themselves as bearers of a supposedly primitive kind of sexual deviancy, white queers can position themselves as modern heirs of Indigenous presence on the lands claimed by settler-states like the United States and Canada. Such gestures, including queer rural back-to-the-land movements and expressions of neo-paganism, assert “a relationship to Native land and culture that does not feel like the conquest that they know they inherit,” also presenting “an Indigenous nature” as fundamentally “driving queer politics.”⁸¹

Work over the past thirty years also has questioned the field’s implicit investment in what Jack Halberstam has characterized as metronormativity. Halberstam observes, “While the story of coming out tends to function as a temporal trajectory within which a period of disclosure follows a long period of repression, the metronormative story of migration from ‘country’ to ‘town’ is a spatial narrative within which the subject moves to a place of tolerance after enduring life in a place of suspicion, persecution, and secrecy.”⁸² That spatial distinction, though, is also temporal and racial. The non-urban appears as a place of backward, regressive whiteness. As Scott Herring indicates, “Metronormativity often appears as a travel narrative that demands a predetermined flight to the city; a mythological plot that imagines urbanized queer identity as a one-way trip to sexual freedom, to communal visibility, and to a gay village,” and this vision is partially powered by “the unfounded assumption that urbanized areas are more racially diverse and racially inclusive than ruralized ones.”⁸³ Moreover, it envisions that escape from rural spaces can be nothing other than liberating for queer and trans people. However, while Eli Clare notes, “My loss of home is about being queer,” he refers to his dislocation from that home space as “exile,” indicating “a sense of allegiance and connection – however ambivalent – to the place left behind, an attitude of mourning rather than of good riddance.” Clare also notes how the disdain for rural whites due to their supposed backwardness and investment in forms of racism and colonialism tells a deeply classist story in which they “are more complicit with environmental destruction [and other forms of violence] than the rest of us.”⁸⁴ Highly publicized instances of homophobic and transphobic violence in non-urban places, such as the murders of Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena, circulate as evidence of an atavistic and homicidal heterowhiteness that supposedly pervades what’s cast as the hinterlands. This story of urban sophistication, acceptance, and diversity effaces the oppressions and dispossessions at play in the city (including forms of gentrification in which white queers actively participate).⁸⁵ In addition, it casts the rural as a particularly concentrated space of sexual and gender normativity, effacing the long history in the twentieth century of seeking to impose heteronormative and cisnormative ideals on such areas as well as positioning the non-urban “as America’s perennial, tacitly taken-for-granted closet” (despite the fact that in such settings “sexual and gender nonconformity are widely known but treated as open secrets inappropriate for, or just too obvious to warrant, public conversation”).⁸⁶ Such metronormative assumptions also whitewash spaces outside the city, thereby rendering invisible the lives of queers and trans people of color in rural and suburban spaces. Attending to the suburbs, Karen Tongson argues, challenges the tendency, including in Sedgwick’s work, to associate the queer with the subcultural and the subcultural with the “politically radical.”⁸⁷ Instead of continually foregrounding a minoritized, white, urban, male homo avant-garde, there’s a need to acknowledge the presence of a wider range of queer and trans subjects in a wider range of places living in a wider range of ways that need not be understood as inherently politically transformative. As Tongson asks, “what happens when subjects opt in to one problematic context as they try to opt out of another?”⁸⁸

If Sedgwick’s later work seeks to think about kinds of feeling, living, and relating that go on beside dominant norms, rather than necessarily directly opposing them, later scholars have argued that such bad feelings (like humiliation, disgust, depression, and rage) can help in tracking the lived effects of ongoing histories of oppression and can provide insight into how minoritized persons and peoples work to create livable lives for themselves. Such analysis also helps reframe what counts as a political activity or response. Ann Cvetkovich asks, “What if depression, in the Americas at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all our lives”? She contrasts this perspective with a common pattern on the Left, including in queer and trans activisms, “of assuming that the expression of feeling has to become something else to make it count as political,” “looking for a deeper meaning or a ‘real’ politics that lies elsewhere” than in “emotional expression.”⁸⁹ In her earlier work, Cvetkovich suggests that trauma can be understood as giving rise to broader networks of queer relation that respond to the consequences of existing forms of heteropatriarchy and institutionalized homophobia. Among the “trauma cultures” Cvetkovich addresses are lesbian survivors of sexual abuse, AIDS activists, and caretakers of people with HIV/AIDS, and she suggests that they “maintain a place for shame and perversion within public discourses of sexuality rather than purging them of their messiness in order to make them acceptable.”⁹⁰ Engaging the historical construction and everyday experience of blackness, Darieck Scott argues that the kinds of feelings that white supremacy produces can do valuable work as part of Black self-making. He argues that “to be black means to have-been-blackened, to have been rendered abject,” a process he characterizes as “the queerness” of Black histories and which he contrasts with the idea of “an ostensibly liberated black wholeness” that imagines itself as utterly breaking free from “a history of sexual domination.”⁹¹ Rather than arguing for the importance of an unviolated sense of selfhood, Scott suggests that a “willing embrace of the defeat, abjection, and violation that blackness inescapably is” as a result of these formative histories allows one to access another kind of power not based on mastery of self or others – one that “provides an opportunity for different configurations of gender and sexuality” not predicated on Euro-American models of personhood.⁹²

In a similar vein, we might question notions of pride that emphasize “the need to resist damage and affirm queer existence” and of transition that cast it as an “entrée into a kind of gender euphoria.”⁹³ Efforts to cast queer and trans identity in a purely affirmative mode efface the accretive emotional effects of continuing denigration and discrimination while also creating a normative image of proper subjectivity that denies the range of ways of living queerness and transness. Heather Love insists that “the outrages and humiliations of gay and lesbian history” need to be addressed, particularly given the ways they continue to shape “the ongoing suffering of those not borne up by the rising tide of gay normalization.” Such supposedly “[b]ackward feelings” of shame and humiliation “indicate continuities between the bad gay past and the present” while “show[ing] up the inadequacy of queer narratives of progress.”⁹⁴ Hil Malatino tracks the ways that negative feelings are part of “a trans technology of survival.”⁹⁵ For example, he suggests that “[r]age is a legitimate response to significant existential impediments, to roadblocks that minimize, circumscribe, and reduce one’s possibilities.” Such a response “seeks to transform, and destroy, such impediments,” and, similarly, “burnout” speaks to trans negotiations of authority in medical contexts in which trans subjects’ “epistemic authority” is discounted and in which “need and debt” structures the experience.⁹⁶ More than highlighting how individual experiences can fail to line up with both dominant ideals and homonormative/transnormative ones, bad feelings also can become the basis for forms of collectivity. Addressing the work of the organization Gay Shame in San Francisco, Eric Stanley emphasizes how an “affective commons” can emerge around the effects “of the devastation of racial capitalism’s modes of extraction,” including the participation and investment of state-recognized LGBT institutions, like community centers, in programs of gentrification. As against such bids for inclusion that help normalize other forms of structural violence, Stanley suggests that Gay Shame generates a “commons of hate” – a “motley assembly of outsiders, freaks, and queers” that is sustained less by a program of advocacy than rage at LGBT efforts to accommodate dominant social and economic frameworks.⁹⁷ Bad feelings, then, point toward continuing inequities, the phenomenological experience of living amid them, the emotionally complex dynamics of disidentification from existing norms, and the lessons learned about possibilities for collective care and worldmaking amid such processes (even if those possibilities don’t look like proper political organizing).

At the Edge of the Human

In different ways, both Butler and Sedgwick address the question of how embodied beings come to be understood as human. They trace the dynamics of intelligibility through which kinds of desires, feelings, sensations, and experiences of embodiment are seen as expressive of personhood or as indicative of perversion/monstrosity. Queer and trans work in disability studies and on the distinction between the human and nonhuman can be seen as building on Butler and Sedgwick’s work, even indirectly, in considering how heteronormativity and cisnormativity shape the terms of intelligibility for personhood, how bodily traits and dispositions line up in ways that allow someone to be understood as fully human (and, conversely, how the boundaries of that category are policed with regard to gender and sexuality), and how other modes of being and becoming live on beside these institutionalized conceptions of personhood.

Disability studies starts from the premise that the concept of disability less refers to some particular set of supposed impairments than the fact that particular bodyminds are cast as lacking in relation to a naturalized ideal of physical and mental processes.⁹⁸ Within what is termed the “medical model” of disability, “the proper approach to disability is to ‘treat’ the condition and the person with the condition rather than ‘treating’ the social processes and policies that constrict disabled people’s lives.” By contrast, in the “political/relational model” adopted in disability studies (also known as “the social model”), as Alison Kafer observes, “the problem of disability no longer resides in the minds or bodies of individuals but in built environments and social patterns that exclude or stigmatize particular kinds of bodies, minds, and ways of being.”⁹⁹ Such physical and social infrastructures take a particular vision of personhood as the baseline for normal bodily and mental functioning, treating that image as expressive of an asocial and ahistorical notion of health. This set of assumptions, in which those cast as disabled are seen as failing to live up to that image, can be described as ablebodiedness or ablenormativity. The idea that disability equals deficit comes along with the aim to cure such deficits, to eliminate them in the name of health and well-being. As Eli Clare suggests, “At the center of cure lies eradication and the many kinds of violence that accompany it.” Such medicalized ideologies and interventions are of a piece and work in tandem with a broader range of normalizing conceptions of the body: “The medical-industrial complex is an overwhelming thicket. It has become the reigning authority over our body-minds .… It shapes our understandings of health and well-being, disability and disease. It establishes sex and gender .… It diagnoses, treats, and manages the human life cycle as a series of medical events.”¹⁰⁰ More than creating distinctions between the healthy and those deemed “‘defective,’ ‘deviant,’ and ‘sick’” in ways that “have been used to justify discrimination against people whose bodies, minds, desires, and practices differ from the unmarked norm,” such notions of the normal themselves historically emerge out of more explicitly eugenic discourses in which “fears and anxieties about disability” have been embedded in ideas about “reproductive futurity” – “concerns about the future of the ‘race’ and the future of the nation.”¹⁰¹ In addition to attributing feeblemindedness to people of color, linking it to claims about their supposed incapacity to uphold white conceptions of sexual and gender order, as Ryan Lee Cartwright notes, “Eugenicists understood same-sex sexuality, interracial sex, and gender transgression, among other forms of deviance, to be evidence of low intelligence and irresponsibility that afflicted white people” and that, consequently, needed to be contained, disciplined, and prevented from being spread through reproduction.¹⁰² Thus, not only do ideologies of (dis)ability intersect with norms around gender and sexuality, they arise out of a racializing, eugenicist concern about the proper form and future of the species.

People with disabilities also are perceived as having aberrant sexualities and genders. As Anna Mollow and Robert McRuer observe, “the sexuality of disabled people is typically depicted in terms of either tragic deficiency or freakish excess,” and efforts to conceptualize and represent disabled people as erotic beings run against the grain of “a liberal conception of disability as squeaky-clean and respectable,” one in which disabled persons are not supposed to be sexually desiring.¹⁰³ In this vein, Tobin Siebers insists, “The point is to ask how the ideology of ability determines how we think about sex,” recognizing the ways that disabled people “represent disability not as a defect that needs to be overcome to have sex but as a complex embodiment that enhances sexual activities and pleasures” – including remapping the “limited erogenous zones” envisioned within “normative sexuality.”¹⁰⁴ Moreover, not only have deviant sexuality and gender nonconformity historically been seen as indicative of intellectual disability, but nonnormative desires and genders in disabled people are often seen as merely an effect of their constrained mental dynamics. In their study of autism as a mode of neuroqueerness, Melanie Yergeau insists that they “are unwilling to accept research that would attribute [autistic people’s] gender identities to ableist ideas such as ‘lacks conceit of self and other.’” Yergeau also observes that autistic practices such as “stimming – repetitive motions that might include body rocking and hand flapping – was (and still is) frequently regarded as masturbatory and sexually perverse,” thus needing to be prevented.¹⁰⁵ Part of that process of containment often involves Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA), which seeks to reorganize autistic physicalities into more normative social patterns. That project also involves the “attempt to straighten” autistic people – and others subjected to the treatment – in ways that “reinforce stereotypical and cis/heteronormative behaviors,” a dynamic that is particularly notable given the prominent history and role of ABA in “attempts to defeminize gender-nonconforming children.”¹⁰⁶ Moreover, gender normativity itself can prove elusive to disabled people, since “the mannerisms that help define gender – the ways in which people walk, swing their hips, gesture with their hands, move their mouths and eyes as they talk, take up space with their bodies – are all based upon how nondisabled people move.” Clare adds, “The construction of gender depends not only upon the male body and female body, but also upon the nondisabled body.”¹⁰⁷

When considered together, queerness, transness, and disability further can extend as well as disorient each other’s framings in ways that complicate ideas of embodiment, cure, and critique. Foregrounding disability, for example, helps bring into focus a critique of what Abby Wilkerson has described as “normative sex,” the ways understandings of eroticism depend on a range of social presumptions – including ideas of bodily integrity and what actions count as sex – that are mediated to a large extent by medical assumptions that depend on “the heteropatriarchal sex/gender binary.”¹⁰⁸ In its attention to kinds of felt experience that do not fit available social categories, queer analysis can help in figuring forms of disability that do not fit conventional models of impairment. Discussing efforts to characterize and conceptualize chronic pain, particularly with respect to the difficulty of physically locating it as well as its temporality, Michael Snediker observes that queer theory facilitates a “poetics of phenomenology” due to its habit of addressing “the difficulty posed to thinking by objects about which one doesn’t quite know how or what to think” – the dynamics of entities, relations, and sensations that are “neither-quite-subject-nor-object.”¹⁰⁹ This effort to articulate the nowhereness/everywhereness of chronic pain also speaks to the multilayered desire for a bodymind free from agony, disease, and debility. Even while raising sustained questions about the ways medicine promises to eliminate disability, “routinely turning body-minds into medical objects and creating lies about normal and natural,” Clare notes the importance of medical technologies in his own transition, indicating the messiness of the felt tensions between “my lifelong struggle to live my disabled self exactly as it is with my use of medical technology to reshape my gendered and sexed body-mind.”¹¹⁰ Ideologies of cure, then, are violently normalizing while also pointing toward chemical and surgical interventions that can alleviate (or at least reduce) suffering and at times can create a greater sense of bodily and mental wholeness. Conversely, efforts to distinguish transness from mental illness, especially in the wake of transition, can end up displacing complex ongoing feelings of, in Cameron Awkward-Rich’s terms, maladjustment. Not only are trans phenomena explicitly excluded from coverage under the Americans with Disabilities Act,¹¹¹ but efforts to refuse psychiatric oversight of access to gender-affirming care can end up “reaffirming the sanity/health of trans people” such that public validation of the trans experience can “hinge on whether it can be effectively decoupled from pathology, mental illness, and feeling bad.” Awkward-Rich notes that, while “ostensibly meant to open up space for politics,” such representation “disavows bad feeling” in ways that leave unaddressed “the task of learning how to live with, through, and despite” such feeling and that create a vision of “the good trans subject” as “one who can get over it.”¹¹² Considering transness as a form of debility, Alexandre Baril observes that his own “dysphoria is as psychologically disabling as my other mental disabilities,” suggesting how trans experience may point toward forms of disability that are “not merely a consequence of ableism.”¹¹³

Work in queer and trans studies, though, also has emphasized the ways that disability encompasses not only bodyminds that diverge from normative standards but the “unnatural” effects of “war, toxic landfills, childhood abuse, and poverty.”¹¹⁴ Jasbir Puar emphasizes the “promot[ion of] disability empowerment” by the same political and economic systems that create “the precarity of certain bodies and populations precisely through making them available for maiming.” She tracks “how the global north holds the key to the liberalization of disability while the global south bears the brunt of its weaponization,” in terms of the mechanisms of warfare, imperial occupation, and capitalist extraction.¹¹⁵ In these ways, disability marks not only the disjunction between normative conceptions of health and a range of lived bodily/mental states, but also the political, economic, and imperial distinctions made between persons and populations cast as subjects of care/rights/state protection and those deemed sacrificable.

Further contesting dominant ideas of the human, scholars have explored how queer and trans analysis can highlight ideas about species difference and the forms of hierarchy built into such ideas. As with Butler’s argument that sex was gender all along, the representation of heterosexuality, monogamous union, and dimorphic sexual difference as all biologically inherent has been shown to depend on historically specific cultural assumptions. Not only does same-sex eroticism occur in hundreds of species, the concept of sex itself is changeable given that numerous species move between “sexes” in terms of their role in reproduction, with members of some species containing multiple “sexes” at the same time.¹¹⁶ In fact, “the majority of living organisms on this planet would make little sense of the human classification of two sexes,” much less of an understanding of transness as “based upon a conceptual separation of nature and culture.”¹¹⁷ Moreover, the sociobiological insistence on heterogendered pairing as the center and motor of evolution can be traced back to early Enlightenment discourses of European gendered hierarchy, in which “the natural right of humans over animals” mirrors “the right of the father in civil society.”¹¹⁸ Presumptions of heterocouplehood have shaped/skewed the interpretation of behavioral data from studies of animals while also contributing to racializing frameworks in which sexual difference and monogamy have been used as tools to measure relative evolutionary advancement among human populations.¹¹⁹

Heteronormative and cisnormative dynamics still often are portrayed as themselves a result of evolutionary progress, as signaling the difference from nonhuman animals and marking the superiority of Homo sapiens as a species. This employment of sexuality and gender to mark human identity and evolutionary development cannot be severed from the ongoing history of using these same metrics to privilege whiteness as the apex of civilizational advancement. As Mel Chen has argued, an animacy hierarchy shapes how “objects, animals, substances, and spaces are assigned constrained zones of possibility and agency.” Those distinctions involve attributing lesser ability to affect the world to other entities while claiming a right by ostensibly more animate beings to control, regulate, and own less animate ones. This spectrum has allowed for racialized populations to be cast as less animate, as less fully human and less endowed with natural and acquired capacities for engaging the world, suggesting the role “comparative racisms” play in attributions of relative development – including when gender and sexuality feature as evidence of such (in)capacity. Chen further contends that intellectual strategies of queering “can work to blur the tenuous hierarchy of human-animal-vegetable-mineral” by challenging hierarchies attributed to natural development.¹²⁰ As Chen and Dana Luciano note, “‘full humanity’ has never been the only horizon for queer becoming,” and queer analysis can draw attention to how “the very possibility of making a distinction between human and nonhuman” historically has depended on modes of (racializing) “dehumanization.”¹²¹

Queer and trans scholarship has sought to open up possibilities that sit beside and trouble homogenizing notions of human exceptionality. For example, rather than viewing forms of gender-affirming bodily modification as the mutilation of natural bodily wholeness, Eva Hayward compares such alterations to a starfish’s capacity to remake itself, seeing trans processes of becoming as illustrating “the reach and possibility of our layered experience” in ways that enact a complex “ongoing relationship with the world” that is also transspecies.¹²² Additionally, in the face of climate change and what Neel Ahuja refers to as late-carbon capitalism, an attention to the queer intimacies produced by “racialized forms of carbon privilege” that shape “social and biological precarity” can challenge Global North narratives of contagion in which both persons (such as migrants) and other species (such as mosquitos) are cast as invasive parasites. Instead, queer analysis can offer accounts of the kinds of “interspecies entanglement” produced by fossil fuel consumption and the “casual reproduction of forms of ecological violence” (in which queer and trans people in the Global North also participate).¹²³

Conclusion

Looking back at two of the most influential and iconic figures from the 1990s helps provide a sense of the intellectual trajectories of queer and trans studies as they emerged as academic fields. Butler’s theorization of “sex” as a function of how gender operates within a heteronormative matrix, insistence on the performativity of sex/gender/sexuality, and attention to the ways humanness emerges through the ways bodies are rendered normatively intelligible and Sedgwick’s attention to how sexual identity oscillates between minoritizing and universalizing frames, foregrounding of what doesn’t line up within extant cultural narratives of sexuality, and tracking of complex affects and bad feelings that don’t directly contribute to an oppositional politics still do important work within queer and trans studies. Scholars continue to engage with, build on, and critique Butler’s and Sedgwick’s formulations and approaches. Their work considers the ongoing processes through which ideas of health, family, embodiment, and proper social roles are constructed, circulated, fused to each other, and naturalized. In doing so, they seek to open room for thinking about and representing sexual and gender minorities in nonpathologizing ways.

While incredibly generative, those intellectual projects also can be somewhat overly optimistic about the inherent radicalness of such (implicitly white) minority positions and can underemphasize the role of other social dynamics – such as racialization and empire – in shaping how gender and sexuality work. Other scholars have traced how race, class, migration, imperialism/colonialism, disability, and species difference can complicate, reorganize, and reimagine Sedgwick’s and Butler’s frameworks. In addition to challenging what some have seen as the dematerializing of trans lives within queer studies, scholars have raised questions about the ways articulations of gender nonconformity can rely on imperial figurations (or at least can efface the geopolitical implications of how transition is envisioned) and the (racial and colonial) limits of notions of “transgender community,” as well as developed structural frameworks for engaging how gender is produced within overlapping administrative systems. Work in queer and trans studies also has explored the historiographic and demographic limits of “the closet,” the problems of metronormative methodologies, and the importance of moving beyond positive narratives of pride and transition.

Exploring Butler’s and Sedgwick’s ideas and their import for later thinkers, conversations, and debates, though, is not the same as presenting them as originary. As Kadji Amin notes, there needs to be “a reckoning with the field’s affective haunting by the inaugural moment of the U.S. 1990s.” That haunting has to do with an idealizing linkage of “understandings of same-sex sexuality,” and one might add gender-nonconforming identity, with “social transformation, political futurity, [and] more egalitarian social relations.”¹²⁴ Even as work over the past twenty years has developed and dissented from Butler’s and Sedgwick’s oeuvre from the 1990s and early 2000s, they remain touchstones of a particular period in which queer and trans studies took shape as such, and their ideas and the issues to which they drew scholarly attention continue to resonate powerfully, in ways both haunting and inspiring.