I can’t remember the first time I heard the word queer – or trans/transgender, for that matter. With queer, it probably was hurled at me as a slur on some playground or in some school hallway (although fag was the preferred term of denigration). While I’m also not sure when I first encountered the reclaimed, defiant sense of queer, I do recall shouting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re fabulous, don’t fuck with us” at any number of demonstrations across the 1990s. I think it’s safe to say that I’m part of the first queer studies generation. I started college only two years after the publication of the field-making double feature of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), only a year after Teresa de Lauretis coined the phrase queer theory in print (1991).1 During those same years, I read Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw (1995) and was transformed by Leslie Feinberg’s fictionalized autobiographical novel Stone Butch Blues (1993). This period is my intellectual coming-of-age, when I came to the world- and self-remaking realization that sexuality, gender, all of it, is socially constructed, that my ingrained sense of the natural was learned and historically built, and that, as a result, maybe any number of things around me – and possibly in me – might be changeable (or at least less invariably embedded and intractable as they seemed). This heady, 1990s sense of possibility, and of the ways intellectual work can reshape consciousness, has for the last several decades continued to orient my relation to queer and trans studies as scholarly fields, which is the subject of this book.
What do queer and trans studies do? What conclusions do they offer? What do queer or trans mean, and how do we know them when we see them (or are them)? Queer at its broadest refers not solely to homosexuality, homoeroticism, or whatever lies outside dominant straightness, but also to the critique of ideological and institutional structures that present “opposite sex” desire, monogamous couplehood and marriage, and the nuclear family household as inherently natural, healthful, and necessary for human development and thriving. Such structures can be called heteronormativity. In a similar vein, trans can be said not only to refer to persons whose self-perceived and lived gender is different than the gender conventionally assumed for the sex that person was assigned at birth (usually based on an assessment of the infant’s, or fetus’s, genitalia), but also to the critique of ideological and institutional structures that presume a necessary, natural congruence between body shape/physiology, gendered self-expression, and social role. Those structures can be called cisnormativity (cis in Lain means on this side, as opposed to trans as a movement across).2 We also might describe queer and trans analysis and critique as allied, although not identical in their foci, aims, and methods. Having offered these initial definitions, my goal in the rest of the book is to expand, complicate, reframe, and challenge them. Much of the work of queer and trans studies lies not so much in trying to provide clear terms and definitive answers as, instead, finding ways of seeking to understand, sit with, work through, and live in the general conceptual and political messiness of the world. That messiness includes the complexities, unruliness, contradictions, and multilayered possibilities of identity, power, privilege, desire, and embodiment as well as the difficulties, debates, and disagreements involved in envisioning and pursuing more equitable and just relations.
That being said, we might start out with the idea of treating queer and trans less as identities than as analytics. To understand them as identities suggests that these terms refer to kinds of persons whose belonging to that group is based on particular criteria, such as sexual object-choice (the sex of the persons whom you desire) or gender expression (the ways you enact your gender, especially if it’s not consistent with the gender attributed to your body at birth). While we might talk about how ideas about who belongs to those categories change over time, or about how those categories (as well as related ones) emerge historically, intellectual work that is identity-based would treat these categories (or similar ones) as the primary starting point and organizing framework. Thinking about queer and trans as analytics, though, means that these areas of study pose particular kinds of questions and provide tools for thinking about a range of topics: they are modes of analysis rather than (solely) kinds of identity that attach to a specific group of persons or that provide the basis for those persons to see themselves as belonging to a coherent group.
What, then, defines queer and trans modes of analysis or determines whether something belongs in queer and trans studies? In addressing this question, we can turn to two early-ish writings in these fields that foreground and elaborate the distinction between identity and analytic in ways that center questions of inclusion/exclusion and their implications – Cathy Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens” (1997) and Emi Koyama’s “Whose Feminism Is It Anyway?” (2006). In her ground-clearing essay, Cohen takes “queer” intellectual and activist work to task not only for their implicit whiteness but for the ways they largely envision queer as naming an identity formation rather than offering a broad-based critique of processes of normalization. While at its best queer foregrounds “the socially constructed nature of sexuality and sexual categories, but also the varying degrees and multiple sites of power distributed within all categories of sexuality,” “queer politics has often been built around a simple dichotomy between those deemed queer and those deemed heterosexual.” In presuming a unified identity, that binary ignores the distinctions in power and privilege among those who might be understood as queer, including class and racial differences, as well as attendant forms of racism and classism among queers and in queer spaces. Moreover, that simple dichotomy – straight versus queer – rests on an “unchallenged assumption of a uniform heteronormativity from which all heterosexuals benefit.”3 Queer, then, refers to those who are not heterosexual, leaving aside the ways the “‘nonnormative’ procreation patterns and family structures of people who are labeled heterosexual have also been used to regulate and exclude them.” Attending to the legacies of enslavement, including the racialized figure of the welfare queen, Cohen illustrates that, while many people of color may be classified as straight, conceptions of sexual deviance have been attached to people of color regardless of their sexual object choice. In this way, we can see the “roots of heteronormativity in white supremacist ideologies,” and although Cohen is dubious about the capacity of queer thinking and activism to address these issues, her argument demonstrates how queer analysis can move beyond identity in important and productive ways.4 In a resonant vein, Koyama’s essay shows how engaging transness opens toward a searching analysis of the politics of the category of woman. Addressing the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s policy that only allowed entry to “womyn-born-womyn,” directly excluding trans people, Koyama argues, “most if not all rationales for excluding transsexual women are not only transphobic, but also racist. To argue that transsexual women should not enter the Land [where the festival was staged] because their experiences are different would have to assume that all other women’s experiences are the same, and this is a racist assumption.” She adds, “white skin is just as much a reminder of violence as a penis.”5 The exclusion of trans women not only de facto defines women in biological ways (itself questionable as a feminist position), it posits a unity of experience based on shared womanness that effaces differences within that category, forms of privilege and oppression among “women” around those differences, and the significance of relations with others who share those identities that exceed the category of woman. Starting from the exclusion of trans people, Koyama’s analysis turns toward highlighting the politics of naturalized gender identity and its alignment with whiteness.
As opposed to foregrounding identities, then, the Introduction approaches queer and trans as kinds of intellectual frameworks that raise questions about sexuality and gender as concepts and categories, illustrating what comes into view when one ceases to treat them as obvious or commonsensical. As they have emerged, accrued, and changed over the past three decades or so, queer and trans studies seek to trouble the presumed clarity of what “sexuality” and “gender” mean and do. In contrast to an ethos of ethical and political transparency that often seems to dominate popular and activist discourses, the implicit sense that there is a correct kind of analysis or framework that if adopted in and of itself can resolve all disagreements and provide an unimpeachable way forward toward justice, this volume is invested in exploring the intractable messiness of social life and the difficulties involved in trying to say something meaningful about it. Here I mean that questions of how power works, how institutionalized forces shape forms of individual and collective experience, how intimate life and felt embodiment articulate to public languages and systems, how multiple kinds of struggle might connect, and how varied projects of critique and seeking to live life otherwise rub and run up against each other and evade simple, unitary formulations. This book, then, aims to highlight the ways queer and trans studies have sought to speak to urgent issues in the world while also holding onto a sense of its irresolvable, multidimensional complexity. It shows how these fields in troubling ideas about the givenness of sexuality and gender also upend a wide range of other conventional givens about personhood, peoplehood, what a fairer world would entail, how we understand our places within that world and this one, and how to get there. I spend a good deal of time tracing specific lines of argument to illustrate queer and trans thought in its thinking, the how through which these fields navigate and unsettle the social landscapes we inhabit while also being reflexive about the limits of their own conceptual tools. That searching sense of undoing the taken-for-granted and seeking to attend to the crises people have been and are living in while not knowing beforehand exactly what will come to matter or where intellectual work will take you seems a hallmark of queer and trans scholarship. More than any specific content, that sense is the takeaway for readers.
As one might expect, there are any number of ways to tell the story of what these fields have been and keep becoming. The story I aim to tell is centered on how, moving beyond the hetero/homo and cis/trans binaries, scholarship in these fields addresses how what we think we know about sexuality and gender is inevitably crossed by and constitutively intertwined with race, class, ability, nationality, religion, ambient ecologies, and extant political and economic systems. The discussion offered here is rooted in a refusal to understand sexuality and gender, or queer and trans, as indicative of a single-issue politics that seeks to isolate a category of discrimination/oppression and to consolidate those subjected to it as a unified group so as to advocate on their behalf. Queer and trans as modes of analysis provide frameworks for understanding how sexual and gender identities themselves are shaped by and experienced through other kinds of identity. Perhaps more importantly, though, work in queer and trans studies has provided tools for tracing how dynamics of sexuality and gender are crucial to the making and sustaining of racial, capitalist, and imperial formations. This book aims to address queer and trans work in the humanities and qualitative social sciences over the last thirty years (particularly coming out of the United States) while resonating with where these fields’ current energies are, in many ways reading backward from the present to generate a usable past for these adjacent, often aligned, but not interchangeable areas of study.
An Introduction to Introductions
I’ve been suggesting that queer and trans studies – and this introduction to them – are less invested in providing a window onto queer and trans persons (however defined) than raising questions about the assumptions, organizing principles, and erasures at play in existing (dominant?) ways of thinking about gender and sexuality. In this vein, in offering a survey of some of the major intellectual strategies in these fields that can help orient readers, I’d like to turn to other introductions that illustrate how these ideas have been developed, reshaped, and contested over the years. Whether to collections of essays or as freestanding monographs (like this one), such introductions themselves reflect on the state of these fields and articulate major trends within them. In this way, a survey of a collection of important introductions can provide a sense of how queer and trans analytics have been understood and of significant ways these areas have been theorized as fields of study.
The question of the capaciousness of queer and trans studies, the extent to which they can develop multidimensional models of subjectivity and oppression, has been a concern of these fields from the beginning. While often presented as a later turn, some of the earliest introductions foreground issues of what we might term intersectionality – the mutually defining copresence of varied kinds of identity and domination – as central to queer and trans analysis.6 In her initial discussion of “queer theory,” a phrase she invented, Teresa de Lauretis presents this incipient area of study as seeking to “problematize some of the discursive constructions and constructed silences in the emergent field of ‘gay and lesbian studies,’” and one of the principal silences is with regard to race: “The difference made by race in self-representation and identity argue for the necessity to examine, question, or contest the usefulness and/or the limitations of current discourses on lesbian and gay sexualities.”7 In this early articulation of queer as a scholarly concept, it appears as a way of opening up what constitutes the study of “sexualities” by raising questions about the scope and character of gay and lesbian as an organizing frame, particularly drawing attention to the silences within existing intellectual and political formulations. More than seeking simply to add additional constituencies to these existing categories, queer gestures toward the need to think in different ways about identity and representation, suggesting that attending to race, for example, alters how we conceptualize sexuality. This kind of intellectual work
not only illuminates how various dimensions of social experience – race, sexuality, ethnicity, diaspora, gender – can cut across or transect one another resulting in their potential mutual transformation; it also “queers” the status of sexual orientation as itself the authentic and centrally governing category of queer practice, thus freeing up queer theory as a way of reconceiving not just the sexual, but the social in general.8
The editors of the special issue “Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender” (1997) present queer analysis as part of a process of decentering “sexual orientation” as a stand-alone issue/identity in favor of addressing how various kinds of identity and forms of social positioning transect and coconstitute each other.
From this perspective, queer studies entails less the analysis of sexuality per se (sexual identity or specifically gay and lesbian persons) than the consideration of how sexuality as a category or concept necessarily operates within a wider set of social relations, also reciprocally understanding the form and content of sexuality (whatever it might mean) as shaped by that complex network of relations. If queer studies addresses transections among identities and struggles against domination and the silences produced by conventional models and discourses of sexual identity, that set of concerns leads toward an analysis of how Euro-American notions of sexuality have also been an important part of projects of empire. As the editors of the collection “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” (2005) observe, work in the field “has examined the numerous ways in which racialized heteropatriarchy has been universalized as a Western discourse of (sexual) development, as a project of modernity and modernization, as a colonial and civilizing mission, as an index of political and social advancement, and as a story of human liberty and freedom.”9 Western formulations of proper sexuality (which themselves are shaped around racial ideals and imperial histories) bolster the West’s narrative of its own superiority, as contrasted with nonwestern deviance and backwardness, and such ideals also help shape forms of Western intervention, seeking to reorganize dynamics of eroticism, intimacy, household-formation, and kinship in other places. Some of the introductions take other scholarship in the field to task for failing to engage these issues and for de facto centering whiteness and promoting Eurocentrism, but the engagement with race and empire in these introductions indicates that part of “the political promise of the term [queer has] resided specifically in its broad critique of multiple social antagonisms, including race, gender, class, nationality, and religion in addition to sexuality.”10
Similar concerns have shaped the direction of trans studies. As Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (2013) indicate, “Gender is not merely the representation in language and culture of a biological sex; it is also an administrative or bureaucratic structure for the management of sexual difference and reproductive capacity,” and in this way, “transgender is intimately bound up with questions of nation, territory, and citizenship, with categories of belonging and exclusion, of excess and incorporation, and with all the processes through which individual corporealities become aggregated as bodies politic.”11 Transgender here does not simply provide a collective way of naming a variety of kinds of gender identity and expression (particularly those deemed nonnormative because they do not accord with what is taken to be a person’s biological sex). Rather, the term speaks to the broader processes through which gender is defined, through which it is attached to notions of supposedly innate sexual difference, through which such definition and difference affect the management of social and biological reproduction, and the implications of all of those dynamics for how persons are grouped together and regulated within administrative and legal structures. More than highlighting particular embodiments and experiences of gendered selfhood, trans studies considers how ideologies of gendered embodiment intertwine with the numerous other ways bodies are given meaning within (and are managed by) social and political systems. Even as trans studies opens possibilities for addressing a wide range of processes of gendering and conceptions of embodiment, both intimately felt and imposed, scholars also stress the problems of treating transgender, or any other category of gender variance, as if it were universally applicable. As Susan Stryker notes in the introduction to the first Transgender Studies Reader (2006),
The conflation of many types of gender variance into the single shorthand term “transgender,” particularly when this collapse into a single genre of personhood crosses the boundaries that divide the West from the rest of the world, holds both peril and promise. It is far too easy to assimilate non-Western configurations of personhood into Western constructs of sexuality and gender, in a manner that recapitulates the power structures of colonialism.12
In the second edition, Stryker and Aizura ask, “What kinds of questions and practices, then, can transgender studies offer that advance an anti-colonialist agenda, and that resist the subsumption of non-western configurations of personhood into western-dominant frameworks that privilege either ‘homo’ or ‘trans,’ or assume the ontological given-ness of the concepts man and woman? What might an anti-colonial or decolonizing transgender studies look like?”13 In addition to tracking how gender and the distinction between sexed bodies is constructed in ways that affect and are affected by other kinds of identification, work in trans studies further traces the silences created by treating Euro-American terms and concepts as common sense, instead seeking to envision possibilities beyond such colonial interpellation and erasure.
As suggested by the discussion thus far, these fields both aim to challenge assumptions about the givenness of sexual and gender identities. The term transsexual was popularized in the 1950s by Harry Benjamin as a way of talking about persons who sought to change their sex through surgical intervention (what previously was called a sex change), as opposed to transvestites who sought pleasure through cross-dressing but did not seek to live as or become the other sex. In the 1990s, transgender came to represent “a political alliance between all individuals who were marginalized or oppressed due to their difference from social norms of gendered embodiment,” potentially including those who were described (and described themselves) as transsexuals.14 Inclusion in the category of transgender, though, did not and does not assume a desire for gender-affirmative surgery and can include persons who do not see themselves as men or women (often using the term non-binary). In opening up possibilities for thinking about a range of kinds of gendered embodiment and possibilities for transition, as Stryker observes, “Transgender phenomena call into question both the stability of the material referent ‘sex’ and the relationship of that unstable category to the linguistic, social, and psychical category of ‘gender.’”15 Those questions, she suggests, are central to formulating the work of trans studies as a field, which
broadly conceived, … is concerned with anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes visible the normative linkages we generally assume to exist between the biological specificity of the sexually differentiated human body, the social roles and statuses that a particular form of body is expected to occupy, and subjectively experienced relationship between a gendered sense of self and social expectations of gender-role performance, and the cultural mechanisms that work to sustain or thwart specific configurations of gendered personhood.16
Thus, rather than solely attending to persons who might be characterized as transsexual or transgender, this area of study aims to contest the supposed obviousness of biological sex, gendered social roles, and gendered self-understanding and the presumed relations among them while also highlighting the networks of principles, practices, and policies through which such notions of gendered personhood are made to appear self-evident. This project of disrupting and denaturalizing sex/gender offers a “political imaginary that moves beyond a rights-and-representation based framework,” one where the goal would be to advocate for a clearly delimited marginalized group to be recognized by the state as the subject of rights and of anti-discrimination protection.17 In contrast to that conception of transgender, trans studies considers the shifting and layered ways sex and gender are (re)made as social categories and the implications of those processes for various experiences of embodiment and gendered selfhood.
Queer studies also shifts away from a focus on “identifiable subjects laying claim to liberal rights, recognition, normalization, and inclusion.”18 It engages systems of power that produce and naturalize ideologies of identity, eroticism, health, and homemaking. Annamarie Jagose (1996) notes, “It is difficult to think of ‘homosexuality’ not as a self-evidently descriptive term for certain identifications or inclinations but as a historically and culturally contingent category,” adding, “It is particularly hard to denaturalise something like sexuality, whose very claim to naturalisation is intimately connected with an individual sense of self, with the way in which each of us imagines our own sexuality to be primary, elemental and private.”19 Considering the contingency of the identities through which we characterize ourselves and others not only opens the potential for challenging their apparent obviousness but directs attention toward the institutional and ideological dynamics that create and sustain that sense of obviousness. In this vein, Nikki Sullivan (2003) suggests that “a deconstructive analysis would highlight the inherent instability of the terms, as well as enabling an analysis of the culturally and historically specific ways in which the terms and the relation between them have developed, and the effects they have produced.”20 In this sense, a queer approach not only contests the naturalness of heterosexuality (as opposed to, say, simply challenging the supposed deviance of homosexuality) but addresses the ways the differential distinction between the two – the hetero/homo binary itself – means that the one depends on and is defined through the existence of the other (“the homo in relation to the hetero … operates as an indispensable interior exclusion – an outside which is inside … making the articulation of the latter possible”).21 Moreover, their existence as a linked pair is dependent on historically shifting social processes. As Michel Foucault (1976) has famously argued, in Europe acts of sodomy had been condemned and prosecuted as a “temporary aberration,” a prohibited kind of behavior, but with the invention of the category in the nineteenth century, “the homosexual was now a species”: the “homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood” – a type of person defined by a notion of sexual identity that newly was used as a way of cataloguing people.22 Queer as a critical concept, then, does not refer to a collection of kinds of persons who are part of a “community” that in some sense has “a common identity” or that “by nature” share certain “things in common”; “it does not offer itself as some new and improved version of lesbian and gay but rather as something that questions the assumption that those descriptors are self-evident.”23 Further, queer draws attention to the complex ways such a sense of self-evidence is generated and maintained – with respect to notions about normality and deviance, distinctions among sexual identities, and even the idea of sexuality itself.
Queer and trans studies further foreground the multiplicity and potential mutability of identity, both in the sense that any identity is crosscut and coconstituted by other identities (discussed above) and that experiences of subjectivity and selfhood are themselves complex and not simply derivable from external criteria. In this vein, we might think about the influence of poststructuralism and psychoanalysis on these fields. The former addresses critiques of the notion of a stable truth and of the idea that there is a grounding real/nature outside of historically shifting cultural frames. As Jagose suggests, “within poststructuralism, the very notion of identity as a coherent and abiding sense of self is perceived as a cultural fantasy rather than a demonstrable fact.”24 With respect to psychoanalysis, “the theory of the unconscious has radical implications for the common-sense assumption that the subject is both whole and self-knowing,” and considering the role of unconscious feelings and desires within everyday experience emphasizes how identity “is an effect of identification with and against others: being ongoing, and always incomplete, it is a process rather than a property.”25 Moreover, particularly within trans studies, “the embodied experience of the speaking subject” is “a proper – indeed essential – component of the analysis of transgender phenomena; experiential knowledge is as legitimate as other, supposedly more ‘objective’ forms of knowledge.”26 As against claims about a person’s supposed real sex, trans analysis values subjectively experienced sex/gender while also recognizing how that sense is itself historically and socially situated and possibly variable over the course of a person’s lifetime.
One of the principal ways that scholars have sought to address social dynamics with regard to sexuality and gender without starting from the presumption of determinate identities is by presenting queer and trans analyses as critiques of various kinds of normativity. In what is often cited as the first use of the term heteronormativity, Michael Warner (1993) notes the prevalence of “a heteronormative understanding of society,” adding that “political struggles over sexuality ramify in an unimaginabl[y] large number of directions. In the everyday political terrain, contests over sexuality and its regulation are generally linked to views of social institutions and norms of the most basic sort.” From this perspective, “‘queer’ gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual” and by “pointing out a wide field of normalization.”27 More than simply pointing to those who are heterosexual as privileged, queer analysis engages the wide range of ways extant social institutions generate and manage the terms of “sexuality,” presenting those ideas and structures as simply given (as the basis for social organization, reproduction, health, etc.) rather than as actively (re)made through the work of discourses, institutions, and regularized practices. Warner and Lauren Berlant further develop this framing in their essay “Sex in Public” (1998), observing, “Intimate life is the endlessly cited elsewhere of political public discourse, a promised haven that distracts citizens from the unequal conditions of their political and economic lives, consoles them for the damaged humanity of mass society, and shames them for any divergence between their lives and the intimate sphere that is alleged to be simple personhood.”28 This normalization of the bourgeois private sphere of home and family (the supposed space of intimacy as differentiated from the public sphere and the world of politics) not only makes it appear as natural, as the necessary condition for personhood itself, it also normalizes/naturalizes the capitalist and state structures that make possible the existence of the private sphere and the systems of inequality those structures engender. As a way of marking this broader systemic mode of analysis, some scholars draw on what has been called subjectless critique, which insists that “queer has no fixed political referent” in the sense that it offers “a continuous deconstruction” of a single-issue kind of advocacy that holds steady the existing political and economic structures and “lay[s] claim to liberal rights, recognition, normalization, and inclusion.”29 The presentation of the field(s) as subjectless highlights the absence of queer or trans identity as a grounding feature, instead emphasizing the turn toward interlocking ideologies, policies, and practices that (re)produce and seek to materialize notions of the normal. (Although other scholars have suggested that such supposed subjectlessness can lose track of the importance of subject position in understanding the dynamics and politics of lived desire and embodiment.)30
The concept of heteronormativity, then, points toward the ideologies and social arrangements through which linked ideas about desire, eroticism, intimacy, gender, home, and family take shape and come to seem obvious and simply given, including the idea that sexual identity is a necessary and ingrained feature of human experience. The use of queer as a verb – queering – draws on this sense of queer as a challenge to the normal. As Sullivan suggests of her introduction to the field, “the aim of this book is to queer – to make strange, to frustrate, to counteract, to delegitimise, to camp up – heteronormative knowledges and institutions,” and Siobhan Somerville (2020) observes how, in contrast to the idea of queer “as an umbrella term for a range of sexual and gender identities,” queer-as-verb “signal[s] a critical stance … that is skeptical of existing identity categories and more interested in understanding the production of normativity.”31 Reciprocally, the concept of cisnormativity “mark[s] the ongoing assumptions about the psychic and social congruence between birth assignment and sex/gender identifications,” and it indicates a “political awareness of the ways that social institutions and built environments train all people to pass as a single, consistent, legible, and acceptable gender,” while attending to how “binary gender norms and gender hierarchies are established and maintained through violence against those who visibly deviate from them.”32
This critique of normativity, though, also extends to queer and trans people. Homonormativity, coined by Lisa Duggan (2002), refers to the effort by members of sexual minorities to fit into a heteronormative model: “While in prior decades gays and lesbians sustained a radical critique of family and marriage, today many members of these groups have largely abandoned such critical positions, demanding access to the nuclear family and its associated rights, recognitions, and privileges from the state.”33 This “incorpor[ation] into (neo)liberal regimes of … marriage and kinship, of markets and property, and as reproductive actors and agents of the state (in military service, for example)” illustrates “LGBTQ alignments with nationalist and racist ideologies” that are “constitutive of a normative queer liberal rights project.”34 This dovetailing of queer people seeking forms of state recognition with acceptance of forms of racializing and imperial domination – including when supposed support for queer rights serves as an alibi for a country’s claims to be enlightened and democratic despite violence against people of color (at home and abroad) – has been called homonationalism.35 Transnormativity has been described as a “universalized trajectory of coming out/transition, visibility, recognition, protection, and self-actualization” that “largely remains uninterrogated in its complicities and convergences with biomedical, neoliberal, racist, and imperial projects.”36
Some, though, have questioned organizing the field(s) around the critique of normativity(/ies). If “queer opts for denaturalisation as its primary strategy,” “can queer theorizing proceed without a primary commitment to antinormativity?”37 Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson (2015) have suggested that this commitment to challenging norms illustrates how “the allure of moving against appears to have had greater critical currency than the more intimate and complicit gesture of moving athwart,” adding that there seems to be a shared scholarly “conviction that norms are conceptually and politically limiting” and that they operate “univocally on the side of privilege and conventionality.”38 To be against endows a sense of being outside of relations of power, potentially enacting a “romanticization of the outside as a privileged site of radicality.”39 To be athwart, though, implies being in the middle or at an odd angle, perhaps carrying the image of being caught in currents. This perspective suggests that norms may not coalesce as a singular source of authority/oppression – the normative, for which queer and trans provide an unimplicated position of fluidity, freedom, liberation, justice, etc. Instead, queer and trans might address the complex currents that bring a person, group, scene, or situation into and out of conjunction with multidimensional forms of institutionalized power, and they might generate modes of analysis whose aim is less tracking and condemning complicity with dominant ideologies and systems than attending to the range of ways ideas and practices of desire, embodiment, and intimacy circulate, what they do, and how they facilitate or foreclose various possibilities for individual and collective worldmaking. In this way, transing may differ in important ways from queering. More than tracking and contesting forms of cisnormativity, or even transnormativity, transing might be thought of as multiplying possibilities for gendered perception and experience and for conceptualizing them: “proliferating ecologies of embodied difference” and “begin[ning] to articulate what might be called a general ‘somatechnics,’ or analytics of embodied difference.”40 If queering tends to draw attention to the limits of ostensibly shared identity as a means of political analysis and organizing, shifting focus to engagement with more encompassing and multipronged systems of normalization (to which sexual minority subjects may in various ways contribute as privileged beneficiaries), transing, perhaps, emphasizes less the violence of normalization than the range, complexity, layeredness, and mutability of processes of gendered meaning, expression, relation, and sensation.
Organization
The structure of the book aims to introduce readers to a range of concepts, questions, and intellectual strategies in these scholarly fields in a way that allows for ideas about sexuality and gender to be further and differently problematized with each chapter. To this end, it begins with discussion of some of the scholars whose work often is positioned as the beginning moment of queer studies in the 1990s, presenting them less as an origin than an ongoing touchstone for discussions and debates. From here, the book offers two different kinds of histories – one on movements frequently discussed as leading to queer and trans studies and the other on queer and trans histories, historiographies, and temporalities. These two chapters less offer a history than highlight the intellectual issues raised by how these fields turn to the past and articulate its relation to the present and future. The final two chapters might be described as shifting from time to space, at different scales. One chapter addresses dynamics of race, diaspora, and empire in relation to the United States (both because it’s where I am situated and it’s the site from and about which a significant amount of queer and trans work has been generated), and the final chapter turns outward, engaging scholarship on nonwestern and Global South peoples and places, since such work historically has not been centered in these fields. As this description suggests, the arrangement of the project is not based on something like progressive waves (such as in how histories of feminism are often described) or the description of foundational ideas/approaches into which additional persons, places, or topics simply can be included. Transness, class, race, religion, and the Global South, for example, are not contents to be slotted into established frameworks but themselves shape and reshape what queer and trans studies do and the how of their doing. For this reason, much of the scholarship discussed in any particular chapter could also readily be addressed in another chapter, and the placement is less about the topic to which something properly belongs than what struck me as most narratively effective in laying out the points for a given section or chapter.
Although the intellectual and political currents that might be understood as shaping what became queer and trans studies certainly precede the 1990s, this decade is when these areas of study begin to take shape as distinct fields in the humanities. In order to explore that process, as well as the ways the fields have grown through returning to and challenging those emergent analyses, Chapter 1 focuses on the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It will offer an account of the major strands of their thinking, how their work evolved over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the ways some important (re)formulations can be traced directly or indirectly back to these writers. 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. 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.
Queer and trans studies often have been presented as emerging out of previous social and intellectual movements from the 1960s onwards. Over the past couple of decades, queer and trans scholarship has created, circulated, and revised stories about these movements, and Chapter 2 will consider some that often have been cited as laying the groundwork for the development of queer and trans studies as scholarly fields. These earlier movements in the context of the United States, themselves overlapping in complex ways, include gay liberation, lesbian feminism, women of color feminism, AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) writing and activism, and early transgender writing and activism. However, we might approach them not so much through a conventional intellectual history – these ideas directly caused or led to those – than as sites of inspiration and provocation to which later scholars return. These recursive and revisionary journeys through the past speak to a process of creating genealogies that help anchor the present while also understanding the past as less an origin than a continuingly generative resource for reframing how we think.
If we do not understand terms like queer and trans as indicating historically unchanging kinds of identities and bodily experiences, then attending to the histories of contemporary terms, categories, and conceptual frameworks is vital in seeing that they have been constructed, how they have been so, and the institutional and ideological dynamics at play in those processes. How do you both draw on contemporary concepts, categories, and identities to make sense of the past in ways that are meaningful for the present and challenge their apparent obviousness? How do you both trace the structural continuities of forms of power and privilege across time and draw attention to other ways of being that have been effaced or supplanted by newer configurations of sexual and gender identity? Chapter 3 engages these historiographic issues, and the significance of history for queer and trans studies, from several different angles, including the stakes of centering race and empire, the ways scholars have conceptualized eroticism and embodiment in periods before the advent of the concepts of homosexuality and transsexuality, the question of whether particular historical persons and social dynamics should be understood as queer or trans, and the emergence from the late nineteenth century through the mid twentieth century of the dominant categories of sexual and gender identity we’ve inherited from that period. The chapter will close with scholarly articulations of queer and trans temporalities – the effort to rethink how we understand the experience of being-in-time.
More than simply attending to the experiences of nonwhite subjects deemed deviant due to their object-choice and/or gender expression, queer and trans of color critique engages the ways sexuality and gender themselves gain meaning in the context of systems of racial differentiation and, reciprocally, how struggles for justice, abolition, freedom, and decolonization must attend to sexuality and gender as both vectors of domination and sites of liberatory imagination and expression. Chapter 4 considers in greater detail how ingrained inclinations toward savagery, criminality, and inassimilable alienness are attributed to racialized populations in the United States through invoking their supposed failures to enact proper gender and sexuality – to live in heteronormative and cisnormative ways. Additionally, I will consider how queer and trans of color critique addresses the specificities in how particular racialized groups are defined through systems of sexual and gender normativity and how they have engaged those systems in multidimensional ways. This chapter will consider these issues by attending to queer and trans work in Black studies, Latinx studies, Asian American studies, and Indigenous studies, tracing differences and disagreements within those fields and tracking dialogues among/across them.
When thinking about the world outside of “the West” (the United States, northern and western Europe, and predominantly white settler-states like Canada and Australia), scholarship can fall into generalizing frameworks in which comparison with the West predominates or in which the world is divided up into “areas” that are treated as self-identical blocks, also de facto portrayed as more or less sealed off from each other. As Chapter 5 discusses, the presence of such patterns raises a series of intellectual and methodological questions: how can we reckon with the effects and ongoing histories of imperialism and occupation, uneven transnational dynamics of exploitation and extraction, and racial capitalism while not understanding those subjected to oppression and domination as merely passive in the face of those processes? How do we engage with forms of difference while understanding them as multidimensional, permeable, and changing, rather than freezing them in ahistorical and essentialized accounts of local/national/regional culture? How do we attend to forms of place-based specificity (at whatever scale) while engaging the heterogeneity and diversity of the area, country, and/or population under discussion and while also addressing dynamic relations with other peoples and places – both chosen and coerced? Moreover, how do we decenter “the West” without recentering it in that very process (as the thing whose negation ends up defining the shape and character of our studies)? In considering how queer and trans studies have taken up these challenges, this chapter is organized into three sections. The first considers critiques of imperialist and capitalist influence as well as critiques of those critiques, due to what other scholars have suggested can be their homogenizing tendencies. The second section focuses on articulations of national/local difference and how to understand it in relation to layered histories and contemporary transnational formations. The final section will address circulations and exchanges, particularly as they generate forms of regional interrelation – connections that themselves do not simply follow from Western/Global North formulations and frameworks, despite the latter’s presumed dominance.
Note on Audience and Use
The audience for this book includes undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and members of the general public. The volume provides useful background on important figures, arguments, and texts in these fields. While designed to be read from beginning to end, each chapter also works as a freestanding discussion of its organizing topic, and in many ways, each section in the chapters potentially could be read as a freestanding unit. This modular-ish structure is meant to allow ease of engagement, for reading and teaching. In this vein, although the book is meant to sustain itself as a stand-alone volume, I’ve also tried to bear in mind its potential pedagogical uses, which has included trying to provide a range of sources for all of the topics discussed so that someone could easily either assemble a reading list for further exploration on their own or develop a syllabus around the topic(s). It’s been important to me that this volume be accessible enough for someone first starting out with these fields and that it also retain the complexity and specificity that would make it helpful for those experienced in scholarly work who want to learn more about queer and trans studies as well as scholars already working in (or closely adjacent to) queer and trans studies who want to learn more about other aspects of these fields. I very much hope this book can serve those various purposes and constituencies while conveying the richness of these areas of study, which have meant and continue to mean so much to me (in my ever-evolving “I’m a queer ‘90s baby” way).
