Recent antitrans discourses have critiqued trans masculinity in particular as a site of social panic and contagion for proto-trans adolescents. In extreme cases, this is framed as a seduction. Turning “seduction” from a social danger to a benefit, this essay theorizes masc4masc t4t erotics as a type of contagious gendering. The authors discuss the coming…
An unprecedented cultural alliance is underway between the anti-trans strand of the radical feminist movement and a new brand of militant right-wing politics that takes issue with the idea that gender is a social and cultural construction. This so-called “anti-gender” movement—which also travels under names such as “gender-critical feminism”—has found immense international power and is…
Abstract: In this article I write on the rift between trans inclusive and gender critical feminists in the UK. I consider this division within university culture through a focus on the case of Kathleen Stock. I discuss the coverage of her resignation from the University of Sussex through a focus on The Daily Telegraph. From…
This is a paper I wrote but, never got to submit to the Sociology book Award for my local college
Repudiations of trans-exclusionary radical feminism often take the form of a call to strip from TERFs the name feminist. TERFism, it is often argued, is not “real feminism,” and in this same vein it is sometimes argued that lesbian exponents of transmisogyny are not a “real” part of queer history. Asa Seresin and Sophie Lewis—both…
In recent years, “white feminism” and girlboss feminism have taken a justified beating. We know that leaning in won’t make our jobs any more tolerable and that white women have proven to be, at best, unreliable allies. But in a time of rising fascism, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to…
Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian women accessed more economic autonomy though their participation in peddling networks. In Possible Histories, Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores…
In Peripheral Desires, Robert Deam Tobin charts the emergence, from the 1830s through the early twentieth century, of a new vocabulary and science of human sexuality in the writings of literary authors, politicians, and members of the medical establishment in German-speaking central Europe—and observes how consistently these writers, thinkers, and scientists associated the new nonnormative…
The figure of the monster has long been used by trans and intersex scholars, artists and activists to articulate their sense of being in a world dominated by binary, cisgender norms. Yet what does it mean to embrace ‘the monstrous’ and how might that embrace inform the construction of transgender history? This article examines the…
Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomical injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work…