“Queer” is such a simple, unassuming little word. Who ever could have guessed that we would come to saddle it with so much pretentious baggage-so many grandiose theories, political agendas, philosophical projects, apocalyptic meanings? A word that was once commonly understood to mean “strange,” “odd,” “unusual,” “abnormal,” or “sick,” and was routinely applied to lesbians…
“I am interested in the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality in a way that enables me to understand the indifference that men, but, more importantly to our struggles, men who have been racialized as inferior, exhibit to the systematic violences inflicted upon women of color. I want to understand the construction of this…
An academic article that uses Hannah Arendt’s theories , thoughts, and life to parse through a conception of what gender is. The article was written, anonymously, by an academic who was at the time attempting to work through her own relationship with gender. The author believes in exploring the “potentials of gender-binary emancipation contained within…
“The history of the resistance of gender-variant misfits and rebels is incomplete without understanding the central role of hooker networks that united hustlers, queens, hair fairies, and radicals during the 1950s and ’60s, a pivotal era that led to the first gay riots that had the police fleeing the streets in San Francisco and New…
In A Coincidence of Desires, Tom Boellstorff considers how interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropology and queer studies might enrich both fields. For more than a decade he has visited Indonesia, both as an anthropologist exploring gender and sexuality and as an activist involved in HIV prevention work. Drawing on these experiences, he provides several in-depth case…
The story of birth certificate corrections begins, for our purposes, in 1965, when a transsexual woman (a woman born male who transitions to female) asked the City of New York to issue her a new birth certifi- cate identifying her as female. “Anonymous,” as described in court docu- ments, did everything she thought was needed…
This year, scholars and activists are marking the twentieth anniversary of “the enunciation and analysis of ‘intersectionality’ by legal theorist Kimberle W. Crenshaw.” The early 1990s also saw the emergence of some important galvanizing texts in what would come to be identified as trans studies and trans politics, especially Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and…
The many ways that academia generally and legal academia specifically produce and reproduce hierarchical norms and standards of race, gender, sexuality, ability and class have been explored in the articles in this volume and many oth- ers. Because the university is both a location of the production of knowledge that is often central to sexist,…
In the past ten years, trans issues and activism have emerged with a new level of energy and visibility that crosses the legal, cultural, and activist realms. Trans rights protections in the law are growing at a fast pace, with seven US states now explicitly naming gender identity and/or expression discrimination as a forbidden category…
This provocative and perceptive book argues that the current ‘trans moment’ presents an unparalleled opportunity for exploring vernacular classification systems and political claims about identities. Transposing and generalizing to the arena of race and ethnicity insights developed by transgender and feminist analysts, Trans reveals the paradoxical deployment of social construction, contingency, and biology.