2 Feminist Solidarity after Queer Theory

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter addresses the issue of how — in theory and in practice — feminism should engage bisexuality, intersexuality, transsexuality, transgender, and other emergent identities (or anti-identities) that reconfigure both conventional and conventionally feminist understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. How feminists should imagine and create communities that take the institutions and practices of sex, gender, and sexuality to be politically relevant to freedom, or how might such communities incorporate our manifest and intransigent diversity, and build solidarity, is discussed with reference to the leitmotif of transgender. A critical analysis is made of two very different feminist texts: the 1994 reissue of Janice Raymond's notorious The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (originally published in 1979) and Bernice Hausman's 1995 book Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender. This chapter shows that the differences between the ethical and political dilemmas faced by feminists who are transgendered and those who are not are not as great as some theorists have suggested.