A Journey beyond Normativity

Abstract

Given the exponential growth in scholarship about gender and sexuality, there is still a paucity of works dealing extensively with the complexities of trans studies. The book Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities, edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Sarah Tobias and published in 2016, fits perfectly in this gap. This anthology stems from the trans studies lecture series organized by the editors and Aren Aizura in 2012–13 at Rutgers' Institute for Research on Women. Taken together, the essays engage in a rich interdisciplinary debate that deals with several political, theoretical, and methodological issues that are crucial for this field of study.The thirteen chapters here are organized in five sections. The first section, “Gender Boundaries within Educational Spaces,” discusses how to create inclusive higher education environments for transgender people. This section interlocks academia and social policy with the intent of offering concrete proposals to transform university organization. The “Trans Imaginaries” section includes three essays that adopt the trans studies lens to interrogate the imaginaries created by canonical and innovative cultural production in theater, narrative, and cinema. These chapters offer thought-provoking insight to understand the role of literary theory and cultural studies in addressing the intersections between identity work, the burden of the colonial experience, and the racialization of desire. The “Crossing Borders/Crossing Genders” section offers a discussion on the ways in which normative assumptions about the body inform the creation of social policies in the post-9/11 fight against terrorism. The three chapters in this section show that regulations and security technologies incorporate gender norms and racial stereotypes that hinder and inhibit the mobility of gender-variant people across national thresholds. “Trans Activism and Policy Work” addresses the intricacies of the relationship between trans activism, broader LGBTQ+ movements, and health issues (HIV). Finally, the “Transforming Disciplines and Pedagogy” section adopts the trans studies framework to rearticulate medical research and educational practices.The brief description of the contents of this anthology highlights the wide variety of topics herein presented. The heterogeneity of the contents of the book may unsettle the reader, but the introductory chapter and the concluding one are both helpful in identifying the common threads shared across the five sections. The chapters align with a concerted effort in gender studies toward a more refined understanding of normativity, and, more specifically, they take the reader into the heart of the productive instability of concepts such as heteronormativity and homonormativity.Beginning with the introduction, this book scrutinizes the separations between theory and practice, and between politics and academia. Indeed, it contains works dealing with empirical research, social policy, and activism alike. Some chapters also try to bridge these areas, as, for example, offering critical accounts of biometric surveillance in airport security (chap. 6). These connections offer, in addition to a description of the socioeconomic context of trans activism, a refined depiction of the uneven access to political and economic resources by trans and LGB activism. Further chapters point out some of the most crucial tensions produced by the academic institutionalization of trans studies, which resulted in neither a substantial increase in the number of trans people as faculty members, staff, and students at universities (chap. 2) nor an actual transformation of medical praxis for what concerns gender variances (chap. 12).The organization of the book also blurs the compartmentalization of trans, queer, and women's studies, which led to heated debates among the areas' respective proponents. While recognizing the historical and political significance of the distinctions between these fields, the editors suggest that their mutual friction and magnetism—the challenge to gendered and sexual oppressive assumptions, and the attention to the complex interrelations among embodiment, bodies, and identities—might offer an opportunity for “a multivocal continuation of the problematization of gender” (4). The book does not define what should count as trans studies in a neat way. The theoretical entanglements, which are not limited to the three above-mentioned fields—including, for example, postcolonial studies—broaden the hermeneutic potential of trans studies. What I found to be most remarkable is that trans studies cease to be merely defined by the focus on gender-variant people. It becomes a fully fledged and privileged analytical frame for a “complex disarticulation between the definition of biological sex, culturally constructed gender and normative or nonnormative sexual desires” (7). As an illustration, Lucas Crawford's literary analysis of The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett (chap. 3) clearly shows the potential of trans studies, in conjunction with queer theories, to grasp the simultaneity of stickiness and instability in identity projects.This theoretical engagement maintains and extends previous accounts of the multilayered divisions that are at play in a multitude of contexts, such as college policies (chap. 1) and airport security norms (chaps. 6 and 7). To put it another way, this book unpacks the LGBTQ+ acronym, with a specific focus on the trans category, pointing out that there is no easy dichotomy between emancipation and reproduction of the norm. For example, Aren Z. Aizura points out the underlying nationalist epistemic violence in trans-focused documentaries aimed at raising awareness about trans migrant asylum seekers. We can identify previous attempts in this direction, for instance, in the study by Eleonora Garosi (2012) about hegemonic transnormativity in politics of transitioning in the Italian context, which resulted in a tripartite model of gender transition trajectories—gender conformers, gender innovators, and gender benders. Nevertheless, Trans Studies overcomes the categorical approach—first and foremost the transsexual-transgender dichotomy—focusing on the processual dimension of the articulation of gendered subjectivation. Rather than enumerating a typology of gendered nonconformities, the essays expressively stress the relevance of the stratification processes at play. They unfold the entanglement of—by way of example but not limited thereto—persistent colonial inheritances (chap. 4), medical praxis (chap. 12), late capitalistic transnational economic strategies (chap. 5), and security policies (chap. 6) in which the production of the trans category takes place. Likewise, they markedly destabilize the very process of identification and self-naming by showing the pervasive interweaving of disciplinary strategies and lines of flight: “At the same time, the imposition and policing of this complex array of gender, racial, and sexual categories coerce both belonging to and transgression of their boundaries” (70). Last but not least, this volume lays the ground to transform these thick theoretical, empirical, and political dissertations into actual changes in social policies and practices, in particular for what concerns education (chap. 13) and the academy (chaps. 1 and 2).A major issue with this book is the almost exclusive focus on North American countries and English-language texts —excepting the essays written by Keja Valens (chap. 4) and Jian Chen (chap. 5). For this reason, it is not easy to extend the discussions included in this book in other geographical contexts. Nevertheless, it would be unfair to consider this an actual limitation, and I believe that the eclectic theoretical exchanges offered in this anthology might be a powerful stimulation for further debates about trans studies in other countries.In Italy, trans studies is extremely underrepresented and nearly absent in academic programs. Despite this, I am persuaded that a dialogue between trans studies and the so-called Italian theory (Gentili and Stimilli 2015)—a wide array of philosophical and political thoughts that emerged from the operaismo (an Italian working-class antiauthoritarian grassroots political movement that emerged in the 1970s from a rearticulation of Marxism)—would be highly productive, as demonstrated by previous attempts in this direction (Arietti et al. 2010). Italian theory shares with trans studies not only an enmeshment of theoretical engagement and political praxes but also the nonontological understanding of social categories. Notably, Italian theory conceptualizes social class more as an investment of social desire than a mere effect of social structure (Gentili 2002). This epistemological frame, in conjunction with the disarticulation of sex, gender, and sexuality, might draw attention to the process of subjectivation and self-constitution as a site to contest and unsettle gendered and sexual norms (Negri 2015), in dialogue with the “Trans Imaginaries” section in this book. Furthermore, a dialogue between these strands of study might, on the one hand, help locate trans studies within the context of neoliberal late capitalist governmentality and, on the other, balance the disembodied cisgender gaze that is still prevalent in Italian theory.Overall, I deem this book to be an essential and complex contribution to the field of gender studies. Given the heterogeneity of its contents and the intricacies of the theoretical trajectories herein collected, this work might not be suitable as an introduction to trans studies for those new to this field. However, as a young researcher in gender studies and an LGBTQ+ activist, I found the reflections contained in this anthology very useful, notably because they offer a comprehensive overview of the intersections between trans subjectivities and communities, and cultural production and social policy. For this reason, the essays are extremely helpful and thought-provoking for researchers, social workers, practitioners, and activists willing to engage in a critical exploration of the analytical, practical, and syncretic opportunities of trans studies.