Fixing Gwen

The use of the “born in the wrong body” model of accounting for transgender embodiment pervades young adult fiction featuring transgender teenage girls, including the much-acclaimed Luna by Julie Anne Peters and Almost Perfect by Brian Katcher. Realistic novels about transgender teenagers, usually framed as “coming of age” narratives, privilege gender reassignment surgery as the culmination of a process of self-discovery confirming the gender binary. In wrong-body discourse, self-identity comes into conflict with and ultimately trumps the body, with the transgender character’s transition following a single-minded trajectory to adulthood and the erasure of the transgender past. While this model of embodiment is undoubtedly accurate for some transgender teenagers, it limits the space in which to think about the complexity of gender for both cisgender and transgender readers. Two recent novels, Rachel Gold’s Just Girls and Kristin Elizabeth Clark’s Freakboy, serve to demonstrate both the persistence of wrong-body discourse and its disruption. A verse novel that allows a range of gender nonconforming characters to speak to their own experiences of embodiment, Freakboy offers readers alternatives to the wrong-body model.

This chapter provides a more in depth exploration of the pedagogical implications for and teachers and researchers of reconceptualising school based sexuality education encounters as experimental sites that can engage more fully with young people’s lived experiences of sex and gender politics. Situating Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) inter-related concepts of affective assemblage and becoming within a broader project of rhizomatics, I show how in my work with students as a researcher, I found rhizomatics useful as both an analytic for understanding the social and political moment and a politic for becoming differently within it (Youdell, 2011). I map the ways in which, over time, my orientation to understand and explore the effects of the many and varied ways that students were learning about sexualities and relationships in their lives, shifted the traditional ‘rules of engagement’ between us at school. Frequently confounded, over the years, I show how I developed the capacity to more fully attend to the present and respond rhizomatically to what emerged, and what that orientation produced. I close by considering the pedagogical challenges and affordances of conceptualising sexuality education encounters in schools as rhizomic.

David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s 2008 transnational remake of the Hong Kong horror film Gin gwai (The Eye) (2002) into The Eye exemplifies an alternative cultural dynamics and gender politics in the border-crossing of cinematic texts. Moving away from the binary opposition of the original/remake and East–West analytical paradigms, this article argues that any attempt to employ cinematic transnationalism as an innovative and illuminating critical apparatus to analyse and investigate the increasingly popular global entertainment phenomenon of transnational film remakes needs to contextualize the films’ cultural discourses, gender politics and representational rhetoric within both axes of the national and the transnational. Therefore, this article adopts an alternative critical lens in transnational remake studies that recognizes both the reciprocity and the rivalry between the East Asian original and the Hollywood remake in order to tease out the contested gender politics and cultural dynamics in the re-articulation of a cinematic other. Accentuating a competitive symbiosis between Gin gwai and The Eye, this article argues that The Eye inscribes an ethnocentric feminist discourse to erase Gin gwai’s apparent patriarchal gender politics, but The Eye’s liberating feminist re-visualization only allows the American protagonist agency at the expense of her inferior Mexican other.

ABSTRACTIn June 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, creating massive political turmoil and controversy. Our aim in this paper is to contribute to a discussion about how to analyze such critical moments in policy and politics. Rather than searching for one ‘real’ cause (whether the micro-politics of the Conservative Party or popular disaffection from neo-liberalism), we offer a form of conjunctural analysis that highlights issues of multiplicity and heterogeneity. We sketch this approach and then explore two puzzles that have particular pertinence for Critical Policy Studies. One is the puzzle of populism: how new imaginings and representations of the ‘British people’ were constructed. The second is the puzzle of expertise; how antipathy to ‘expert’ knowledge was shaped to challenge British and European ‘elites’. Conjunctural analysis, we argue, offers a vital means of engaging with such puzzles, and of grasping the heterogeneous and contradictory forces, tendencies, and pressures that enabled Brexit.

international levels and are likely to do so over the next few years. Progressive people everywhere want to answer an important question: What does black power mean in Chicago? Harold Washington was elected mayor on February 22, 1983, at the heart of Chicago's first critical moment in black power politics. The second moment was initiated by his death on November 26, 1987. The movement to elect Washington defeated racist white power and established black power on the basis of a coalition of Latinos and progressive whites.1 It is on the basis of this struggle (1982-1987) that we can sharpen our focus on the recent months since Washington's death. Specifically, we want to discuss who won and who lost on

Chapter 7 considers different indicators of party cohesion in Ukraine to examine the effects of party nominations during the country’s first PR-only election on legislative politics following that election. The analysis focuses primarily on the selection of Ukraine’s prime minister. The vote is a critical moment in Ukrainian politics because it allowed the losing candidate in Ukraine’s disputed 2004 presidential election, Viktor Yanukovych, to reinsert himself into national politics as a legitimate and influential member of the executive branch. In fact, tension between Prime Minister Yanukovych and his 2004 rival, President Viktor Yushchenko, proved to be a catalyst for Ukraine’s second PR-only election, which was held in 2007. In general, the chapter’s findings raise questions about the ability of Ukraine’s PR-only system to overcome the types of elite behavior that had undermined the consolidation of the country’s party system up to that point.

A multifractal analysis of hourly and daily rainfall data recorded at four locations of Andalusia (southern Spain) was carried out in order to study the temporal structure of rainfall and to find differences between both time resolutions. The results show that an algebraic tail is required to fit the probability distribution of the extreme rain events for all the cases. The presence of a multifractal phase transition associated with a critical moment in the empirical moments scaling exponent function was also detected. Both facts indicate that the rainfall process is a case of self‐organized criticality (SOC) dynamics, although the results differ for each place according to the time resolution and the nature of the rainfall, either convective or frontal. This SOC behaviour is related to a statistically steady state that implies the presence of clusterization in the time‐occurrence sequence of rain events. Such fluctuations have been shown by performing the analysis of the Fano and Allan factors and the count‐based periodogram. The values for the “synoptic maximum”, the typical lifetime of planetary scale atmospheric structures, have been obtained for each place and some important periodicities have been detected when dealing with extremes. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In one of those brief but illuminating apocryphal tales with which all history abounds, we are told that Benjamin Franklin was prevented by the Founding Fathers from authoring theDeclaration of Independencebecause they feared he would insert a joke. They knew their man; indeed, John Adams, who may have known the most, wrote that Franklin “had a satire that was good-natured or caustic, Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais, at his pleasure.” Both the story and the description point to a central paradox in Franklin's character—his capacity for irreverent reverence—a psychological and artistic reflex that appears throughout a career that consistently merged with a society undergoing rapid social, economic, and political changes. Even given his far-ranging genius, it is remarkable how Franklin's humorous and satiric energy permeates his writings and erupts at critical social and political moments into a variety of discrete forms, which nevertheless remain part of an organic comic vision. Far more than an occasional jokester orad hocsatirist, Franklin embraced the comic as a habitual mode of expression so integrated with his deistic beliefs and reliance upon reason and the “natural order” of things that it may be said to function as a form of epistemology, a dialectical way of not only exposing theerrataof human behavior in the traditional manner of humor and satire, but also of gaining control, insight, and understanding into the nature of humanity. Thus, he could write to Madame Brillon:Reflect how many of our duties [Providence] has ordained naturally to be pleasures; and that it has the goodness besides, to give the name of sin to several of them; so that we might enjoy them more.

Sex and the State Allison Brown (bio) Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity by Paisley Currah NYU Press, 2022, 256 pp. Click for larger view View full resolution Documentation of gender-based government censorship in film from Julia Weist's Motion Picture Division Association of America (2022) (courtesy of the artist) [End Page 106] As a program representative for a state social services department, my primary role is "determinations interviewer." I conduct short interviews with people claiming benefits and their various contractual counterparties, write summaries of the factual information I have received, and then use legal precedent and established administrative procedure to determine the claimants' eligibility for benefits. The systems, both legal and technical, are highly standardized. Let's briefly walk through the standard experience of a claimant. First, they're (hopefully) sent their state-mandated forms that explain, in legal jargon, how to apply. After filling out a long form with detailed information and submitting it, they'll typically be scheduled for an interview with someone like me. These interviews happen about a month from the claim filing date, and during this time, any benefits are placed on hold. All interviews are conducted remotely by phone, all office locations are treated as confidential, and there are no corresponding public offices. If claimants have issues navigating the system, we provide them with a customer service number, which frequently hangs up before they ever reach a human. To maintain a facade of administrative technocratic omnipotence, we're encouraged to rely on wonky "guide sheets" for issues that we have not been trained on if the claimant asks about them. Claimants often experience disorientation at every level of the system. At some point on the job, I began to encounter cases in which the claimant's listed sex did not correspond to the pronouns they used. Here, I found out the instructions were shockingly simple: ask the claimant what their gender is, then update it in the system. From a certain perspective, the ease with which I could update the claimants' data reveals the gains won by trans people: trans claimants are, without much fuss, properly recognized by my state agency and subsequently subject to the same rules as any other claimant. Take that, transphobia! But after reading Paisley Currah's new book Sex Is as Sex Does, I'm increasingly convinced that this is a moral Band-Aid for the injustice of our system: as easy as it is to acknowledge a claimant's identity, the barriers for them to actually receive benefits remain prohibitively burdensome. What good is equal recognition by laws and institutions that reproduce and sanction repression and inequality? ______ For a book that seeks to address a seemingly simple question—why is legally changing your sex so hard?—Sex Is as Sex Does amounts to a dizzyingly dense 151 pages (not counting endnotes). Currah walks readers through the political philosophy, critical theory, and legal scholarship that addresses the current moment in gender discourse and politics, with little philosophical hand-holding. Those willing to brave its theoretical depths, however, might be surprised at how grounded the text is in the facts of its case studies. Currah touches on Tennessee state legislation, Florida marriage court, New York State DMV policy, the Maryland Court of Appeals, and numerous other legal incidents and institutions throughout the book, snapping the reader back to the stakes of the issue whenever things start to get a little wooly. The resulting tapestry is a little patchwork, but Currah's conversational style and sense of humor keep things mostly cohesive. Recounting his approach toward archival research, Currah cheerily reports his passion for lesser noticed (and much less sexy) apparatuses and domains of governmentality that even Foucault found too dull to look into: administration, unenumerated police powers, the population, norms of classification that precede inaugural moments, texts as dull as the [End Page 107] Domesday Book, regulatory decisions and interpretive rules, and the US Social Security Administration's manual for field personnel. Through this omnivorous, detail-oriented approach to the historical record, Currah shows that state actors (such as myself) do not produce transphobic results merely out of a deep-seated fear of those who...

When Tone Bringa published Being Muslim the Bosnian Way in 1995, the book soon became the hallmark of anthropological studies of Islam in Southeast Europe. In the wake of the tragic events in Bosnia-Herzegovina ensuing from the breakdown of Yugoslavia, it provided much needed intimate insights into the complex entanglement of religion, politico-religious symbolism and identitarian politics in the wartorn country. Furthermore, it complicated the immediate proliferation of the ‘quick solution’ paradigms – clash of civilisations, or ‘old’ ethnic hatred – that had been adopted with ease by many international and local politicians, as well as by scholars working in the region, and that soon became the mainstream of academic discourse during and especially in the years after the war.

Michel Foucault has famously argued that, since the counter-Reformation, the modern West has been preoccupied with extracting truth from sex, above all, the truth about power and the human subject. Africa has long been waging its own battles over the politics of gender, sexuality, personhood, and power, a conflict in which religion has played a pivotal role, abetting and sometimes challenging established modes of governance. In recent times, this relationship has become ever more agonistic. In many parts of the continent, religious authorities have mounted puritanical crusades against nonconforming gender and sexual practices. But faith has also been mobilized to offer refuge to the persecuted. How might these issues of identity, exile, and redemption speak to more general transformations in the nature of religious life in the current moment, in Africa and beyond?

Written by a leading activist in the transgender movement, Becoming a Visible Man is an artful and compelling inquiry into the politics of gender. Jamison Green combines candid autobiography with informed analysis to offer unique insight into the multiple challenges of the female-to-male transsexual experience, ranging from encounters with prejudice and strained relationships with family to the development of an FTM community and the realities of surgical sex reassignment. For more than a decade, Green has provided educational programs on gender-variance issues for corporations, law-enforcement agencies, social-science conferences and classes, continuing legal education, religious education, and medical venues. His comprehensive knowledge of the processes and problems encountered by transgendered and transsexual people - as well as his legal advocacy work to help ensure that gender-variant people have access to the same rights and opportunities as others - enable him to explain the issues as no transsexual author has previously done. Brimming with frank and often poignant recollections of Green's own experiences - including his childhood struggles with identity and his years as a lesbian parent prior to his sex-reassignment surgery - the book examines transsexualism as a human condition, and sex reassignment as one of the choices that some people feel compelled to make in order to manage their gender variance. Relating the FTM psyche and experience to the social and political forces at work in American society, Becoming a Visible Man also speaks consciously of universal principles that concern us all, particularly the need to live one's life honestly, openly, and passionately.

"Either/Or" and "Both/Neither": Discursive Tensions in Transgender Politics -- TEST

Mediatization became a central concept in media and communication studies in the early 2000s. Mediatization calls for a critical engagement with the changes invested in media and their role in high modern societies, and the effects of those changes. Such a process is understood to have profound gendered consequences. Particularly crucial are the reflections around the empowering/disempowering effects of the pervasive presence of media in our lives and, in particular, on their role in both reproducing and disrupting hegemonic understanding of gender and sexuality. This entry focuses especially on the mediatization of politics and its role in perpetuating discourses that tend to marginalize and minoritize those who do not conform to a deeply gendered and racialized ideal of power. It then examines how the emancipatory and transformative power of social media is deeply intertwined with practices that reproduce conservative gender politics.

Biodiversity conservation is at a crossroads. A number of trends are converging with the potential to transform our understanding of nature and how we conserve it. First, conservation policy makers are advocating increasingly ambitious global biodiversity targets, such as the agreement to protect 30% of terrestrial, inland water, and of coast and marine areas by 2030 made at the December 2022 Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Second, recognizing that governments do not have sufficient resources to reach these ambitious targets, they are turning to private finance and innovative financing mechanisms for help. Third, technological advances are enabling new ways of surveilling people, species, and ecosystems, measuring conservation outcomes, and targeting funding. Finally, long-standing concerns over the alienation of Indigenous Peoples and local communities from land and resources, and the colonial legacy of conservation, have been amplified by widespread contemporary awareness of racism more generally. Nascent critiques of conservation are incorporating but also moving beyond calls for participatory or rights-based approaches to conservation to push for the complete decolonization of conservation, alternatives to capitalist approaches to conservation, and other radical reforms. Collectively, these shifts are both reinforcing traditional conservation practice and power relationships and opening up space to expand understandings of collaborative management, environmental caretaking, and sustainable livelihoods and dramatically reform conservation. In this article, we draw on decades of research studying conservation governance in sites that range from villages to international meetings in order to examine this critical historical moment in conservation politics. We argue that conservation is at an ontological and epistemic moment during which the meaning of biodiversity, how to know it, how to conserve it, and who should conserve it is being fundamentally transformed. As transnational movements seek to transform our political economic system and to decolonize conservation, the consolidation of elite power among actors in finance, technology, governments, and big nongovernmental organizations abstracts conservation from localized contexts, drawing attention away from ensuring effective conservation on the ground and failing to challenge the root causes of biodiversity loss. Thus, continued vigilance is needed to keep equity, rights, justice, and livelihoods at the forefront of conservation.