Pink and blue in a yellow box: National Geographic’s special issue on gender identity

Abstract

ABSTRACT National Geographic magazine’s January 2017 special issue focused on gender around the world, including the magazine’s first explicit discussion of gender identity and transgender lives. I argue that the issue enacts a colonizing rhetoric of new discovery to address gender identity, whereby the magazine obscures past and present understandings of gender identity from cultures around the globe to position itself (and the United States) as especially innovative and progressive. I name the phenomenon of talking about the present in ways that forecast a brighter tomorrow by deflecting other pasts and presents futurespective kainotēs.