Trans Bodies Research Articles

Review essay: Trans bodies, trans selves: A resource by and for transgender communities, edited by Laura Erickson-Schroth (2nd edition)

Tiffany Sostar reviews Trans bodies, trans selves: A resource by and for transgender communities, edited by Laura Erickson-Schroth (2022, 2nd edition). Oxford University Press. 728pp. ISBN 9780190092726.

This Is Your Voice on T

Trans bodies and lives—and by extension, voices—are at the forefront of contemporary cultural, legislative, and political discourses in the United States and beyond. In this article, I apply a disability lens to concerns about exogenous testosterone (T) and transmasculine vocality, as well as larger anxieties around the transmasculine body as constructed or even irreversibly damaged. Inspired by the use of bodymind as a term in disability studies and activism, I propose bodyvoice as a term in vocal studies to express that the body, voice, and perceptions around them are often interdependent. On social media, the photographic transition timeline constructs a stagnant, binary, before-and-after narrative in contrast to the more fluid sonic transition timeline, in which trans people on T record and display a series of vocal changes, either spoken or sung, over time. The sonic transition timeline functions as a vital way of sharing embodied transvocal knowledge in an increasingly hostile climate.

Surveying trans and nonbinary communities: Research methodologies, accountability, and ethics with the Trans Bodies, Trans Selves Survey (2nd edition).

Surveying trans and nonbinary communities: Research methodologies, accountability, and ethics with the Trans Bodies, Trans Selves Survey (2nd edition).

Intersectionality as a framework for the construction of public policies aimed at trans people

This article aims to demonstrate that the concept of intersectionality is a fundamental analytical input for the construction of public policies aimed at trans people. Through a conceptual analysis, this work argues that intersectionality contributes to a clear understanding of different types of violence that are reproduced through institutional mechanisms and, consequently, demonstrates how intersectionality can also be an analytical mechanism to build public policies that prevent medicalization-pathologization of trans bodies, the marginalization of certain communities and sexual classification for the assignment of social roles and opportunities

The Day I Got My Period at the Museum

The author unexpectedly gets her period when she is visiting the Museum of the City of New York and uses the incident to explore how women’s desire to be free is thwarted when period products are not available in public restrooms. The author touches upon several aspects of menstrual equity—period stigma, outdated and empty dispensers, tampon tax, menstruating while homeless or incarcerated, and trans bodies that menstruate. Building on Judy Grahn’s idea that all culture is a result of women’s menstrual rites, the author points out the absurdity of not accommodating menstruating bodies in high-culture spaces like museums and asks for modern vending machines for period products in public restrooms.

Extended Review of Political Choreographies, Decolonial Theories, Trans Bodies

This article offers a comprehensive review of Political Choreographies, Decolonial Theo-ries, Trans Bodies, the latest book, a volume edited by Marina Gržinić and Jovita Pristovšek in intensive collaboration with Nomusa Makhubu and Tjaša Kancler, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2023. This volume takes as its starting point the body as a structural signifier, which is conceptualized in seven chapters. Each of them addresses the question of movement, politics, revolt, action, etc., in a variety of ways to de-link ourselves (especially us Whites) from colonial modernity as the organizing principle not only of capitalism but of a whole range of processes that emanate from modernity, i.e., forms of domination and oppression such as racism, sexism, Eurocentrism, and environmental destruction. What makes this book special, however, is not only the positions presented but also the way in which they are presented. Each conversation begins with a carefully selected starting point, linked to the interlocutor’s* work and accompanied by a rich citation system of references and additional information. This opens up the formation of epistemic counter-narratives that confront the violent history of capitalism and form possibilities for yet unidentified bodies, movements, politics, and political action as future potentialities.

Dirty Waters: Urine, Waste, and the Shimmering Trans Body in Nånting måste gå sönder or Something Must Break (2014)

This article examines genderqueer writer/director Ester Martin Bergsmark’s film Something Must Break (2014) and the trans gaze created through the film’s disjunctive imagery. I argue the film’s aestheticization of polluted environments and trans bodies posits a queer alliance between transness and trash. Similarly, Something Must Break’s repeated imagery of urination and body fluids representationally relates transness, waste, and transgressive sexuality to a politics of marginality, which Bergsmark employs in Something Must Break to express these relationalities as sites for creative difference and possibilities of being that exist outside of heterosexual norms. I use post-structuralist and queer interpretations of perversion to reimagine the film’s polluted environments and abject fluids as sites/sights of creation and liveability for trans bodies. I find in the refractions of polluted waters, blood, saliva, and urine in Something Must Break the same cinematic fissures that Eliza Steinbock argues allows for a uniquely trans gaze in their theory of shimmering. In considering a cinematic transgender gaze, Steinbock describes a cinema that eschews the visual reveal and instead portrays a lived trans experience not defined by dualities, but by disjunctions; thus, the unsettled, the (un)becoming, the “shimmering” aesthetics of trans embodiment. I argue Bergsmark achieves a cinematic trans gaze in their imagining of a queer space where pollution, trash, urine, and blood are not symbols of abjection and shame, but embody an opening-up, a vulnerability: a becoming that molds new forms of relationships, new forms of love, and new forms of creation.

The Table and the Tomb: Positioning Trans Power and Play Amid Fantasy Realism in Dungeons & Dragons

This article contends with the transphobic logics perpetuated by the “world's greatest roleplaying game,” Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Bringing together game texts and scraped social media data from reactionary D&D fans, I argue that despite cursory improvements in official representation, D&D's hostility to trans play is inscribed in the game's engagement of fantasy realism—a culturally sculpted “common sense” that rearticulates the logics of established fantasy media. From sex-swap curses in Gygax's “Tomb of Horrors” (1978) to the shapechanging “blessed elves of Corellon” (2017), D&D's approach to fantasy realism mechanically and narratively excludes trans bodies, vilifies trans stories, and diminishes trans power. Drawing on the work of analog game and trans media scholars, I use this case study to center trans power in tabletop gaming and explore D&D's relationship with fantasy realism by asking Whose fantasy? and Whose reality?

Who counts as a woman? A critical discourse analysis of petitions against the participation of transgender athletes in women's sport

This article aims to analyze the organizational anti-trans discourse on the presence of transgender athletes in women's sport. To achieve this, the petitions published from 2019 to 2022 on the websites of three US organizations (Save Women's Sports, Independent Council on Women's Sports, and the Women's Sports Policy Working Group) were analyzed. The analysis addressed the research questions of how this discourse defines trans women and trans bodies and reproduces the indispensability of sex segregation in sport competitions. The research revealed that the petitions’ authors identified trans athletes as biological males who have an advantage over cis women. The organizations demand that the protection of women's sport from trans women's participation and women's rights be based on the sex (assigned at birth) category. The article emphasizes that members and allies of these organizations perceive biomedical science as providing objective arguments for the sex dichotomy and the exclusion of trans women from sport competitions. At the same time, the petitions’ authors ignore sociocultural factors that influence the perception of gender dichotomy and athletic performance.

The Tempest as Trans Archive: An Interview with Scholar Mary Ann S. Saunders

This interview with Dr. Mary Ann Saunders, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin, offers a new interpretation of Julie Taymor’s film The Tempest. Bringing her life experience to bear on cisgender biases in non-trans artists’ works, Saunders proposes a new interpretation of Ariel, as performed by Ben Whishaw, as a trans woman who is “both beautiful and bittersweet.” Reading Shakespeare as a “trans archive” enables us to more effectively interrogate the long history of associating trans bodies with monstrosity and bodies in distress.

Kings, Queens, Monsters, and Things: Digital Drag Performance and Queer Moves in Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The Zizi Project is a series of connected art and performance pieces created by artist Jake Elwes in collaboration with Me The Drag Queen and members of London’s drag performance scene. The works – currently Zizi: Queering the Dataset (2019), Zizi & Me (2020; ongoing), and The Zizi Show (2020) – sit at the intersection of drag performance and Artificial Intelligence (AI), playing with and queering facial recognition software, deepfake technologies, and Machine Learning algorithms. I consider The Zizi Project as an example of work at the vanguard of an emergent field of queer AI performance. The project intervenes in complex conversations surrounding AI and Machine Learning, including the lack of representation of diverse identities and communities in datasets used to train these systems and the complexity of creating datasets which include queer and trans bodies and identities. However, in aiming to use drag performance to expose and demystify these complex technological systems to audiences, I propose that queerer forms of art making and performance emerge that push at the boundaries of both drag and the technologies used. Ultimately, The Zizi Project articulates drag and queer futures where the digital and the actual interact in increasingly complex ways to explore notions of diversity, inclusion, and access that speak to fundamental questions of what counts as drag, what counts as queer, and, indeed, what count as human.

‘You have to trust their word’: transmasculine experiences with sex partners and safety during the early COVID-19 outbreak

The early months of the SARS-CoV2 pandemic exacerbated health disparities for vulnerable populations, including transgender (trans) communities, creating unique challenges for navigating sex and dating. This paper aims to expand upon the current literature regarding transmasculine populations by capturing their lived experiences during this critical time. We interviewed 20 assigned female sex at birth (AFAB) adults of the transmasculine spectrum - men, nonbinary, and transmasculine individuals - about their social and sexual experiences in the USA in May and June 2020. Transcripts were analysed using an inductive thematic approach. We found that sex drive decreased and uncertainty about health risks increased. Some participants found alternate ways to date and hook-up that reduced their COVID-19 risk, such as engaging in online sex (e.g. sexting, dating apps). Others expressed discomfort using virtual platforms for both personal/work and sexual lives, along with nuanced feelings around being objectified, compared to pornography, and fetishised as trans bodies. COVID-related shutdowns of queer spaces also amplified pre-existing concerns about interpersonal safety and rejection. When seeking new partners, participants sought behavioural characteristics that instilled trust. Future public health communications can take advantage of safety and sexual health strategies already present in trans communities to bolster wellbeing in trans lives.

Crusade for Identity: An Exploration of Space Among Gender, Diversity and Inequality in Anna-Marie McLemore’s When the Moon Was Ours and Blanca and Roja

The purpose of the research is to comprehend the highly polymorphic notion of identity in the works of Anna Marie McLemore, a Mexican American writer. A detailed inspection of his works indicates that the concept of ‘identity disintegration’ is a concern in virtually all of them. This research aims to demonstrate identity development as a process rather than a distinct result of the struggle. Identity development, as an ever-changing process, provides us with new avenues for investigating subjectivity. Using a close reading of the selected texts, this research demonstrates that identity disintegration is an ongoing process that can create new understandings and possibilities. Through these processes and subsequent learning to survive in postmodern society, individuals can create their subjective identities. This article uses When the Moon Was Ours and Blanca and Roja to relate young adult literature to magical realist canonical works, notably analysing how the texts use magical realism to examine trans bodies. The genre, magical realism is typically characterized by fluidity and intangibility, which explores gender and sexuality in the select texts, helping readers grapple with issues of identity and representation. Similarly, McLemore’s use of Latinx traditions allows young readers to engage in intersectional debates about magical realism, trans bodies and Latinx culture. Through the retelling, McLemore can present nuanced arguments about trans bodies and the Latinx culture that often rejects them which in turn inspires the young readers to explore with an open mind.

Trans Bodies and Embodiments in Shani Mootoo’sCereus Blooms at Night

This article studies how three kinds of trans embodiment—trans-speciation, sartorial metamorphosis, and nonmedical gender transition—in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) unsettle the anthropocentric idea of nature, the genital view of sex, gender, and sexuality, and the pathological framing of trans people in colonial epistemologies. In a postcolonial novel set in the colonial Caribbean, these kinds of trans embodiment interrogate the nature-culture or human-nonhuman divide, allowing certain characters to feel at home in their trans bodies rather than, as per liberal narratives of progress, seeking a new home elsewhere. Like intersex nonhuman species (particularly the snail and the cereus), some trans embodiments also interrogate the enterprise of sex/gender dimorphism.

How we fuck: assembling intimacy-as-method to research trans sex practices

In this paper I present my methodological approach to researching the sex practices of trans people developed during my PhD project How we Fuck. Using my body as both a fertile site of knowledge production (Bain and Nash, 2006), and an instrument for intimate analysis, I articulate an approach to ‘intimacy-as-method’ within an assemblage framework (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) to provide new ways of engaging in empirical sex research. Intimacy-as-method draws attention to how senses, bodies, affects, human and more-than-human agents (‘things’) coalesce to produce both trans sex, and trans sex research(ers) (Fox and Alldred, 2015). If ontologically unstable ‘things’ gain their stability by assembling relationally, then how can we create the conditions that liberate both trans sex from dominant narratives of suffering, and (trans) sex research from its conventions of squeamishness? I argue that considering the dynamic and mutable ways in which trans sex (and trans sex research) is produced expands the capacities and limitations of what trans bodies can ‘do’, making space for novel assemblages, new embodied knowledges, and expansive possibilities of How we Fuck.

Bodies, genders and sexualities

This work presents a discussion about the corporeality of transvestites and transsexuals, seeking to understand the course of the historical transformation of gender in different cultures, as well as showing how in some beliefs transgender people are considered divine. The research method used was the bibliographic review, and interviews with trans- vestites and transsexuals from the city of Palmas - TO. The work was carried out from May to December 2019, with testimonies about the life and confrontations of the participants. The research aims to highlight the studies of culture, gender and sexuality, describing the parti-cipants’ personal experiences and their relationship with their trans bodies, presenting their daily experiences and difficulties, relating to their identification processes, contrasts of nonidentification with the opposite gender and the divine.

Trans Bodies, Trans Speech

Trans Bodies, Trans Speech

Trap/Trope: Galarte's Trans-Figurative, Racialized Readings

Trap/Trope: Galarte's Trans-Figurative, Racialized Readings

Klein, Ula Lukszo. Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Klein, Ula Lukszo. <i>Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature</i>

Review: Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art, by Nicole Erin Morse

Review: <i>Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art</i>, by Nicole Erin Morse