Trans Body Research Articles

Biopolitical and Necropolitical Constructions of the Incarcerated Trans Body

This Article posits that the issue of gender-affirming genital surgery conjures competing constructions of the incarcerated trans body that reflect different conceptions of its relationship to state power. It offers a reading of this conflict as a clash between a biopolitical and a necropolitical conception of the incarcerated trans body. Biopolitics is a theory of state power that views the state as the arbiter and administrator of life and all life processes. Necropolitics, on the other hand, posits that sovereignty is defined by its power to mark out certain populations for social and literal death.

Corpografías divergentes: las ciudades deseadas y las prohibidas en las experiencias travestis (Brasil)

Mediante pesquisas etnográficas realizadas en dos regiones de Brasil —São Paulo y Paraíba—, este artículo reflexiona sobre las maneras en que travestis y mujeres transexuales se hacen presentes en distintos espacios urbanos y cómo construyen formas de resistencia ante las adversidades de los modelosde la ciudad moderna y las múltiples formas de violencias de las que son víctimas. Su presencia en calles, avenidas, aceras y plazas de los medios urbanos no solo desafía reglas heteronormativas, sino ideas de espacio público, prácticas sexuales, corporeidades y géneros. A partir de experiencias urbanas diversas, hay un proyecto de transformación corporal y de movilidad social común que se inscribe en una imbricación intensiva entre cuerpo trans y ciudad, produciendo procesos de desterritorialización y reterritorialización.

Duration, Compression, Extension and Distortion of Time in Contemporary Transgender Cinema

Cinema provides ‘privileged access’ ( Zubrycki 2011 ) into trans lives, recording and revealing private life experiences and moments that might never be seen, nor heard and after the time had passed, only present in memory and body for the individuals involved. Film, a temporal medium, creates theoretical issues, both in the presentation and representation of the trans body and for audiences in viewing the images. Specific narrative, stylistic and editing techniques including temporal disjunctions, may also give audiences a distorted view of trans bodily narratives that encompass a lifetime. Twenty first century cinema is simultaneously creating and erasing the somatechnical potentialities of trans. This article will explore temporal techniques in relation to recent trans cinema, comparing how three different filmmakers handle trans narratives. Drawing upon recent films including the Trans New Wave ( Ford 2014 , 2016a , 2016b ), such as the experimental animated autoethnographic short film Change Over Time (Ewan Duarte, United States, 2013), in tandem with the feature film 52 Tuesdays (Sophia Hyde, Australia, 2013), I will analyse the films as texts which show how filmmakers utilise temporality as a narrative and stylistic technique in cinematic trans narratives. These are texts where cinematic technologies converge with trans embodiment in ways that are constitutive of participants and audiences' understanding of trans lives. This analysis will be contrasted with the use of temporal displacement as a cinematic trope of negative affect, disembodiment and societal disjunction in the feature film Predestination (The Spierig Brothers, Australia, 2014), providing a further basis for scholarly critique of cinematic somatechnics in relation to the trans body.

Praying for Pieces: A Practice in Building the Trans Body

Praying for Pieces: A Practice in Building the Trans Body

Praying for Pieces

CrossCurrentsVolume 68, Issue 4 p. 515-524 Original Article Praying for Pieces A Practice in Building the Trans Body K. J. Cerankowski, Search for more papers by this author K. J. Cerankowski, Search for more papers by this author First published: 26 June 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/cros.12339Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume68, Issue4December 2018Pages 515-524 RelatedInformation

* Trans(ing) Body Art

This article engages with a number of trans artists who have turned to the genre of body art, using their explicit body as the focal point of their work. The article engages the subgenre of trans body art and reads the performances Ritual (Marriage) by Leah James and Mars Hobrecker and Homage by Kris Grey through the notion of the cut to examine the disciplining of corporeality and trans embodied labor and how these are/can be challenged and (re)imagined through performance.

Listening and learning: giving voice to trans experiences of disasters

This article gives voice to trans experiences of disasters, investigating their specific vulnerabilities and resilient capacities. We draw on findings from a project on lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) experiences of recent Australian and New Zealand disasters. We present and analyse trans voices from a survey conducted across multiple case study sites and insights from interview data with a trans person who experienced the 2011 Brisbane floods. Conceptually, to provide a robust understanding of trans experiences of disasters, we bring socially sensitive disaster studies into conversation with trans geographies. Disaster studies have begun to examine LGBT experiences, with some suggestion that trans people are most vulnerable. We advance this work by focusing on trans lives. Trans geographies, in turn, underline the importance of space, place and the body in understanding trans lives, and the need to examine the lived reality of trans people’s everyday geographies rather than embodiment as an abstract concept. Applying these insights to the trans voices in our project, we examine four themes that highlight impediments to and possibilities for trans-inclusive disaster planning: apprehension with emergency services and support; concerns about home and displacement; anxiety about compromising the trans body; and the potential of trans and queer interpersonal networks for capacity building. We offer suggestions for trans-inclusive disaster planning and preparedness, and indicate how the insights from trans experience can enrich disaster planning and preparedness for wider social groups.

DUELING DUALISMS

I write this review with a heavy heart. Trump’s election has rocked my students, my loved ones, and my queer and trans body. The ongoing murders of black men, trans women of color, and Native folks...

Almodóvar y la política Trans. Notas a pie de página

El presente recorrido, a través de notas y comentarios, propone una reinterpretación (acaso oblicua) de la obra del español Pedro Almodóvar, “La mala educación” estrenada en 2004. El filme escenifica no solo una historia anticlerical (o al menos no se reduce a este tópico exclusivamente) tal como señalara el mismo Almodóvar. La trama de la película pone en guerra un ordenamiento de cuerpos atravesada por los mecanismos de poder clericales, y el universo que construye desde ahí tematiza una violencia ulterior dirigida a un cuerpo trans. Para circunscribir la singularidad de estos interrogantes diremos que “La mala educación” entabla una suerte de economía de la violenciasobre una economía del deseo en el marco de un registro cinematográfico que no deja de reinscribe en las representaciones necropolíticas sobre cuerpos Trans.

Bodies with New Organs

“Transgender rights are the civil rights issue of our time.” So stated Vice President Joe Biden just one week before the November 2012 election. This article critically reframes calls such as this by foregrounding a historical trajectory not celebrated by national LGBT groups or media or explicitly theorized in most queer or trans theory: the move from the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act to the present moment of trans hailing by the US state. Such a trajectory helps map the ways that neoliberal mandates regarding productive, capacitated bodies entrain the trans body to recreate an abled body not only in terms of gender and sexuality but also in terms of economic productivity and the economic development of national economy. Rather than argue for a better form of discretion between the categories of trans and disability, this article analyzes the ontological irreducibilities of such categories, irreducibilities that dissolve them through multiplicity. In following the implications of such an argument, this article unfolds trans and disability studies' concerns within a broader analysis of the geopolitics of racial ontology.

Situated Transgressiveness: Exploring One Transwoman's Lived Experiences across Three Situated Contexts

This study investigates the lived experience of one transwoman, Claire, a public advocate and a manager with client services responsibilities. We examine Claire's story in order to discuss how situated contexts, such as different roles, locales and interactions, shape the way she experiences and perceives her trans body and gender identity. In particular, our analysis centres on how Claire's lived experience of personal and professional life shift across three different situated contexts, each enabling and constraining opportunities for political transgression. Our findings contribute to existing conversations within queer theory, transgender and organization studies by highlighting how situated contexts mediate the political potential of queer bodies at work. By developing the concept ‘situated transgressiveness’, this article challenges notions of transgender as a stable, ideal disruptive category and advances a more contextually sensitive approach to understanding the contingency of transgender lives and politics. Such insights are important in facilitating more nuanced understandings of the situatedness of transgression and transgender bodies within work and professional settings.

Photographic Flashes: On Imaging Trans Violence in Heather Cassils' Durational Art

ABSTRACTThis article examines the aesthetic strategy of flash photography to visualize everyday violence against trans people in the visual art of Heather Cassils (2011–14). In addition to using photographic flashes to blind audiences, these works reference violence on multiple levels: institutional discrimination through the location in an empty archive room, killings through martial arts choreographies, and microaggressions in aesthetics of defacement. However, the rigorous physical training undergone for his body art also suggests a productive mode of violence in that muscles must fail in order to grow. I trace the recurrence of the spasm across these different forms of embodied violence to show its generative as well as destructive property. This body of work opens up questions about the historiography of photography: What is the temporality of photographic violence? How can the body's resiliency be pictured? Does a trans body experienced as a punctum indicate queer anxieties?

The Trans/Romance Dilemma in Transamerica and Other Films

Romance is the stumbling block of trans films, providing a quandary even as it proves a popular standard for mainstream access into the transgender experience. Too often narrative expectation is subverted and romantic contact stifled because the filmmaker fears the audience will read the trans character's gender identity as inauthentic and the romance as transgressive. Duncan Tucker's Transamerica (2005), the award-winning film about a male-to-female transsexual who reconnects with her family in the midst of her transition, recalls earlier transgender films The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), The Crying Game (1992), and Boys Don't Cry (1999), where romance undermines the otherwise positive portrayal of the trans experience and reaffirms the dominant viewpoint that authentic gender is dependent upon birth sex rather than upon gender identity. The trans/romance dilemma is the result of two connected, but distinct cultural associations between transgender identity and sexual transgression: the traditional medical conflation of transgenderism with sexual deviance and the overarching presumption that any identity category transgression, more commonly known as passing, is related to sexual transgression. The directors' attempts to resolve the anxiety inherent in these traditions with the gender casting of the trans character, shots of the trans body, and physical interaction between romantic partners end up only reinforcing the character's inauthenticity.In dominant discourse, sex, a biological category, is conflated with gender, the social category of identity exhibited through appearance, mannerisms, dress, and so on. Failure to differentiate between sex and gender exists even when people recognize that the masculine and feminine characteristics assigned to each gender are social constructs that differ across cultures and time periods. Individually or as a group, transpersons expose the workings of this gender system, revealing that the binary is neither natural nor invariant and that male and female are not mutually exclusive categories.Transgender is an umbrella term, which includes cross-dressers, drag queens and kings, transsexuals, and other genderqueer people who may identify outside of the two gender system. Organized transgender activism has existed since the 1960s, but has gained momentum and public attention since the early 1990s (Meyerowitz 20812, 227-41; Stryker 139-53). As a result of this work, as of early 2012, sixteen states have banned discrimination based on gender identity, as have almost 80% of Fortune 500 and other top companies in 2012 (National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, State; Human Rights Campaign 9). Visibility has also exploded into popular culture, with new transgender narratives ranging from reality television shows like TransGeneration (2005), Transamerican Love Story (2008), and RuPaul's Drag Race (2009), major storylines on television series like The L Word, Ugly Betty, and Dirty Sexy Money, and documentaries like Transparent (2005), Boy I Am (2006), and She's A Boy I Knew (2007). However, traditional stereotypes of transpersons continue to shape mainstream depictions, most notably in the conflation of transgender romance and sexual transgression in film.The biased medical discourse that formulated this association between transgenderism and sexual deviance started in early twentieth-century sexology, when homosexuals were defined as gender inverts, so that cross-dressing was presumed to be a physical manifestation of this psychological state. Even though most male cross-dressers are heterosexual, this presumption lingers today in the common stereotype that men who crossdress do so to attract male partners and alleviate their shame and guilt over being homosexual (Boyd 25; see also Garber 207 and Serano 128). Midcentury sexologists who crafted the modern psychiatric category of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) and its accompanying current clinical criteria for transsexuality, known as Standards of Care, obviously feared such connotations when they mandated heteronormative sexuality as a goal of treatment for transsexuals and defined homosexuality as an automatic contraindication for a diagnosis of GID until 1994 (Rosario 39; Fausto-Sterling 107; Rudacille 124-30; Stone 292). …

Referential Sights and Slights

Referential Sights and Slights C. Riley Snorton (bio) Well before the first episode of the first season of Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta (LHHA) aired on VH1, rumors were circulating about cast member Joseline Hernandez and her possible transgender history. Taking a familiar narrative arc, the rumors suggested that Joseline was assigned male at birth and lived as a boy under the moniker Joe until sometime after high school. Speculation about Hernandez’s transgender identity became constitutive to the buzz surrounding the show even before its debut, demonstrated by the numerous hip hop gossip sites who picked up the story and a video that went viral; the video was shot during an Atlanta premiere event, in which an audience member asks LHHA cast members and producer Mona Scott-Young (while looking directly at Hernandez): “Is there a transgender among you?”1 The circulation of this question and the various attempts to address it are the impetuses for this essay, for as the immediate responses bear out, they stage the limits of visual logics in representation while also illuminating the particular conditions of unrepresentability for the trans2 body. This is not to negate the numerous documentary projects—both photographic and filmic—that endeavor to represent transgender people, but rather it is to suggest that what is indexical about the trans body is unrepresentable in visual terms. Raising the question, how does one know that she is viewing a trans body? (And relatedly, how can one really be sure that she is viewing a cisgender one?) In the form of a reversal, Hernandez is first to respond to the audience member’s question: “ To me you look like a transgender—your hair, your clothes, everything.”3 Hernandez’s response relies on a recognizable form of transphobia, where the logics of visibility most frequently are used to evoke and dismiss transgender difference: there’s something perceptibly unnatural, off, or askew that allows one to identify the transgender in one’s midst. These logics suggest that there is no transgender to be found. Rather, a transperson’s “real [End Page 175] sex” is always present—not as a trace, per se, but as the truth of the cissexual that persists at the surface of the body. After a round of retorts exchanged between the audience member and Hernandez, Scott-Young joins the conversation, stating, “I have to say this for the avoidance of further doubt. I’ve seen her absolutely naked. There is no penis.”4 As Scott-Young’s comment referentially marks, the visual experience of witnessing Hernandez’s naked body is supposed to quell all doubts about Hernandez’s female identity. And yet, evidencing dissatisfaction with Scott-Young’s response and a substantial skepticism for the commonsense of the visual as proof, the audience member rejoins: “You don’t know that unless you ate it. Did you eat her?”5 At once, the audience member seems to be articulating a connection between transphobia and homophobia, in her request for Scott-Young to engage in queer sex in order to prove that Hernandez is a “real woman.” Paradoxically, if Hernandez is “really a man,” Scott-Young is able to recuperate and maintain her heterosexuality. And yet the shift from the visual to the gustatory, a reworking of the popularized legal adage—“I know it when I see it” to “I know it when I taste it”—at once reterritorializes female genitalia as sites for pleasures rather than proof of cissexuality. (Can one know a trans body based on that body’s experience of sexual pleasure? Is a cissexual female organ defined by its receptivity to oral, non-penetrative sex?) Scott-Young simply replies, “No, I wasn’t hungry,” which responds to the audience member’s question as if one’s desire to perform oral sex is analogous with a need to consume food, circumventing the question’s queer possibilities while sidestepping sexual desire all together. Yet if one reads Scott-Young’s response as a foreclosure on a set of queer inflected questions about bodies and pleasures, one must also consider how the exchange between the producer and audience member provides another outline for a frequently rehearsed set of articulations about the transgender...

A Passport to Trouble

IntroductionAccess to government issued identity documentation (ID) is not readily available for all Canadians. Trans- identified Canadians1 are one particular group that has a significant amount of difficultly accessing ID. The ramifications of barriers to obtaining ID are significant and far reaching; and for transidentified people, can function as a justification for other forms of exclusion and violence based in transphobia. Transphobia consists of actions, behaviors or beliefs that are driven by an understanding (consciously or not) of trans-body as less real than non- trans body (Prosser, 1998). These actions, behaviors and beliefs function as forms of violence, whether explicit or implicit, intentional or otherwise, that are often thought to stem from fear. Common sense assumptions about gender-that everyone identifies as sex they were assigned at birth and that norms of masculinity and femininity naturally follow these birth assignments-are used to justify transphobia in form of stigmatization, discrimination, and various types of violence (Spade, 2008). Thinking about transphobia in this way, it is easy to see that policies that enact barriers to ID access for trans- people are an excellent example of institutional transphobia.Barriers to ID access for trans- people in Canada occur in a myriad of ways, and this article will look specifically at access issues in relation to passports. As trans legal scholar Dean Spade (2008, p. 749) notes: the literature has thus far failed to look at range of administrative gender reclassification policies and practices-including birth certificates, DMV policies, policies of sex- segregated facilities, and federal identity document policies-side by side, which has meant that significance of incoherence of these policies as a group has been obscured. This article will not go so far as to attempt such a lofty endeavor; however, through an examination of barriers to information regarding gender reclassification, this article offers a different trajectory towards a similar goal. While significance of these incoherencies is incredibly important, so too are erasures of gender reclassification policies that occur through lack of access to information regarding them, and impact these erasures have on interconnected government policies that affect trans- people (such as access to ID, placement in sex- segregated facilities, and access to healthcare). Moreover, these erasures perform a significantly more important function than simply an extension of institutional transphobia; they also function to naturalize and reify common sense assumptions about gender that underpin both policies and transphobia, as well as various forms of misogyny.Through a consideration of relationship between legal discourses and citizenship discourses as they relate to transsexed body and passport, this article undermines commonsensical assumptions that underpin social justice and human rights issues. By explicitly considering how a lack of access to information functions to produce certain bodies as possible and others as impossible, while simultaneously producing different forms of citizenship for these (im)possible bodies, government issued ID becomes ground from which horizon of institutional transphobia and naturalization of gender difference becomes obvious. Exposing this institutionally imbedded transphobia is merely an initial step in much larger project suggested by Spade, as significance of incoherencies between policies is also obscured by barriers to access of very information contained in these policies. Moving through a critical and rigorous examination of a single Passport Canada form, this article uses formal and informal archive produced by this form, ethnographic stories, and mandate and understanding expressed by Passport Canada to expose inaccessibility of information regarding gender reclassification. …

Expecting Bodies: The Pregnant Man and Transgender Exclusion from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act

EXPECTING BODIES: THE PREGNANT MAN AND TRANSGENDER EXCLUSION FROM THE EMPLOYMENT NON-DISCRIMINATION ACT In April 2008, news about an Oregon man's impending parenthood spawned a media tsunami across the United States and even internationally. Is Six Months reported CBS news. Man Speaks Out, announced People magazine as it hyped the first published show-all pictures. Pregnant Man Is Feeling Swell, punned the New York Post. ABC news highlighted his television debut in its story 'It's My Right to Have Kid,' Man Tells Oprah. but She's a Man, headlined the Sydney Morning Herald. Pregnant, yes-but not a man, huffed an editorialist in the International Herald Tribune. The riveting lead drew readers and viewers further into the story. It was usually in the second paragraph that authences were provided with an explanation. The pregnant man was Thomas Beatie, a man who had had top surgery and been on hormone therapy but had stopped taking testosterone in anticipation of getting pregnant. A quick and unscientific survey of the blogosphere indicates that the news was met with disbelief, curiosity, revulsion, annoyance, indifference, and, less often, celebration. Some bloggers felt that she was still a woman; others thought transitioning should mean Beatie had forfeited his right to give birth; still others (usually women) expressed annoyance at all the attention the first was getting. A small proportion seemed to have no problem getting their mind around the idea. The story originally came to light at the end of March, when Beatie published a first-person account in the Advocate, a Time-like weekly magazine marketed to the U.S. gay community. In that essay, Beatie describes the travails he and his wife went through as they tried to find medical professionals who would work with them. Some refused to treat Beatie because of their religious beliefs; one physician told Beatie he would have to shave his beard; a third consulted with his hospital's ethics board and then turned him away (Beatie 2008). For trans people in the United States, much of Beatie's narrative resonated with their own experience. While it is rare, but not unheard of in trans communities, for people who have transitioned to give birth, his larger story of discrimination in the health care industry is depressingly familiar. T. Benjamin Singer has studied the inability of many medical professionals to provide appropriate care to people whose somehow exceed conventional expectations. He examines the terror engendered by the unknown through a frame he labels the transgender sublime, which he describes as the conceptual limit to a service-provider's ability to recognize the legibility and meanings of trans identities and bodies (2006, 616). The common sense of gender says that birth sex, gender identity, and the secondary sex characteristics that later develop will all be in alignment. But the histories, spatial arrangements, and physical terrains of trans people's can confound conventional expectations. Some are modified through hormones, various types of gender reassignment surgeries, or both, to produce culturally commensurate with gender identities. In those cases, the perceived incongruence comes only from knowing the history of that individual's body. Other bodies, however, have unexpected configurations in their particular geographiesfor example, breasts with penises for some, male chests with vaginas in others-that produce a dissonance. (This dissonance, to be clear, belongs not to the trans body but to those gazers who have conventional gender expectations.) The more easily read and specific physical terrains of bodies, such as the presence or absence of facial hair, baldness, or patterns of musculature, can add a third layer of potential contradiction. (Ironically, these configurations of geography and terrain often are determined by one's lack of access to medical care. …

Transgender on Screen

Transgender on Screen is an eclectic investigation of gender through representations of (and ambivalent responses to) crossdressing, transgenderism and transsexuality in mainstream film. Phillips argues that little has been published that puts transgender at its heart, and thus ‘This book is designed to fill in the gap’ (p. 1). As he negotiates specific films which feature trans1 subjectivities and themes from within the genres of comedy, horror and others, Phillips offers some introduction to various theoretical frameworks through which to read these films and characters. He posits trans as an interdisciplinary subject matter, but bases his own readings predominantly on the use of psychoanalysis. This book may be significant for media studies or film studies students for whom psychoanalytic tools are useful and whose interest in trans studies and gender politics is growing. Similarly, those involved in gender studies, queer theory and feminism may benefit from the psychoanalytic methodologies employed when reading representations of trans. As an activist from within the trans community, however, my reading of the book is as one whose interests lie in the valorization (or not, as the case may be) of trans subjectivities specifically. It is perhaps necessary to state that my response may not be the same as other readers, but it raises concerns over some of the understandings of trans people that Phillips offers in relation to the films that he critiques. He engages us with psychoanalytical modes such as Lacan's notion of the ‘Real’ and the ‘imaginary’, the ‘symbolic realms’ and the ‘father's law’, as well as Freud's notion of ‘castration anxiety’, each of which offers understandings of how gendered roles are psychically constructed in the world and more specifically from within the family. He understands these types of analysis to be ‘essential tools in the exploration of a powerful textual unconscious’ (p. 5). Phillips also outlines the work of gender studies and queer theorists as an important backdrop when engaging with trans. He breaks down the multiplicity of identities within trans, such as drag queens, female impersonators and transsexuals, informatively, relying heavily on Marjorie Garber. Throughout his introduction he offers short, concise and compelling summaries of understandings of sex, gender and sexuality in relation to the trans body. This demonstrates how ‘trans’ hosts multiple and diverse meanings as well as subjectivities, which ideologically might seek to explode binaries. Phillips cites Garber to this effect: Transvestitism is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself.2 (p. 3)