Transfeminist Research Articles

Putting the Femme in Feminist: Trans Feminism and the ‘Male Lesbian’ in the American Second Wave

Putting the Femme in Feminist: Trans Feminism and the ‘Male Lesbian’ in the American Second Wave

Pregnant Persons as a Gender Category: A Trans Feminist Analysis of Pregnancy Discrimination

Pregnant Persons as a Gender Category: A Trans Feminist Analysis of Pregnancy Discrimination

Reading Meredith Talusan’s Fairest: A Queer Decolonial Critique of the U.S. Empire

This essay examines Meredith Talusan’s Fairest, the first book-length memoir by and about a trans Asian woman. I argue that Talusan’s gender and sexual reconstruction is an ongoing process of accepting, negotiating, and rejecting ideas deeply rooted in the white heteropatriarchy that prevails throughout the U.S. transnational empire. I first investigate Talusan’s critique of the colonial mentality that is imposed on Filipinos, and their suggestion to resist such a sense of indigenous inferiority. Next, I explore how Talusan molded themself to blend into the masculinity-obsessed American gay culture that renders Asian men undesirable, but they ultimately realized that either passing as white or gay erased certain parts of who they really are. Last, I analyze how Talusan proposes a new direction of trans feminism that centers on woman-identification while rejecting the male privileges that they had enjoyed before gender transition. Inspired by nineteenth-century British women writers, Talusan revisits the colonial history of Filipino transgender people as victims of gender-based violence.

We Must Abolish the Conditions of the Unbearable: A Conversation with Marquis Bey

Abstract: This article is structured as a conversation between scholars Jess A. Goldberg and Marquis Bey, grounded in the arguments of Bey’s recent book Black Trans Feminism , published in 2022 by Duke University Press. Rather than an overview or summary of Bey’s book, the conversation digs into particular dimensions of Bey’s arguments and analyses. It begins by situating Black Trans Feminism in relation to the topic of the special issue of WSQ in which the article appears, with Goldberg asking Bey to explain their thinking around “the unbearable” or the abject as they relate to the framework of black trans feminism. From there, the conversation turns to the roles of affect, desire, and disagreement in feminist theorization and argument as well as an extended consideration of metaphors of “holding” in Bey’s work and beyond. The conversation closes with a critical and loving exchange over questions of violence in abolitionist politics and movements and the risks we take on in trying to abolish the conditions of unbearable life at various levels.

Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art, Nicole Erin Morse (2022)

Review of: Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art, Nicole Erin Morse (2022) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 179 pp., ISBN 978-1-47801-814-8, p/bk, $26

Reading Refugee/(Im)Migrant Education Diffractively: Transdisciplinary Exploration of Matters That Matter and Matter That Matters in Refugee/(Im)Migrant Education

This paper is a conceptual exploration and diffractive reading of refugee/(im)migrant education through multiple lenses, including data-driven decision making, critical refugee studies, new materialism and critical feminist and posthumanist studies, and trans theorizations such as Black trans feminism. After a brief introduction to “the field” of refugee/(im)migrant education, the paper turns to diffractive readings of refugee/(im)migrant education as means of exploring what is the matter, as in the material and discursive substance, in refugee/(im)migrant education, and why and how (including when, where, and by whom) does that matter come to matter? The paper concludes with discoveries, or findings, from this diffractive, transdisciplinary exploration and considerations for educators, policymakers, researchers, activists, and other actors (co)constituting and “becoming with” refugee/(im)migrant education.

Redrawing the lesbian: The memory of lesbian feminism in Kate Charlesworth’s Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide

Kate Charlesworth’s graphic narrative Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide (2019), part memoir and part documentary of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex life and activism in the United Kingdom from 1950 to 2019, remembers the time when the LGBTQI+ and feminist movements met and influenced each other deeply, namely in lesbian feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on feminist historiography and memory studies, this article discusses the role the figure of the lesbian has played in the collective memory of lesbian feminism. With a focus on the expressive capacities of comics, it examines how the work revisits this figure at a time when women’s and LGBTQI+ rights face a backlash led by anti-gender campaigners, some of whom draw on discourses associated with lesbian feminism. It concludes that the work challenges dominant narratives about the relationship between lesbian, queer, and trans feminism and enables a reconsideration of these movements as parts of a common political project.

Trans feminism and the women's liberation movement in Britain, c. 1970–1980

AbstractThe history of the British women's liberation movement (WLM) is a growing field of study, but it has had little to say about trans participants in the movement. Drawing on feminist and LGBT+ archives and interviews, this article argues that while trans acceptance in ‘women‐only’ groups was not guaranteed during the period between 1970 and 1980, trans and cis feminists worked together to advance feminist positions on bodily autonomy and to develop critiques of medical authority. In doing so, this article demonstrates that it is ahistorical to approach trans rights and women's liberation as distinct from one another.

Masculinity and transfemininity: Evidence in the film "Memories of My Body"

As a distinct field of research, so-called transfemininity studies can be used for the purposes of creating strategic coalitions and exploring specificities and differences. This study aims to explore the life journey of Arjuna (Juno), a man who is also a trans feminist, through the perspective of masculinity studies. The sub focuses of this research include: 1) transfemininity, physical transformation 2) and socio-psychological transformation. This research is interpretive qualitative research that verbally narrates data in the film Memories of My Body which was broadcast in 2019 as the data source. The results of the study show that Juno as the main character is caught between past trauma, his profession as a Lengger dancer, his sexual orientation and being liked by other men. Not yet finished making peace with himself, the people around him also add to the chaos with the end of his return to the beginning, trans-feminity – masculinity. Gender and sex as the other side of the coin are simple constructs, so future studies should be carried out to provide additional insights into the gender identities that have been internalized, reproduced, and possibly opposed by 'women' in everyday life in the social environment.

<i>Dressed to Kill</i> Cis Hetero Patriarchy

Through re-cutting misogynist horror, this video essay approaches the diptych as a tool to construct resistant trans feminist readings in Dressed to Kill, Brian De Palma’s 1980 homage to Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Playing and Hiding Joyfully in the Rubble

Abstract Marquis Bey's Black Trans Feminism (2022) puts forth radical gender abolition as the necessary actualization of blackness and transness toward hopeful world de/construction. An intentional, ongoing work of stepping aside from expected regimes replaces material identitary stances and aims to embrace possibility rather than hold us down. The present conversational piece, fostering critical reflection in/on kinship and interested in evading disciplinary pledges, explores underlying themes of Bey's fugitive theorization, such as undefining, opacity, queer excess, playful performativity, and the destabilization of “solid” ground. Desloover and Bey discuss the avoidance of ontological gendering violence in practice and the necessary forgoing of identities held near and dear. They touch on xenogender proliferation, which could lead not only to fracturing the oppressive binary but also to obliterating gender as colonial cis-heteropatriarchy knows it — to release the need for “making sense” and let it remake itself over and again. Bey describes the stifling experience of (en)forced embodiment of attributed/assumed privilege, claiming nonbinariness on/as the way to wider spaces that skirt required legibility. How can we run (off) from socially imposed and oppressive terrain that forecloses possible unruly existences? Yearnings for the vastness of the “not quite” that-which-is-given ripple beneath the surface of the nameable and speak ofthe elsewhere Bey desires without tying it too tightly to defining words. Playful joy from and for radically healing openness is shared and upheld here to elude the paralyzing exhaustion caused by a “cistem” that cannot possibly hold us.

U jeets'el le ki'ki’ kuxtal: A Hemispheric Meditation on Abolition and Autonomy

This article imagines abolitionist politics in the Yucatán peninsula as one group, known as U jeets'el le ki'ki’ kuxtal, pushes against one portion of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador's development plan known as the “Tren Maya.” I contend that U je'etsel's calls for autonomy speak to forms of radical abolitionist politics present in the United States, where we might observe the centrality of land in both abolition and decolonization. To this end, I first provide a definition of a trans feminist abolition radically focused on the otherwise, or the eradication of all forms of social oppression. This definition is followed by close readings of U je'etsel's communiqués regarding AMLO's 2021 visit to the Yucatán peninsula and the continued role the so-called “Caste War” plays in attempts to expand nationalized colonization into the region. My final goal is to proffer that “Caste War” constitutes a historicized form of radical autonomy as well as project of abolition subject to forces that seek to vacate it of its liberatory power. I demonstrate that part of U je'etsel's discursive project is to reclaim the “Caste War” narrative as part of an emancipatory project involving a radical reclaiming of autonomy's regional history.

Entering the archive of second‐wave trans feminist print culture: The journal of male feminism

AbstractCommon stories of second‐wave feminism equate the period either explicitly or by reference to its presumed biological essentialism, with trans‐exclusionary feminism. This article deep‐dives into issues published between 1977 and 1979 of the Journal of Male Feminism, an underground newsletter for a predominantly North American‐based male‐to‐female (M‐T‐F) cross‐dressing community. It argues that these texts contain a rich set of theoretical resources and nuanced perspectives on sex and gender developed by trans people in the 1970s and therefore deserve to be read as part of an expanded canon of second‐wave feminism.

In Relation or Nah? A Review of Black Trans Feminism by Marquis Bey

In Relation or Nah? A Review of <i>Black Trans Feminism</i> by Marquis Bey

Anybody, Everybody, All the Time

Abstract In this conversation, Andrew Cutrone and Marquis Bey discuss Bey's recent monograph, Black Trans Feminism (2022) in the context of citation practices, black and trans feminist practice and theory, “radical-radical thinking,” and fugitivity.

An imaginative geography of linear gender: Bathrooms, locker rooms and cis vulnerability

The wave of anti-trans bathroom bills since 2015 has raised awareness of the importance of bathroom politics for trans people. Long before this, feminist scholars have argued that bodies and spaces are simultaneously forced into a gender binary through the regulation of gender-segregated spaces such as bathrooms. In this article, I offer a trans feminist reading of the media events and rhetoric of the Christian right opposing trans access. I analyse the opposition of the Christian right towards trans access to gender-segregated spaces as an imaginative geography of linear gender. As I argue, the Christian right builds an imaginative geography of a threatened, White ‘cis America’ through rhetorical devices. Vulnerability attached with micro-level spaces across the United States is evoked through the figure of the child, ‘women and children’ and the predator. Through these rhetorical devices, bodies and spaces are imagined simultaneously. These figures work as powerful ‘stopping devices’ for anyone bending the straight line of linear gender. These stopping devices can mobilize cis bodies around a defence of a conservative gender order, legitimize a ‘protective’ control over cis girls and women, make living in the social world even harder for trans people, all the while envisioning an exclusionary ‘America’.

Against Trans Inclusion in the Military: A Trans Of Color Abolitionist Critique

Abstract: Over the last few years, trans inclusion in the military has become the focal point for much of trans activism in the US. Advocates seeking inclusion highlight how participation in the military is often a means of socioeconomic mobility and access to trans-friendly healthcare. Such advocacy hinges upon notions of “good citizenship,” which buttresses US exceptionalism, and concretizes the US empire vis-à-vis militarism. In this paper, we examine a popular documentary, TransMilitary (2018), released in the context of the US–led War on Terror. This documentary serves as a cultural artifact that showcases the deployment of trans service members to Iraq and Afghanistan as a form of inclusion advocacy. Against the backdrop of US imperialism in Asia and Oceania, we extend Asian/American and Pacific Islander feminist analytics to bring into conversation a trans of color abolitionist praxis that centers demilitarization and abolition of the military. In conclusion, we formulate Asian and Pacific Islander trans feminist abolitionist critiques of US trans militarism. A trans abolitionist framework unsettles ideas of liberal inclusion and, instead, centers abolishment of the military for collective trans liberation.

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

Changing Times

Changing Times

General Editor's Introduction

General Editor's Introduction