Transgender Sexualities Research Articles

(Re)producing sex/gender normativities: LGB alliance, political whiteness and heteroactivism

ABSTRACT LGB Alliance, as a prime example of gender-critical feminism, argues that the ‘sex-based’ rights of those who are ‘same-sex attracted’ are threatened by the inclusion of trans individuals, and trans lesbians especially. In seeking to exclude trans women from gay/queer spaces by presenting them as a threat to (cis) lesbians, LGB Alliance can be understood as deploying strategies of heteroactivism and political whiteness. Sex/gender normativity is discursively framed through specific configurations of gender, race and class, including visual codes determined by biological and cultural standards that are, ultimately, a product of colonial/racial science. Trans lesbians, gay men and bisexuals whose bodies are not regarded as sex/gender normative, who are perceived as queering the male/female binary, and who are understood as falsely and dangerously claiming a label of homosexuality, are subjected to suspicion and surveillance, their bodies rendered inferior and denied social and cultural recognition. Although LGB Alliance claims its advocacy is intended to support and advance the interests of the (cis) lesbian, gay and bisexual community, the article argues that the organization can be read as (re)producing and engaging in harmful discourses related to heteronormativity, racism and classism, and which, overall, seek the restriction and limitation of broader LGBTQ+ equalities.

Transfeminine letter clubs, community care and the radical politics of the erotic

This essay examines trans feminine community-building and care in the context of desire and the erotic as forms of political praxis. The theoretical core of the text builds on Audre Lorde’s broad, poetic use of the erotic as well as José Muñoz’s aesthetic and utopian notion of queer future. I argue that Lorde and Muñoz provide important tools for theorizing the erotic as a politically subversive and utopian form of care in the contemporary political setting of rising anti-genderism, moral conservativism and neo-fascism. The essay begins though a brief, historical examination of the ways in which transgender sexuality, desire and the erotic have come to be a neglected and contested topic in both academic and clinical research, despite what Michel Foucault defines as a ‘discursive explosion’ on the truth about sex and sexuality in modernity. I will then point out historical counter examples of transfeminine, transvestite and cross-dresser community-building in which care is intimately linked to the erotic in Lorde’s sense of the term. Finally, I argue that trans desire and the erotic should be understood as radically political in Muñoz’s sense of utopian imagining of a future yet to be made.

Žižek’s “Frankenstein”: Modernity, Anti-Enlightenment Critique and Debates on the Left

In this article, I examine Slavoj Žižek’s Freudian-Hegelian interpretation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus (1818), and argue that Žižek’s critique of Shelley’s ambiguous and contradictory attitude toward the French Revolution and its regime of terror remains central to the debates about the revolutionary and Enlightenment ideals today. For Žižek, Shelley employs the family myth not only to obfuscate the social reality of the French Revolution, but also to subvert the bourgeois family from within, through its transgressive sexual politics. Although Shelley manages not simply to dismantle modernity, she expresses a radical commitment to a “pure Enlightenment subjectivity”. Nonetheless, Shelley fails to articulate the speculative identity of the Enlightenment and revolutionary terror. Žižek’s analysis of Shelley’s ambiguous position on emancipatory politics has major implications for his critique of Leftist debates about Muslim refugees in Europe and transgender sexuality. It is still urgent, Žižek correctly insists, to interrogate the ways in which identity politics and the human rights regime can be readily appropriated and commodified in late capitalism.

Gender’s ontoformativity, or refusing to be spat out of reality: reclaiming queer women’s solidarity through experimental writing

In this article, I argue that queer women – especially cis and trans lesbians – have more in common than contemporary fissures either allow for or acknowledge. Lesbians who recognised their queer sexuality in the 1970s have in common with trans women the shared condition of being, in the words of the 1970s radical feminist Marilyn Frye, ‘spat summarily out of reality’. We also share the experience of refusing to accept this condition. I make this argument by manoeuvring away from questions of gender identity and focusing instead on gender’s ontoformativity: the astonishing, welcome and transformative fact that new social realities are brought into being by new social practices. I turn to experimental writing to explore this matter. Through this medium, the cis lesbian poet Nicole Brossard and the trans lesbian poet Trace Peterson wrote themselves into worlds, languages and social orders that refused to acknowledge their existence. Brossard was writing in 1970s Montreal, Peterson in early twenty-first-century New York, but what they have in common, indeed what radical lesbian theory from the 1970s shares with contemporary theorising by trans women, is the insight that identifying with men is expected. It is in identifying with women that we are most at risk.

Going online to be a lesbian: AfterEllen, Vice Versa, The Ladder and queer (?) theorizing in discursive spaces

By constructing a lineage of mediated discourse in which queer women theorize their spaces and identities, this article argues for the significant place of communication technologies as venues for queer women’s theoretical discussions. Specifically, it analyses content from AfterEllen, a website devoted to popular culture and media for lesbian and bisexual women, connecting the site to two twentieth-century lesbian periodicals, Vice Versa and The Ladder, ultimately arguing for a conception of the discourse produced in these spaces as a type of proto-queer theory. In each space, queer women reject the fictive wholeness proffered by systems of heteronormativity through their critiques of mainstream society and cultivation of representation and community. However, this article also analyses the dangers of theory, as spaces like AfterEllen theorize a lesbian subjectivity that denigrates and dismisses trans lesbians. Utilizing convergence theory, this article additionally argues that heralding the web as the first liberating space of its kind for LGBT individuals obfuscates a rich history of investment in and dependence on communication networks for identity and community formation.

Going online to be a lesbian: AfterEllen, Vice Versa, The Ladder and queer (?) theorizing in discursive spaces

By constructing a lineage of mediated discourse in which queer women theorize their spaces and identities, this article argues for the significant place of communication technologies as venues for queer women’s theoretical discussions. Specifically, it analyses content from AfterEllen, a website devoted to popular culture and media for lesbian and bisexual women, connecting the site to two twentieth-century lesbian periodicals, Vice Versa and The Ladder, ultimately arguing for a conception of the discourse produced in these spaces as a type of proto-queer theory. In each space, queer women reject the fictive wholeness proffered by systems of heteronormativity through their critiques of mainstream society and cultivation of representation and community. However, this article also analyses the dangers of theory, as spaces like AfterEllen theorize a lesbian subjectivity that denigrates and dismisses trans lesbians. Utilizing convergence theory, this article additionally argues that heralding the web as the first liberating space of its kind for LGBT individuals obfuscates a rich history of investment in and dependence on communication networks for identity and community formation.

One Womanist's View of Racial Reconciliation in Galatians

In contemporary society, the devaluation of black and brown bodies in the United States is a continuing problem. Black and brown bodies falling as a result of police violence along with the continued degradation of black female sexuality or transgender sexuality (as opposed to cisgender women) in the context of Women's Marches is also problematic. In her various works, Kelly Brown Douglas highlights how Christian theology has not adequately addressed its complicity in degrading black and brown bodies. Moreover, critical social theorist Pierre Bourdieu highlighted habitus and body capital as ways to theorize around body issues. Engaging these scholars, this essay problematizes Paul's privileged use of his own body as "bearing the marks of Jesus" in Galatians 6:17. This essay argues that biblical scholarship has not adequately wrestled with the uncritical wholesale adoption of Pauline "identity" and "body" language while thinking through initial steps out of this conundrum.

“The intersections of trans women and lesbian identities, communities, and movements”: An introduction

ABSTRACTThis introduction to the special issue on “The Intersections of Trans Women and Lesbian Identities, Communities, and Movements” considers the interconnectedness of “trans” and “lesbian” as identities and as concepts. Our approach challenges a reading of the two communities as largely separate and adversarial. In reviewing the articles included in this issue, we highlight places of intersection between the two identities, including the experiences of the individuals who live at the intersectional point: trans lesbians.

The Limits ofBaklaand Gay: Feminist Readings ofMy Husband’s Lover, Vice Ganda, and Charice Pempengco

Although the past decade has been characterized by a sustained and generative examination of queer lives in the Philippines and in the diaspora, this emergent scholarship has primarily focused on the lives of gay men, bakla identities, and cisgendered persons. Contributing to dialogues within feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies, this article places the most legible subjects of such critical scholarship—the bakla and gay man—through more heightened feminist scrutiny. It explores how the hypervisibility of both these identities in the contemporary moment paradoxically enables problematic articulations of female and transgender sexualities. It focuses on three examples from Filipino/a popular culture to help develop these points further: first, the immense popularity of the teleserye or soap opera My Husband’s Lover, and the show’s circulation in queer- and non-queer-identified communities; second, the success of the out bakla comedian Jose Marie Borja Viceral, or Vice Ganda, including the most recent controversy around his comments on obesity and rape; and, finally, Charice Pempengco’s coming out as a tomboy, a word that can mean lesbian or transgender identity, and the reactions to Pempengco’s coming out. Ultimately, as it expands the archives of queer Filipino/a studies to include transnational queer mediascapes that circulate narratives about gender and sexuality, this work decentralizes the visibility of both gay and bakla subjects in order to better understand the gendered occlusions such visibilities enact.

Gay Men and the Rural South: No Contradiction in Terms

Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. By John Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 395 pages. $27.50 (cloth). GAY MISSISSIPPI. FOR MANY RURAL SOUTHERNERS WHO ARE ACCUSTOMED TO maintaining a pretense of ignorance toward what they do not want to see or hear about, those two words together have represented something of a contradiction for much of the twentieth century. Male-male desire and gender insubordination might exist in the seemingly less normative and more anonymous environment of major, mostly Northern cities but largely not in their homes and communities. Ironically, such a mindset also informs the beliefs of many non-Southern lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists and historians who assume that individuals who are attracted to others of the same gender will come out--and if they live in a rural part of the country, move out--and settle in a large metropolitan area where they can supposedly express their sexual identities more openly. These activists and historians cannot fathom the possibility that individuals interested in pursuing same-gender relationships could live satisfying lives in Jackson or Biloxi, much less in Brandon, Mississippi, the town in which John Howard grew up. Howard's work demonstrates that "men like that," as well as men "who liked that" (men who had sex with other men but who did not identify themselves as gay or bisexual), not only survived but flourished, [End Page 178] whether living in the Mississippi countryside, in a small town, or in a relatively more populated city neighborhood. Neither completely isolated nor invisible, they acted on their desires within the main institutions of local society--home, church, school, and workplace. In a sense, sexual and gender nonconformity were homegrown experiences in Mississippi. Men Like That examines male-male sexualities and male-to-female transgender sexualities--what Howard refers to as expressions of "queerness"--from the end of World War II to 1985, the year that seems to have marked the onset of the AIDS crisis in Mississippi and the culmination of a rural to urban shift in the state. The first part of the text describes how queer Mississippians both shaped and were shaped by their particular social and physical landscape. While readers familiar with LGBT histories of cities such as Buffalo, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Flint, Michigan will recognize some commonalities, Howard provides a history that is specific, if not entirely unique, to Mississippi. For example, given the predominantly rural nature of the state, men who were attracted to others of the same gender did not necessarily seek out or look to belong to a community of people like themselves. Instead, they developed distinct ways of enacting their sexualities. For this reason, Howard argues that gay community "is not simply a phenomenon lacking at this place and time. Rather, it is a concept lacking in explanatory power, a notion that incompletely and inadequately gets at the shape and scope of queer life" (15). However, the fact that many Mississippians did not structure their lives around membership in a gay community did not mean that they refrained from creating and occupying spaces specifically marked as gay. In chapters entitled "Sites" and "Movements," Howard vividly describes how men who desired other men met and circulated, moving back and forth between rural and urban, local and more distant places. While bars with a predominantly gay clientele played an important role for some men, as they did in other locales, most Mississippi residents, according to Howard, had limited access to them. For much of the period he considers, few cities in the state other than Jackson could sustain an exclusively gay bar, especially for African Americans, and the bars that did exist were divided along lines of race and gender presentation. As a result, men-desiring men more often went to local African American or white establishments, where they socialized with individuals of different sexual persuasions, or they met each other for [End...