Transgender Bodies Research Articles

Queerying the Countryside

Queerying the Countryside Ellie Vainker (bio) Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies. Edited by Mary L. Gray, Colin R. Johnson, and Brian A. Gilley. New York: New York University Press, 2016. vii + 396 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $30.00 paper. Oklahomo: Lessons in Unqueering America. By Carol Mason. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. xiii + 217 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $80.00 cloth, 23.95 paper. Over the past decade, scholars have increasingly paid attention to the importance of place in relation to discussions of queerness in the United States, resulting in a burgeoning field of scholarship that has come to be known as rural queer studies. This vein of scholarship has criticized the bias toward the city and the prejudice against the nonurban in scholarly debates, activism, and the popular (urban) imagination regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (lgbtq) people and issues. J. Halberstam, author of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), has labeled this preclusion of the rural an example of “metronormativity” (12). The narrative to which the term points is surely familiar: the lgbtq subject leaves the singularly oppressive rural area, where one must hide one’s “true” (gay) self, and enters the city, where one is able to finally find belonging and be one’s “full” (gay) self. Rural queer studies scholars emphasize the dichotomous logics that this totalizing narrative gives rise to and ask us—as with any totalizing narrative, perhaps—to think again. Or as the editors of Queering the Countryside put it, to “think twice.” In their introduction, the editors note that for many “the term ‘rural’ seems to imply certain things these days, not the least important of which is a stubbornly persistent attachment to highly traditional views regarding gender and sexuality and, by extension, an aggressive, even murderous, antipathy toward gender and [End Page 57] sexual difference” (11). This depiction of the rural is illustrated most clearly in E. Cram’s chapter, “(Dis)locating Queer Citizenship,” which outlines the “metronormative optics” that surrounded national press coverage of Matthew Shepard’s 1998 murder in Laramie, Wyoming. Cram’s analysis of the representations of the event reveals that Shepard’s violent death became seen almost as an inevitability given the rural locale. This sequestering of violent homophobia serves to uplift urban spaces as the proper place of queer citizenship—the urban becomes a place of belonging and liberation when set against rural prejudice and aggression. It is a separation deeply entrenched in the lgbtq imaginary and lies at the foundation of most contributions to Queering the Countryside, with contributors seeking to question this organizing structure. Some contributors temper it, such as Kelly Baker in “Out Back Home,” whose interviews with lgbt people in rural Nova Scotia showed that her interviewees all experienced acceptance in their hometowns, albeit to varying degrees. While some left for the city to find lgbt community, for others “lgbt community was experienced most intensely within the rural setting” (44) whereas the urban was found to be exclusionary. Baker shows, then, that while space and place are important, there are no absolutes in terms of the proper place for lgbtq belonging. Other contributors seek to dismantle the very notion of urban/rural corresponding to liberated/oppressed, such as Katherine Schweighofer, who in “Rethinking the Closet” challenges the binaristic logics that lead to the oft-rehearsed suggestion that rural areas serve as gay America’s “closet.” On the contrary, she argues, rural areas are constitutive of queer space and can play host to novel forms of queer relationality. Taken as a whole the volume leaves the reader in little doubt that the rural is a far more complex space than its homogeneous rendering suggests. As its title indicates, much of the volume’s work goes into depicting the rural otherwise, injecting queerness into an area previously seen as devoid of it. In “Queering the American Frontier,” Robin Henry takes us back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, showing that the Colorado frontier afforded men a space to engage in same-sex sexual practices at a time when anti-vice and reform...

Seeking ways to our transgender bodies, by ourselves: Rationalizing transgender‐specific health information behaviors

ABSTRACTTransgender people have typically been pooled in studies on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) health information behavior. We, however, argue that transgender people have unique health needs and context that differ from LGBQ people. To demonstrate our argument, we are using the transitioning process from male‐to‐female or female‐to‐male as a case study. We are using data currently being analyzed from Tumblr to demonstrate how their process of seeking health information differs from LGBQ and highlights why information science needs to better understand this population and their information needs.

Loneliness: Black Gay Longing in the Work of Essex Hemphill

Loneliness:Black Gay Longing in the Work of Essex Hemphill Darius Bost (bio) Do you think I could walk pleasantlyand well suited toward annihilation?with a scrotal sack full of primordial lonelinessswinging between my legslike solid bells? —Essex Hemphill Black gay poet, essayist, and performer Essex Hemphill was, arguably, the most prominent of the black gay intellectuals of the 1980s and early 1990s. His work addresses the psychological, social, and political struggles of urban black communities, and often maps the psychological, social, and political location of black gay men onto the black urban landscape. In "Heavy Breathing," Hemphill takes the reader on a city bus ride through 1980s black Washington, DC. The speaker of the poem rides the "X2, the bus I call a slave ship," with the "majority of its riders Black" (lines 65–66). The speaker defines the "X2" as a "risky ride," with its "cargo of block boys, urban pirates" (71–72). The imagery of the city bus as "a slave ship" and the riders as "cargo" conjures the historical trauma of the Middle Passage, suggesting a continuity between the social death of antebellum slavery and the urban poverty and decay produced by neoliberal capitalism. The speaker goes on to describe the spectacular forms of violence that emerged in Washington, DC, in the late '80s and '90s, as the line "the funerals of my brothers" alludes in part to how the nationwide crack epidemic greatly impacted crime in cities like Washington, DC, with a homicide rate so high in the late 1980s and early 1990s that it eventually earned DC the label of "murder capital."1 But the speaker attends these funerals only "at the end of heavy breathing" (63), signaling the climax of public sexual encounters with other men. It is in this same black urban [End Page 353] environment that the speaker negotiates the dangers and pleasures of same-sex desire. If read within this context, the speaker's "brothers" are also his same-sex-desiring brothers, and the "funerals" are also for those who have succumbed to homophobic violence and AIDS. A range of black cultural studies scholars, most notably Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton, have also theorized a continuity between antebellum slavery and contemporary blackness.2 Drawing on Orlando Patterson's conceptualization of antebellum slavery as "social death" and Saidiya Hartman's conception of "slavery's afterlife," these theorists point out the specificity and ubiquity of antiblackness obscured by hegemonic discourses of multiculturalism and colorblindness in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.3 Furthermore, Sexton defines the lived experience of blackness as a "social life of social death" and expresses a political refusal to distance himself from blackness "in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, life, or sociality."4 But these theories have yet to fully account for gender and sexual difference for the queer "brothers" of Hemphill's poem, who also negotiate their lives under the sign of blackness. In Wilderson's formulation, queerness, as a "human" ontological category, depends on the non-ontology of blackness for its coherence, and, thus, the gratuitous violence done to black queer and transgender bodies is subsumed under the structures of anti-blackness. But afro-pessimist theories fail to address how non-normative black genders and sexualities signify differently, and how these so-called "minor differences" oftentimes bring black gender and sexual minorities closer to illness, death, and social exclusion under regimes of antiblackness. The line "funerals of my brothers" in Hemphill's poem conjures the ghostly presence of 1980s and 90s black gay intellectuals within contemporary theorizations of blackness fixed as pathology and as embodied subjectivity marked by (social) death. In addition to the racial retrenchment affecting urban black communities in the Reagan era, black gay artists, intellectuals, and activists in the 1980s and 90s also experienced amplified cultural stigma attached to homosexuality during the AIDS epidemic. Many of them carried in their bodies the literal pathology of AIDS and a consciousness shaped as much by everyday black life as it was by black (social) death. Though the literary communities that they formed could not prevent their deaths, nor could they alleviate the debilitating psychic and...

Whose Club Is It Anyway?: The Problematic of Trans Representation in Mainstream Films––“Rayon” and Dallas Buyers Club

Dallas Buyers Club (2013) offers a stereotypical representation of trans themes and images that do not fit contemporary gender-diverse communities, creating negative images and damaging connotations that could last for years. This article explores the stereotypical characterization and clichéd narrative devices deployed to create the fictitious character of Rayon in Dallas Buyers Club and examines the ongoing problematic of trans representation within mainstream cinematic texts by comparing Dallas Buyers Club with The Crying Game (1992), Boys Don’t Cry (1999), and Transamerica (2005). To contextualize the ongoing issues raised by the film and its screenplay, this article reads Rayon as one example in a long line of socially proscribed Hollywood “fallen women,” here, with the narrative displaced onto the transgender body.

Contingent belonging: Chelsea Manning, transpatriotism, and iterations of empire

Engaging with the story of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, this article reveals how the incorporation of transgender subjects into assimilationist politics, idealized by narratives of a ‘US sexual exceptionalism’ ( Puar, 2007 ), is characterized by a contingent belonging. By analyzing responses from transgender veterans to Manning’s revelations, the article argues that present formations and modalities of US empire are legitimated through the recent emergence of transpatriotism. Expanding Puar’s notion of homonationalism, I conceptualize transpatriotism as a form of jingoism characterized by an unwavering devotion to the state and an adherence to the gender binary. Engendered through exceptional forms of transnormativity, transpatriotism is grounded in an unmarked whiteness that incorporates certain previously stigmatized transgender bodies into the folds of US empire.

Call me Caitlyn: making and making over the ‘authentic’ transgender body in Anglo-American popular culture

A conception of transgender identity as an ‘authentic’ gendered core ‘trapped’ within a mismatched corporeality, and made tangible through corporeal transformations, has attained unprecedented legibility in contemporary Anglo-American media. Whilst pop-cultural articulations of this discourse have received some scholarly attention, the question of why this ‘wrong body’ paradigm has solidified as the normative explanation for gender transition within the popular media remains underexplored. This paper argues that this discourse has attained cultural pre-eminence through its convergence with a broader media and commercial zeitgeist, in which corporeal alteration and maintenance are perceived as means of accessing one’s ‘authentic’ self. I analyse the media representations of two transgender celebrities: Caitlyn Jenner and Nadia Almada, alongside the reality TV show TRANSform Me, exploring how these women’s gender transitions have been discursively aligned with a cultural imperative for all women, cisgender or trans, to display their authentic femininity through bodily work. This demonstrates how established tropes of authenticity-via-bodily transformation, have enabled transgender to become culturally legible through the wrong body trope. Problematically, I argue, this process has worked to demarcate ideals of ‘acceptable’ transgender subjectivity: self-sufficient, normatively feminine, and eager to embrace the possibilities for happiness and social integration provided by the commercial domain.

Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era by Paul B. Preciado

Reviewed by: Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era by Paul B. Preciado Sarah K. Hansen Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era New York: The Feminist Press, 2013, 432pp. ISBN 9781558618374 Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era is a testosterone fueled “body essay,” a work of “auto-theory” that upends contemporary understandings of biopolitics and revels in the gender-fucking experimentation of its author, Paul B. Preciado. In the text, Preciado is the first-person narrator BP, a Paris-based philosopher who takes black-market testosterone to “foil society” and to avenge the death of a friend, Guillaume Dustan or GD. BP’s experiment may be the only way to mourn or “avenge” someone like Dustan, a filmmaker and notorious sexual provocateur. It is also an extraordinary and exhilarating way to do philosophy. Instead of providing “thinking head” commentaries on Hegel or Butler, BP practices a method of “auto-decapitation”: “I wanted to cut off my head that had been molded by a program of gender, dissect part of the molecular model that resides in me. This book is the trace left by that cut” (424). It is quite a trace. Testo Junkie is shot through with sexual energy and conceptual innovations, alternating between scenes of double penetration and genealogies of the pharmaceutical industry, smutty stories and high-on-T theory. Although BP’s experiment sometimes veers in problematic directions, this is a book that will challenge and entertain [End Page 166] not only readers with an interest in gender and sexuality but also readers looking for new approaches to the practice of philosophy. There is inspiration to be found in BP’s call to “sever your own head” and “experience separation.” In the opening chapter, “Your Death,” one of many addressed to GD, BP’s experiment with testosterone spurs a personal and philosophical identity crisis. What kind of feminist am I today: a feminist hooked on testosterone, or a transgender body hooked on feminism? I have no other choice but to revise my classics, to subject those theories to the shock that was provoked in me by the practice of taking testosterone. To accept that the change happening in me is the metamorphosis of an era. (22) BP’s transformations are entangled with our “pharmacopornographic” present, an era dominated by the production and regulation of “orgasmic force.” According to Preciado, orgasmic force is “the real or virtual strength of a body’s total excitation” (41). Since the mid-twentieth century, it has become the central domain of political action, a highly malleable resource to be controlled and converted into capital. In this era, pharmacopornographic subjects like BP are “movable ideas, living organs, symbols, desires, chemical reactions, and affects” (54). These organs and energies frustrate subject categories (like “feminist” or “transgender”) and force the revision of classic theories. For instance, the very notion of a “pharmacopornographic era” revises Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower, subjecting it to “the shock that was provoked in [BP] by the practice of taking testosterone” (22). According to Preciado, life and biopower are archaic terms because our condition is less bio- than biotech-. Today, being alive or dead is meaningful only to the extent that a subject “can or can’t be integrated into a bioelectronics of global excitation” (45). Two extended chapters, “Pharmacopower” and “Pornpower,” outline a more contemporary vocabulary of concepts to match this excitation economy. In “Pharmacopower,” Preciado argues that the pharmacological figure of the birth control pill should displace Foucault’s institutional figure of the panopticon. Power no longer operates as an external political architecture. Instead, pharmacopower moves through “a desire for infiltration, absorption, total occupation” (207). It dwells in the “body desiring power, seeking to swallow it, eat it, administer it, wolf it down, more always, more, through every hole” (208). In “Pornpower,” Preciado claims that labor has been “pornified” to produce the “sexual technobody of the multitude.” While technobodies can cooperate in joyful and exciting ways, they are more often reduced to sexual capital and forced to take on characteristics associated with sex work—“lack of security, sale of corporal and affective...

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.

Transgressive Truth Telling

Transgressive Truth Telling

Our Body Project: From Mourning to Creating the Transgender Body

ABSTRACTAs much as one may attempt to determine the gender of one's psyche, something will always be lacking, something will be left to reckon with, specifically, the body's deception of the psychic body image. The mourning of one's body for a trans* person may follow a unique path but it shares the universal human experience of self-acceptance. A person must come to feel the body in order to accept that aspects of the physical body do not match the person's gender; there is a loss for what was never present and what will never be of the person's body. The phenomena of phantom limb experience will be explored as a means for understanding trans* embodiment and how the bodily phantom must be mourned to be reclaimed. In addition, this paper will explore the concept and relationship of phantom sensations and prosthetics in transgender individuals and how to make clinical use of them. The process of selecting physical interventions to reconstruct oneself will be explored through a schema illustrating the public and private aspects of each bodily intervention available for medical transition. This schema can be used in clinical settings and the public/private realms of the body will be discussed using psychotherapy case material.

Transrodno telo kao mesto transgresije binarno strukturirane rodnosti / Transgender Body as a Site of the Transgression of Binary Structured Gender Concept

Reconsideration and reinterpretation of binary sex/gender categories within a specific cultural context can bring into question discursively posted and determined limits regarding the above categories which define the subject and oblige it to fit into the imaginary and set models of sexuality and gender. The subject internalizes normatives and adopts/approves social constructs as natural facts which allows and leads to the survival of constructs as the one and only valid option. On the other hand, transgender identities and range of other/different gender and sexual identities, indicate the fragility of borders and offer a possibility of their reinterpretation and re-evaluation. This paper addresses the issue of transgender body as a site of the transgressive potential which can subvert the binary structured gender/sex concept, and which can also disrupt the mechanisms of the institutional imposition of those binary norms. Through the language, written and nonwritten laws, regulations and rules of the certain cultural context the subject is being channeled and modified, becoming an object controlled by the dominant discourse.

Flexible Queers, Serious Bodies: Transgender Inclusion in Queer Spaces

Queer spaces are significant for understanding transgender inclusion as “queer spaces were places where individuals were expected to be attentive to or aware of alternative possibilities for being, including non-normative formulations of bodies, genders, desires and practices” (Nash, 2011, p. 203). Indeed, in this interview study of members of a queer leather group called the Club, members described a flexible “sexual landscape” that easily includes transgender members. However, these same queer spaces have been criticized for the way they regulate queer bodies and organize queer subjectivities. In this study, queer members of the Club also contrasted playful queer flexibility with serious transgender bodies. This article argues that, although there is a reiterative relation between transgender inclusion and queer spaces, the idealization of flexibility within queer spaces can also serve to marginalize and regulate transgender bodies.

“None so queer as folk”: Gendered expectations and transgressive bodies in leadership

This paper investigates the relationship between the body and leadership through a case study of a transgender leader. The study shows that the leader’s body, presumed gender, and gendered appearance are salient markers that employees use to make sense of leaders and leadership, and that this gendered nature of leadership shows the deep roots of gender dichotomies and the heterosexual matrix that permeate our understanding of leadership. These two findings lead us to emphasize the need to queer leadership. All leaders experience gendered restrictions, to some extent, via the social norms and expectations of the way leadership should be performed. The construction of leadership through a transgender body reminds us to stay open to the exploration of performativity, particularly the relationships between bodies, gender, sexuality, and leadership and how any body can benefit from queering leadership.

Bodies, Transfigurations, and Bloodlust in Edie Fake’s Graphic Novel Gaylord Phoenix

This essay studies Edie Fake’s award-winning graphic novel Gaylord Phoenix from the perspective of Queer Theory and Transgender Studies. Nikki Sullivan’s use of the term transmogrification from her work on somatechnics provides a critical lens through which to examine Fake’s exploration of the transgender body in his narrative. Fake includes multiple images of bodies undergoing radical transformations through a combination of magic and surgery, blurring the distinction between modern science and the occult. The essay also explores Fake’s status as an innovator in the world of comic books and graphic novels as he creates an idiosyncratic verbal and visual vocabulary largely unprecedented in the world of sequential art.

Skin Deep? Surgical Horror and the Impossibility of Becoming Woman in Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In

Almodovar's films have long been concerned with on-screen representations of masculine tyranny and the gender-blurring quality of the of the transgender body. The Skin I Live In (2011) analyses these tensions by exploring the possibilities of a complete alteration of the male body by means of transgenesis. Taking its cues from canonical surgical horror like Franju's Les yeux sans visage (1960), Almodovar's film is both an indictment of the recent turn to clinical bodies in art and cinema, and a critique of what Susie Orbach has called ‘beauty terror’ (2009), or the horror inspired by the incapacity to have a perfect body. In this article I analyse these contextual coordinates through a productive dialogue with recent developments in Gender Studies, particularly transgender identities (Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, Salamon) and body modification (Orlan) and argue for the potential liberation of the sentient subject through dermography.

LGBTQ: An Alphabet of Interested Writing

LGBTQ: An Alphabet of Interested Writing Sue-Ellen Case (bio) Cruising Utopia: The then and there of Queer Futurity. By Jose Esteban Muñoz. New York: New York University Press, 2009; pp. 234. Theatre & Sexuality. By Jill Dolan. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; pp. 96. Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance. By Diane Torr and Stephen Bottoms. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010; pp. 314. Sitting down to write this review of recent queer scholarship and performance, I was reminded of a scene from Split Britches’s Lost Lounge (2011), in which Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw bring on a fragment of a lounge act, accompanied by the sound and image of collapsing buildings, remarking on the new structures that replace the old. Then they lie motionless on the floor while a digital clock marks the passing time. Contemporary queer scholarship resonates with the collapsing of the structures of twentieth-century modes of temporality, identification, political activism, and performance, at times nostalgic for their prior efficacy and enthusiasm for goals, at other times dismissive of those same qualities. The newer critical structures significantly alter the sense of temporality (the “ticking” of the digital clock); ethnic and nationally bounded modes of identification give way to new transnational and migratory forms, and any direct tie to political activism resembles lying prone on the floor—an activist stasis—while the authors wrestle their ways out of ideological strongholds. The term “performance,” once tethered to something like acting and a performance space, now encompasses a spectacularly broad spectrum of things, from poetry and paintings to clubs and pissing contests. Moreover, the critical strategies of both performance and its interpretation are nourished by metatheories that help to set the critical terms of queer identification and social encounter. Critical theory, once cast in theatre circles as an intrusion, a dalliance, or an elitist [End Page 607] transcendence, is firmly rooted in many contemporary queer writings and performances as a way to account for how meaning is produced and distributed through social codes. In the twenty-first century, the notion and experience of “queer” construct a critical space or a lens through which to engage fully with ideologies that seek to dominate civic and global exchange. For example, conservative and fundamentalist ideologies that claim the threat of terrorism as their origin have been confronted in books like Jasbir Puar’s brilliant Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) and Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004). These critiques organize a critical methodology through which they may regard, or disregard, dominating forms of authority and their attendant violence, offering alternative formations of juridical and civic sociality. Major philosophical systems that organize the very notions of space and perspective have been queered to reveal the gender and sexual bias in their structures by such works as Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), while traditional values of temporality have been refuted through queering the terms of the future by books like Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011). For the queer movement, defined, in part, by structures of desire and love, the critical treatment of emotions has been central to the development of the field. First inscribed in personalized narratives like coming-out stories, descriptions of sexual awakenings, and the stories of shaming in homophobic encounters, descriptions of the operations of desire and love then became the subject of queer and LGBT writings and performances, particularly in terms of psychoanalytic discourses in the former and seductive acts in the latter. But the arrival of the postmodernist “cool” style froze out the discursive treatment of those emotions. As Fredric Jameson diagnosed in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the “waning of affect” is one of the key symptoms of postmodernism. Accordingly, queer theorists turned to analyses of juridical structures (Butler, George Chauncey, and David Eng) and the queering of global economies (Martin Manalansan IV, Eng-Beng Lim, and Eng).1 When queer scholars returned to a full consideration of feelings, emotions appeared as inscriptions...

Body issues: The political economy of male sex work

The analysis of global sexual economies has emerged as an important part of a wider feminist project to re-imagine the boundaries of what constitutes the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of globalisation and capitalism. Emphasising the importance of such an agenda, the article argues that continued understandings of commercial sex as ‘women’s work’ place male and transgender bodies on the outside rather than the inside of the analysis of global sexual economies. Highlighting the need to address this gap in contemporary theorising and empirical analysis, the article then offers an illustration of research into male sex work through discussion of how male escorts in San Francisco negotiate the complex meanings and practices surrounding gender, sexuality and political economy.

The Ethics of Fertility Preservation in Transgender Body Modifications

In some areas of clinical medicine, discussions about fertility preservation are routine, such as in the treatment of children and adolescents facing cancer treatments that will destroy their ability to produce gametes of their own. Certain professional organizations now offer guidelines for people who wish to modify their bodies and appearance in regard to sex traits, and these guidelines extend to recommendations about fertility preservation. Since the removal of testicles or ovaries will destroy the ability to have genetically related children later on, it is imperative to counsel transgender people seeking body modifications about fertility preservation options. Fertility preservation with transgender people will, however, lead to unconventional outcomes. If transgender men and women use their ova and sperm, respectively, to have children, they will function as a mother or father in a gametic sense but will function in socially reversed parental identities. There is nothing, however, about fertility preservation with transgender men and women that is objectionable in its motives, practices, or outcomes that would justify closing off these options. In any case, novel reproductive technologies may extend this kind of role reversal in principle to all people, if sperm and ova can be derived from all human beings regardless of sex, as has happened with certain laboratory animals.

Beyond Additions and Exceptions: The Category of Transgender and New Pedagogical Approaches for Women's Studies

The article argues that while introductory women and gender studies courses typically take social construction theory as foundational, their textbooks, supplemental materials, and teaching strategies simultaneously rely on a definition of "woman" that assumes particular body parts. Such a linkage elides the existence and particularities of transgender and gender-nonconforming bodies and subjects on the one hand, yet posits them as exceptions on the other. This combination stabilizes the normativity of hegemonic sex and gender embodiments by naturalizing nontransgender bodies. Rather than simply arguing for greater inclusion of trans subjects under the sign of woman or man, the article suggests that careful attention to the positioning of transgender bodies necessitates a broad theoretical reframing of how women's studies textbooks and curriculum are designed, and how gendered bodies more broadly are taught and conceptualized.

Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport

It is widely assumed that the more information surveillance apparatuses can collect about an individual, the less risk she poses. In this article, we examine how gender figures into and potentially disrupts the link between identity and security. Our analysis centers on one very particular event: the confusion that erupts at the airport when US Transportation Security Administration agents perceive a conflict between the gender marked on one's papers, the image of one's body produced by a machine, and/or an individual's perceived gender presentation. Gender has been so deeply naturalized—as immutable, as easily apprehended, and as existing before and outside of political arrangements—for so long that its installation in identity verification practices largely goes unthought. In what follows, we describe how the two TSA programs, "Secure Flight" and "Advanced Imaging Technology," operationalize gender differently. We examine what happens when different sources of knowledge about gender clash within the security assemblage of the airport. As part of state security apparatuses' unceasing quest for more and better information, both programs securitize gender. They also reveal the impossibility of predicting with certainty that something about a person, even something thought to be sourced/lodged in the body such as gender, will stay the same over time. We argue, however, that the effects of gender's unreliability as a measure of identity do not constitute a problem for the TSA but rather for the transgender individuals whose narratives, documents, and bodies reveal the category's mutability. We conclude by suggesting that the securitization of gender at the airport is best understood as an assemblage.