Transgender Embodiment Research Articles

Who’s in and who’s out of (queer) fashion (studies)?

Despite vast scholarship on LGBTQ+ fashion, within fashion studies there is still a relative lack of engagement with transgender identities and epistemologies. ‘Transgender Embodiment in Fashion and Beauty’ interrogates how trans people and their experiences have been minimized within fashion studies and argues for an expansive and interdisciplinary understanding of what trans fashion studies might be. To do so, this Special Issue brings together scholars from a variety of fields, including trans studies, Black studies, design history, performance studies and postcolonial studies, to reflect on the trans/fashion nexus. It ultimately aims to pave the way for researchers to excavate unknown or obliterated fashion histories and to centre trans identity as the field of fashion studies continues to evolve.

The transfeminine mystique: Transsexual models and the UK press, 1960–71

The article investigates transgender embodiment, public feelings and (in)visibility in the British press in the 1960s and early 1970s by using the models and performers April Ashley (1935–2021) and Amanda Lear (1939–present) as case studies. Both Ashley and Lear worked as performers at the celebrated Parisian cabaret bar Le Carrousel in the 1950s, and later moved to London independently. Ashley – white, British, working class – enjoyed a successful but brief career as a commercial model that was cut short following her outing by a British tabloid in 1961. Lear – of French and alleged south-east Asian origins – associated herself with the fashionable Chelsea set in London in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on press articles, fashion editorials, documentaries and autobiographical writing, in this article, I reconstruct the two models’ career trajectories and examine how the British media constructed Ashley and Lear as both objects of disgust and exotic objects of fascination. In doing so, I critically assess their respective attempts to navigate these public feelings in relation to the politics of (in)visibility in the contemporary British media landscape.

Non-binary embodiment and bodily discomfort: Body as social signum

Transgender embodiment and transgender-related bodily discomfort have been discussed primarily from a medical perspective that downplays the role of society in shaping one’s orientation towards the body. Drawing on qualitative data on the everyday lives of non-binary individuals, the article analyses the phenomenon of transgender bodily discomfort or bodily dysphoria using a Bourdieusian framework. The data show that bodily discomfort arises in relation to the bodily parts, characteristics and processes that are most heavily invested as being the parts that supposedly tell the ‘truth’ about one’s gender, and in relation to the bodily hexis that is socially recognised as being indicative of one’s gender. The analysis shows that the embodied socially dominant schemes of perception and classifications on which a binary body typology is based contribute to the rise of transgender-related bodily discomfort. Thus, despite the bodily discomfort being individually manifested and experienced, it is (also) the socially embodied – the social body – that reaches out through the discomfort of a socialised body.

Reinforcing or Disrupting Gender Affirmation: The Impact of Cancer on Transgender Embodiment and Identity

There is a pressing need for greater understanding and focus on cancer survivorship and informal cancer caring of trans people (binary and non-binary), across tumor types, to inform culturally safe trans inclusive cancer information and care. This qualitative study, part of the mixed methods Out with Cancer project, examined experiences of trans embodiment and identity after cancer diagnosis and treatment. We drew on open-ended survey responses from 63 trans cancer survivors and 23 trans cancer carers, as well as interviews and a photo-elicitation activity with a subset of 22 participants (15 cancer survivors, 7 cancer carers). Reflexive thematic analysis identified three themes: Cancer enhances trans embodiment, through experiences of gender euphoria following cancer treatment, and acceleration of decisions about gender affirmation; cancer erases or inhibits gender affirmation; trans embodiment is invisible or pathologized in cancer care. These findings demonstrate that trans embodiment and identity, as well as the process of gender affirmation, may be disrupted by cancer or informal cancer caring. Conversely, cancer and cancer treatment can positively impact the embodied identity and lives of trans people, despite the anxiety and strain of negotiating medical procedures. However, if healthcare professionals operate within a cis-heteronormative framework and do not understand the meaning of embodied change following cancer treatment for trans individuals, these positive benefits may not be realized.

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography

Thinking through the s(k)in

ABSTRACT Indonesian male-bodied and feminine identified subjects, locally and internationally known as waria, commonly claim to have the heart and soul of a woman. While waria form a visible social category, they suffer from various prevailing stigmas, of which a significant share is tied to some cultural assumptions embedded in the mainstream understanding of Islamic morality. While most waria do not feel comfortable practising their religion in public, many describe their subjectivity along the distinction between their bodies and their inner sense of gender as God’s will. Consequently, permanent bodily modifications are associated with the notion of sin. These conceptions have enabled a specific form of Indonesian transgender embodiment. This article addresses the bodily negotiations of waria against the background of their religious sensitivities and aspirations for belonging. The spiritually grounded sentiments in relation to their bodies and the sense of gender on one hand, and the signs of increased focus on embodied expression of religiosity among waria on the other, signal the desire for reimagining belonging to Indonesian (Muslim) society. Religious sensitivity, while being the major cause of anxieties on both personal and societal levels, has provided waria with important frameworks which enhance their own relative acceptance of their embodied subjectivity.

Frankenstein Redux

Frankenstein Redux

Embodying place and class habitus: passing practices of male-to-female cross-dressers in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT To obtain a nuanced understanding of body transgendering, I draw on a Bourdieusian theory of practice to examine the interplay between habitus and capital, which enables a focus on both the conscious aspects of capital accumulation and the unconscious aspects of the class habitus that underpin passing practices. Specifically, I propose a place-sensitive approach to examine how the making of transgender space embodies the broader socio-spatial polarization which offers different possibilities for transgender individuals in different social locations. Based on an ethnographic study conducted from 2012 to 2018, I focus on Chinese cross-dressers’ place-making in Hong Kong and its fundamental relation with transgender embodiment and practices. Independent of the use of hormone replacement and surgeries, the passing practices of these cross-dressers demonstrate creativity and reflexivity in the development of body techniques and appropriation of city space. I argue that attention to the roles of place and class habitus complicates our theoretical understanding of gender passing by highlighting the complex processes of negotiation and investment, as well as the materiality and spatiality of particular passing practices.

Review of Trans-Affirmative Parenting: Raising Kids Across the Gender Spectrum

Reviewer: Amy L. Stone, Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA In Trans-Affirmative Parenting: Raising Kids Across the Gender Spectrum, Elizabeth Rahilly provides a unique and timely analysis of how parents of transgender and gender nonconforming children understand their children’s gender. Through in-depth interviews with these parents, Rahilly adeptly shows the way parents navigate their children’s understanding of gender, paradigms pushed by LGBTQ advocates, and their own comprehension of how gender works. In this book, Rahilly effectively analyzes meaning-making of these parents around their children that is not always in neat alignment with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) advocacy and indeed is sometimes at odds with it. Parents balance that advocacy with their child-driven understanding of gender. This child-driven understanding fits into the child-centered parenting that these parents engage in. In sophisticated but readable analysis, Rahilly shows how parents of transgender and gender nonconforming children embrace their child as “truly trans” but debating whether or not they are “just gay.” The long historical association of gender nonconformity with homosexuality informs this debate between “just gay” and “truly trans,” a debate that is at odds with LGBTQ advocacy. These parents negotiate nonbinary and binary possibilities for their children’s gender which is shaped by how hard or easy it is to live outside the gender binary. This parental meaning-making about the gender binary is critical for understanding how the new generation of nonbinary youth may be perceived. Rahilly also analyzes how parents had biomedical understandings of transgender embodiment and used language about disability to explain these biomedical understandings.

Transgender embodiment: a feminist, situated neuroscience perspective

The policing of boundaries of acceptable sexual identities and behaviour is a recurring theme in numerous marginalities. Gender (especially womanhood) is often instantiated socially through the harms to which members of that gender are subjected. For transgender people, the assumption that genitals define gender translates the ubiquitous misapprehension that genitals and sex are binary into an assumption that gender must also be binary. This circumscribes the potentiality of cultural intelligibility for trans gender identities, and may interfere with the ability of transgender people to select the most appropriate medical and social means of expressing their authentic identities, even altering what is possible or appropriate, thereby curtailing trans people’s authenticity and freedom. We therefore distinguish social from bodily aspects of gender dysphoria, proposing a model of their distinct, intersecting origins. We explore ways in which transgender medicine reflects aspects of other gendered surgeries, proposing a biopsychosocial understanding of embodiment, including influences of culture on the neurological representation of the body in the somatosensory cortex. This framework proposes that cultural cissexism, causes trans people to experience (neuro)physiological damage, creating or exacerbating the need for medical transition within a framework of individual autonomy. Our social-constructionist feminist neuroscientific account of gendered embodiment highlights the medical necessity of bodily autonomy for trans people seeking surgery or other biomedical interventions, and the ethical burden therein.

Transgender Embodiment as an Appeal to Thought: A Psychoanalytic Critique of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”

ABSTRACT In this article, we offer a psychoanalytic reading of controversies over “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (popularly known as ROGD), defined as a sudden expression of gender dysphoria in late adolescence and young adulthood where there had not purportedly been evidence of childhood dysphoric experience. We begin by tracing the emergence of the term in relation to contemporary debates about gender, free speech, and academic freedom. Turning to the psychoanalytic concept of free association, we reframe speech as bound to the unconscious and theorize the ethical qualities of animating this linkage in relation to discussions of gender diversity and ROGD in particular. Our discussion supports theorists, clinicians, parents, teachers, and other caring adults who encounter the term to distinguish between collective anxiety and the labor of thought that involves working through feelings of coming undone in the undoing of cisgender.

Transgendering Speech: Discussion of Farley and Kennedy’s “Transgender Embodiment as an Appeal to Thought”

ABSTRACT Farley and Kennedy’s incisive and challenging essay unpacking the controversy surrounding “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) draws upon psychoanalysis to examine the complicated interplay among freedom of speech, truth, power, privilege, and transgender rights and desire. My response frames theirs within the intersecting gaps that psychoanalysis reveals—between materiality and gender, between materiality and speech, between speech and desire—in order both to highlight how freedom of speech and transgender issues are inevitably vulnerable to collision and to guide intervention: We must insistently pry open the seemingly seamless order between biology and gender, and between gendered desire and speech. Absent such dedicated intervention, I fear, the transgender subject will be left to bear this onto-ethical burden for all of us. We need to engender—and perhaps also to transgender—robust radically inclusive “spaces between” for all gendered subjects and for the disruptive, vibrational motions of desire, its freedom of speech.

Trans youth in Portugal: gendered embodiments

The lived gendered experience of trans youth constitutes a relatively overlooked aspect of current research. Addressing this gap, this study reveals how young trans people in Portugal define their identities and legitimate their bodies in daily life. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 12 Portuguese trans young people, this study focuses on how trans youth situate themselves within dominant paradigms for understanding (trans)gender identities and embodiment. In doing so, this study engages with wider discussion regarding transgender embodiment that aims to move beyond binary/non-binary gender divisions, as well as privilege the voices and lived experiences of trans people. As the study demonstrates, trans youth are able to (re)construct authentic and coherent gendered selves through the incorporation of a diverse range of frameworks available in contemporary society. Although these frameworks may sometimes seem incompatible and contradictory, trans youth demonstrate conditional forms of agency in the way they (re)create their gender identity and embodiment. By revealing the diversity of trans participant discourses, practices and embodiments of gender, this study makes a key contribution to research on trans youth in Portugal and beyond, as well as broader debates.

Representing Transgender Embodiment in Film and Culture: Looking beyond the Transition Narrative in Amazon's Transparent

In this article, I identify how the Amazon television series Transparent deploys narrative thematics of home, belonging and importantly, a journey to becoming, to stage a limited representation of transgender lives within a heterosexual economy. Transgender studies has long been preoccupied with the transition narrative as a primary tool of representation, it is a vehicle through which the disjointedness of gender transition can be reformed into a narrative that enables intelligibility and fosters a sense of belonging. I argue however that the transition narrative, which aims to make transgender lives visible (and consumable) to an audience of trans and non-trans folk, is limiting in its representational scope and may impede, rather than mobilise, this agenda. The transition narrative constructs transgender lives within normative frames of time and place, and in the codes of textual conventions that compulsively render transgender transition into narrative. In Transparent, the themes of home and belonging are used to lend a sense of cohesion to the experience of transition in ways that implicate the representation of its trans characters in a ‘universalising narrative of liberal democratic progress’ ( Keegan 2013 ). I will examine the various ways this text employs the conventions of narrative and in doing so, fails to confront its audience with the daily cultural and social transgressions that make up the lived experiences of transition.

Gender, Ethnicity, and Transgender Embodiment: Interrogating Classification in Facial Feminization Surgery

Facial feminization surgery (FFS) is a set of bone and soft tissue procedures intended to feminize the faces of transgender women. In the surgical evaluation, particular facial features are identified as ‘sex specific’ and targeted for intervention as such. But those features do not exhibit ‘maleness’ or ‘femaleness’ alone; they are complexly entwined with morphologies of ethnic classification. Based on clinical observation, I show how the desired feminine ideal conflicted with facial characteristics identified as ‘ethnic’. In FFS practice, ‘masculinity’ and ‘ethnicity’ were entangled as the constitutive outsides by which desirable ‘femininity’ was articulated. I argue that surgery that self-consciously enacts a patient’s move away from physiognomically identifiable ethnicity in order to achieve an ostensibly unmarked and neutral femininity becomes not only a process of feminizing the face but of whitening it, regardless of whether ‘white’ features are the express desire of the patient or aim of the surgeon.

Drawing the Body In: A Comic Essay on Trans Mobility and Materiality

This comic essay engages trans embodiment and temporality, representation and identity, passing, and drawing as a form of thinking. Although uncommon, comics have been established in academia as a genre worthy of literary study as well as scholarly inquiry in the broader humanities, social sciences, and the arts (Bukatman, 2012; Chute, 2010; Howard & Jackson, 2013; Cox, 2016). Recently, scholars have also studied the use of comics making as an analytical tool in qualitative research (Katz, 2013; Sousanis, 2015; Weaver-Hightower, 2013; Flowers, 2017; Henningsen, 2017; Johnson, 2018). This comic essay invites communication scholars to consider transgender embodiment and mobility through a visual medium that can illustrate complex problems of precarity, passing, and the crossing of both material and symbolic borders and boundaries. As a genre, comics allow for dense and layered information to be conveyed very quickly, and its affordances lend themselves well to portraying the tensions in and between trans and gender-nonconforming experiences. The speech bubble and the thought bubble, for example, can juxtapose in a single panel what two characters are saying to one another and what they are thinking and feeling as well as how they are interacting and communicating non-verbally. This graphic scholarship demonstrates why the unique genre of comics is particularly apt in rendering instances of microagression or passing. I argue that comics as a form enable a shift from abstract concepts back into the body, the materiality of which can get lost in academic discourse.

Transgender Embodiment: A Lacanian Approach.

The author uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to conceptualize transgender embodiment, focusing on the Lacanian concept "objet a" to analyze how transpeople may be uniquely attuned to a fundamental lack in being endemic to all subjects of language. Objet a is central to the Imaginary register where body images and sex morphology intermingle. The author discusses objet a in relation to the mirror (and the Other's cisgender gaze), anxiety, postsurgical scars, linguistics, and Thing-like feelings of monstrosity (born of transphobia). For those who are transgender, the a may register as an embodied disjunction between gender identity and natal sex assignment.

Pink dreams, blue world: Power, fantasy and desire in Alain Berliner’s Ma Vie en Rose

Abstract Alain Berliner’s film Ma Vie en Rose (1997) tells the story of Ludovic Fabre, a young transgender girl living in a suburban community outside of Paris. The film uses Ludovic’s story as a lens through which to examine the social policing of queerness and transgender embodiment. This article joins other previously published work about the film in reading it through a Foucauldian lens in order to examine the extent to which social power structures lend shape to normative understandings of gender identity and expression, but this article’s intervention lies in its combination of this Foucauldian perspective with a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach that invokes Lacan’s territory of the real, symbolic and imaginary and the authorization of social ‘law’ within this psychic terrain. I argue that the film’s powerful deployment of desire and fantasy can be analysed within a psychoanalytic framework to delineate the operations of social power and illuminate the extent to which queer gender expression is rendered outlaw and abject within hegemonic normative society.

The watershed body: Transgressing frontiers in riverine sciences, planning stochastic multispecies worlds

In conversation with Eva Hayward’s writing on transgender embodiment, this paper explores how beaver modify landscapes differently than human engineers, and how human engineering might be transformed through riverine collaborations with beavers. Considering the body variously as a body of water — a river, which draws together all of the above and underground water in a watershed — as like our own trans bodies, and as a slippery double for the psyche of an Anthropocene engineer, July Cole and I argued that thinking with beaver as stochastic transgressors against Manifest Destiny engineering projects could transfigure engineers approaches to their work and river restoration more broadly. What if, rather than trapping beavers into service as “ecosystem engineers,” we assert that humans should engineer as beavers do, in ways that create porous boundaries between land and water and up- and downstream, by way of stick-and-mud, leaky, temporary dams? Here, I theorize a transfigured watershed body through human-beaver-salmon encounters at three salmon recovery sites in the Pacific west: a Karuk-led project on the Klamath river, agency-led beaver relocation projects in the Methow and Yakima watershed, and a citizen science-agency collaborative project in the beaverless Salmon Creek and Russian River watersheds. All three stories concern river and salmon recovery in the Pacific West, where either humans or beavers have initiated collaborative projects to raise water tables, keep rivers from going dry, and improve salmon habitat. These scientists and local knowledge holders’ encounters with beavers and their ponds thick with salmon are inspiring them to change how they undertake habitat restoration projects and also spurring some to reconsider the proper task of human ecologists and engineers, into a mode inspired by beavers themselves.

“None of this ‘trapped-in-a-man’s-body’ bullshit”: Transgender Girls and Wrong-Body Discourse in Young Adult Fiction

The use of the “born in the wrong body” model of accounting for transgender embodiment pervades young adult fiction featuring transgender teenage girls, including the much-acclaimed Luna by Julie Anne Peters and Almost Perfect by Brian Katcher. Realistic novels about transgender teenagers, usually framed as “coming of age” narratives, privilege gender reassignment surgery as the culmination of a process of self-discovery confirming the gender binary. In wrong-body discourse, self-identity comes into conflict with and ultimately trumps the body, with the transgender character’s transition following a single-minded trajectory to adulthood and the erasure of the transgender past. While this model of embodiment is undoubtedly accurate for some transgender teenagers, it limits the space in which to think about the complexity of gender for both cisgender and transgender readers. Two recent novels, Rachel Gold’s Just Girls and Kristin Elizabeth Clark’s Freakboy, serve to demonstrate both the persistence of wrong-body discourse and its disruption. A verse novel that allows a range of gender nonconforming characters to speak to their own experiences of embodiment, Freakboy offers readers alternatives to the wrong-body model.