Transgender Studies Research Articles

Gender in Performance, Gender as Performance: Surveillance, Transgender Studies, and Reconsidering Dress Codes for Symphony Orchestra Musicians

Gender in Performance, Gender as Performance: Surveillance, Transgender Studies, and Reconsidering Dress Codes for Symphony Orchestra Musicians

Forever Becoming: Teaching “Transgender Studies Meets Art History” and Theorizing Trans Joy

Academics often comment that their teaching affects their research, but how this manifests is often implicit. In this essay, I explicitly explore the artistic, scholarly, and curatorial research instantiated by an undergraduate class titled “Transgender Studies meets Art History,” which I taught during the fall of 2022. Alongside personal anecdotes—both personal and connected to the class—and a critical reflection on my pedagogy, I discuss the artwork and public programming connected to a curatorial project, “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity, I organized at UrbanGlass, New York City in 2023. The first part of the article I examine how “trans” can be applied to thinking about syllabus construction and re-thinking canon formation for a class focused on transgender studies’ relationship to art history. In the second half, I theorize trans joy as a felt vibration between/across multiplicity and singularity, belonging and unbelonging, and world-making and world-unmaking. Overall, I consider trans as a lived experience and its utility as a conceptual tool. As a coda, I consider the precarity of teaching this course in the current political climate of the United States.

Violence/Visibility

In conjunction with her NEA Media Arts Residency at the Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA), artist Lorelei d’Andriole and I held the following conversation in a small, empty classroom on the fourth floor of Harder Hall on the campus of Alfred University (NYSCC). d’Andriole is an artist, educator, and writer whose work is at the intersection of intermedia and transgender studies. A day before the conversation she presented a lecture titled “Trans Embodiment and Intermedia Art,” which became the launching point for our conversation. “Oh, we’ll just sit and chat about your practice, your time at the IEA residency, and the idea of queer sound.” But we went on for nearly two and a half hours. As such, this interview has been edited and refined for publication.

X Marks Our Spots: Religion and Gender in Transition

Abstract: This article introduces the special section Comparative X: Religious and Gendered Transitions, linking the experiences of religious exes and transgender people through their mutual and different uses of "X" to mark liminal identity and status. Reframing religious disaffiliation through the lens of transition, the article presses on the overlap and intersection of religious and gendered movements to connect these different but related crossings as Xes. Through this crossed and comparative framework, it offers a way of looking at the norming systems of religion and gender together through the movements of those who cross them. Expanding comparative studies in religion through the interfaithless, it introduces comparative ex-religious studies as a new subfield. Drawing on the literature of religious disaffiliation and queer and transgender studies in religion, the article considers how changing the orientation through which we approach religion from its Xes might lead to a better understanding of how the normative structures of "religion" and "gender" shape one another transitively.

Glitch as a Trans Representational Mode in Video Games

Following recent work by transgender studies scholars that has questioned the relationship between queer theory and trans studies, this essay considers how glitch video games, which have previously been considered to be part of the “queer games movement,” use the glitch as a way of representing transgender life. I survey three glitch games, Problem Attic (2013, Liz Ryerson), Strawberry Cubes (2015, Loren Schmidt), and Anatomy (2016, Kitty Horrorshow)—each of which uses the glitch as an expressive visual aesthetic, remediating the analog artifacts of signal noise or error as a sonic and visual quality, as well as a game design principle. These games place an emphasis on the body as that which glitches, exploring the bad feelings of trans embodiment, including dissociation and dysphoria, as well as demonstrating how the glitched body can be both desired and transformative. In the final section, this essay considers how transgender artists and the ways their work foregrounds glitch as an operation of the body are integral not only to glitch art history, but also to video game development more widely, exploring the influence of glitch aesthetics and game design in Pony Island (2016), a glitch video game by cisgender designer, Daniel Mullins.

On Thon; or, Thinking Gender in the Interstice

Abstract This essay takes “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” as an opening for thinking about the impact of Hortense Spillers's thought on Black feminist, queer, and transgender studies. In a reflection on the interstitial, the essay engages Spillers's approaches to the discursive, historiographic, and iconographic dimensions of racialized gender and sexuality in a reading of the failed philological proposal of thon and the life and public memory of the military figure Private William Cathay.

Christine Delphy, an Anti-essentialist TERF: Materialist Feminism and the Affective Legacies of the MLF

For the last decade, Christine Delphy, one of the most important feminists in France, has taken profoundly reactionary positions in relation to transgender people, that qualify her as a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF). But while most TERF discourse relies on biological essentialism, Delphy is radically anti-essentialist. As early as 1981, she showed that both gender and sex are socially constructed, a premise that has become a cornerstone of transgender studies. How is one to understand the fact that a feminist whose thinking would seem to inscribe itself in the direction of transfeminism allies herself with the TERF movement? This essay shows that her theoretical arguments against transness can be overcome from a materialist feminist perspective and argues that her transphobia is bound up in the affective aftermath of conflicts in the women’s liberation movement that were cemented through a complex transatlantic intellectual history and never resolved.

Trans theoretical approaches to memory and relatedness: Potentials and suggestions at the intersections of transgender studies and queer studies

This article focuses on the question of, Can we study memory and its curious itineraries as spaces of kin-making? By focusing on the stories of trans mothers and trans daughters, this research aims to show how women with trans experiences play with the gendered and sexualized links between body, family, time, and memory. The article is organized into two main sections. The first part focuses on everyday practices and experiences of trans motherhoods and trans daughterhoods to illustrate how memory formation and memory transmission are crucial components in the construction of kin-ties and individual identity. Second, I turn my attention to the literature on transcultural and transgenerational memories, highlighting how scholars working across the fields of memory, kinship, and trans and queer studies enrich the scope of trans*. Engaging with trans* approaches to memory and relatedness, expands and plays with legal, political, and social experiences of spatial and temporal confinement while inviting us to attentively see lived experiences that unapologetically experiment with the links between memory and relatedness.

Review of The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment by Cameron Awkward-Rich (Duke University Press)

Simultaneously a project of metacritical reflections about disciplinary foundations at the intersections of the academic fields of transgender studies, disability studies, and Black feminist studies, and a series of close readings of cultural texts and artifacts central to those disciplinary developments, Awkward-Rich’s book is intellectually generous, beautifully written, and deftly argued. Critically investigating the production of disability and transgender theories, forged interdependently and through distancing trans authority from the specter of madness and disability, The Terrible We traces conflicts among trans, queer, and feminist perspectives in closely reading foundational texts and cultural contexts. It presents an invitation to consider forms of maladjustment a productive resource rather than an impediment to trans life, thought, and creativity.

Transgressing Translation/Translating Transgression: The Lili Elbe Digital Archive and the Modalities of Translation

This essay addresses a work that might fruitfully be approached as an international (auto)biography, the life narrative of Lili Elbe (published 1931), a major work in the history of gender variance. Using the versions of the narrative in a range of languages in the recently constructed, free-to-view Lili Elbe Digital Archive, this essay considers the many modalities of translation and transgression which comprise any effort to transition across linguistic, cultural, corporeal, epistemic, and generic boundaries. A concern with how bodies of knowledge as well as corporeal bodies are codified and circulated is fundamental not just to Translation Studies but to transgender studies and to the digital humanities as well, making these fields integral to any theoretical understanding of translation as such. It is argued not just that transgender should be understood as a mode of translation, but that translating transgender across languages, historical eras, and media provides an exemplary instance of, and a model for, the broader field of Translation Studies.

The Structure and Operation of the Transgender Criminal Legal System Nexus in the United States: Inequalities, Administrative Violence, and Injustice at Every Turn

A growing body of research reveals that transgender people are disproportionately in contact with the criminal legal system, wherein they experience considerable discrimination, violence, and other harms. To better understand transgender people's involvement in this system, this article synthesizes research from criminology, transgender studies, and related fields as well as empirical findings produced outside of academe, to conceptualize a “transgender criminal legal system nexus.” This article examines historical and contemporary criminalization of transgender people; differential system contact and attendant experiences associated with police contact, judicial decision-making, and incarceration; and pathways to system involvement for transgender people. The analytic focus is on cultural logics related to institutionalized conceptualizations of gender, discriminatory people-processing in various domains of the criminal legal system, and institutionally produced disparities for transgender people involved in the criminal legal system, especially transgender women of color. The article concludes with a discussion of directions for future research, including a focus on administrative violence, organizational sorting, intersectionality, and measurement challenges.

Unmapping social work scholarship about gender self-designation: reconstructing the basis for engagement

For a half-century, transgender studies and theory have existed alongside but disconnected from social work scholarship on providing services to people with self-designated genders. This article utilises unmapping as a methodology for tracing connections between normalised assumptions and power/knowledge hierarchies across four journal articles that present theoretically focused recommendations for social work in this area. Unmapping the academic discipline of social work as a space organised in particular ways reveals practices that discount and place limits on accepted knowledges. I argue that social work scholarship brackets itself off from broader transgender studies scholarship and transgender theory, and, in doing so, perpetuates social relations of dominance experienced by people with self-designated genders. I suggest that a premise of becoming consciously responsive enables continuing reflexivity, accountability and anti-colonial social work scholarship and practice.

Transgender Rights and Religiosities in India

This article argues that religious mythologies and cultural narratives about the timelessness of gender diversity in South Asia frame the formation of the transgender subject of rights in India. The authors interrogate a verdict issued by the Supreme Court of India in 2014 and the Transgender Person Bill of Rights (2018) to ascertain the frames of recognition accorded diverse transgender communities in India. This is followed by an analysis of the category of eunuch created and criminalized by British colonizers and the present-day category of transgender based on self-affirmation of gender. The conflating of religious mythologies into deliberations about transgender constitutional rights reveals how the supposedly secular rights – based claims of and for transgender communities are mediated through a predominantly Hindu Brahmanical imagination of the rights-bearing transgender subject. The authors examine autobiographical narratives by three prominent transgender rights activists in India: Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, Living Smile Vidya, and A. Revathi, who provide conflicting visions about the role of religion and state recognition of transgender identities. The authors argue the need for theorizing transgender subjectivities from non-Brahman, Dalit, transmasculine, and non – North Indian perspectives. Such theorizations reveal the potential of coalitional transgender activisms that seek to disrupt Hindu-nationalist hailing of the transgender subject of rights in contemporary India. The authors offer new directions in transgender studies by showing how religious narratives, ritual and performance lie at the heart of transgender subject formation while gesturing toward how such formation risks subsuming transgender identities within (Hindu) nationalist projects.

The Transformation of the Character Einar Wegener to A Transgender Woman in the Film ‘The Danish Girl’: A Psychological Point of View

This present work aimed to determine the process of transforming one’s identity from a man to a woman when one must overcome obstacles in a real-life condition depicted in the film The Danish Girl. It is based on Freud’s theory about the human psychological level, with the addition of Queer Theory in completing this research. This descriptive qualitative research obtained data source from the biographical film The Danish Girl directed by Tom Hopper, released in 2015. The subject studied is limited on the main character analysis, who later became Transgender and changed his name to Lili Elbe. In this case, this research focuses on changing the character of a man to a woman in a film and also the limitation used to examine this study is to pay attention to the psychological point of view by using and applying two theories as an approach to reviewing this research. Thus, based on the data, it was discovered there were 39 scenes of Einar transforming into transgender, of which 27 scenes represented ID, 7 represented EGO and 5 scenes were SUPEREGO. The objective of this study are expected to enrich issues related to the development of the human psyche. The researcher hoped that the result of this study also could enrich the next researcher’s knowledge about the psychological problem, especially about The Transformation of the Characters Einar Wegener to Transgender Women. In conclusion, Einar's transformation does not necessarily affect what is inside of him, but everything proceeds according to the time before he becomes a Transgender. The research opens up avenues for further exploration and analysis in the field of transgender studies, gender identity, and psychological development. It encourages future researchers to delve deeper into the topic and conduct more comprehensive studies on the representation of transgender individuals in various media forms.

Chelsea Manning, national security, and the cishetero/homonormative logics of protection

Abstract‘I feel like a monster’, typed Chelsea Manning, referring partly to her gender identity but mostly to her job in the US military. Morally conflicted by what she saw and read while serving in Iraq, extremely isolated from her unit and experiencing emotional distress in relation to her gender identity, Manning would act on these stressors by leaking hundreds of documents to Wikileaks, and coming out as a (trans) woman. While she was quick to be classified as either a hero or a traitor, her case evades such dichotomisation and calls for more sophisticated readings. While a lot has been written on Manning in queer and transgender studies, surprisingly little has been published on this case in International Relations, not even in the quickly growing field of Queer IR. Yet Manning’s case helps highlight many of its core concerns in relation to issues of power, security, and sovereignty. In fact, what is often lost when reading the Manning case are the queer and trans logics of protection that were disrupted by Manning’s disclosures and that made such disruption possible. These dominant logics rely upon a culture of secrecy that must be preserved for performances of national security to hold true.

Vulnerability as best practice?

This article discusses the role of autoethnography in ‘minority’ academic fields such as transgender studies. While supportive of the epistemic and political ambitions related to practices of studying (through) the self, the text focuses on its practical limitations. Specifically, it discusses the potential lived implications of autoethnographic writing for already precariously located ‘minority’ scholars.The text charts epistemic-ethical backgrounds that support the use of autoethnography within ‘minority’ scholarship. It suggests that such methods work in contexts where academic labor and publishing take place within essentially liberal democratic frameworks, in which ‘minority’ scholars are respectfully met. However, the current literature on ‘minority’ academic labor suggests that this is rarely the case.The article stresses the need to think and teach ‘minority’ research and writing in time and place. Such methodologies can, depending on the context, opt for an autoethnographic presence but also for an active push towards giving ‘less’ of oneself to one’s texts.

Scholarly literature in HIV-related lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies: A bibliometric analysis.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) people are marginalized and understudied. Analyzing research activity worldwide is vital to better understand their needs in confronting the HIV epidemic. This study aimed to evaluate the global literature to identify the research collaboration, content, and tendency in HIV-related issues among the LGBT populations. Peer-reviewed original articles and reviews were achieved from the Web of Science Core Collection database. Country's collaborations and co-occurrence of most frequent terms were illustrated by VOSviewer software. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and the linear regression model were utilized to uncover the hidden topics and examine the research trend. From 1990 to 2019, a total of 13,096 publications were found. Stigma, sexual risk behaviors and HIV testing were the major topics in the LGBT research during the study period. Among 15 topics, topics about HIV/Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) prevalence, Outcomes of HIV/AIDS care and treatment, and Opportunistic infections in HIV-positive LGBT people showed decreasing attention over years, while other topics had a slight to moderate increase. Our study underlined the exponential growth of publications on the LGBT population in HIV research, and suggested the importance of performing regional collaborations in improving research capacity. Moreover, further research should focus on examining the manner to increase the coverage of HIV testing and treatment, as well as implement HIV-interventions with low cost and easy to scale-up.

Thinking Trans/Sex: Erotic Justice and the Trans-Subject

Abstract My gender identity is trans-fag bottom boy. I characterize my trans-masculinity as a technologically enabled creation that gives embodied form to the fantasies that structure my desire. I cannot think my gender without recourse to my sexuality. In fact, I conceive of my transness as wholly motivated by the sexual. According to hegemonic trends in Transgender Studies and many political and community discourses, however, I am mistaken at best, and at worst, I am an impossibility. Gender and sexuality are commonly maintained as separate phenomena that emerge from distinct ontological and epistemological foundations. In this article, I trace the historical emergence of the contemporary conceptual frame that holds that gender and sexuality are separate aspects of being. I then argue that the separation of gender and sexuality is not a necessary or sufficient condition for transness. Finally, I discuss the consequences of not considering even the possibility that some trans- people cannot separate their felt sense of gender and sexuality. I conclude by offering thoughts about what might constitute erotic justice for trans- subjects.

Social Work Practice with the Trans Community

Gender identification relates to a person’s sense of self as being female, male, or otherwise gendered (possibly transgendered, or not gendered at all), whereas sexual orientation refers to an individual’s emotional and sexual affinities towards another person. People who identify as transgendered seek the assistance of social workers for a wide range of reasons. On a broader scale, social workers participate in political advocacy activities to guarantee that members of the transgender community have full access to their civil rights. Social workers are obligated by the NASW Code of Ethics (2000) to serve vulnerable and oppressed populations, to remove discrimination based on sex, and to pursue societal change to ensure the well-being of all persons. This article includes findings from a rapid evaluation of research that connects to trans individuals and social work. The paper’s objective is to investigate the role of transgender studies in the discourse of social work.

Asking the question of it: trans/gender object lessons

This article queries the very question of and that is ‘gender’, from the vantage of transgender studies. In other words, it moves through Wiegman's question of the desires that propel us and asks what desires propel a feeling of gender's necessity, positing the possibility of relinquishing gender as a vector with the same kind of footing it currently has. In short, the question that is asked is gender itself, and the question is asked from a trans studies that excavates the possibilities of radicality.