In 1969, a trans woman named Denise D'Anne made the long trip from Los Angeles to Casablanca for gender-affirming surgery with gynecologist Georges Burou. D'Anne was able to bypass the scarcity of quality surgery in the United States through a private clinic abroad because she worked in the executive offices of a large railroad company. When she returned home after recovering, however, her boss not only dismissed her for transitioning but also blacklisted her from the industry. Forced to start over, D'Anne moved to San Francisco. Surgery allowed her to work legally as a woman, but for the same reason the only jobs available were feminized. She took a low-level position in the municipal civil service and quickly came to resent it. In a letter to a social worker at Stanford University's gender clinic, D'Anne (1973: 1) expressed frustration with how surgery had demoted her position in the labor market. "All I can wish," she explained, "is that I could be given the opportunity to make use of my natural and developed talents. However, I am stuck with no 'experience' in any of the fields that interest me and consequently, I am having a hard time getting out of the secretarial rut."D'Anne was hardly typical of most trans women of her generation in the United States. Middle-class wealth allowed her to delay living publicly as a woman to coincide with medical transition. As a result, she avoided the severe downward mobility that affected most trans women, in which the social decision to go full-time occasioned a severe loss of wealth and work opportunities, often pushing them into gay neighborhoods where the only viable income stream was sex work. University gender clinics getting off the ground at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Stanford in the late 1960s in fact targeted poor transsexual women as their primary population, organizing the practice of trans medicine to coerce middle-class outcomes from transition. Psychiatric gatekeeping intentionally delayed requests for surgery for years on end, rationalized by what clinicians termed "rehabilitation." To be approved for surgery, candidates needed to reform themselves not just into conventional women or men but into conventional workers for a sex-segmented labor market. Trans women's ideal destiny after surgery might be marriage, but clinicians cared more that they leave sex work to become secretaries or waitresses, exiting the stigmatized underclass of vice districts (see Laub and Fisk 1974). Though she had avoided that process by traveling to Casablanca, by the gender clinic's metrics D'Anne was an ideal success. In fact, she was so successful in escaping the underclass of trans women that she ran into nontrans white women's dissatisfaction with careerism in the 1970s. On the other side of medical transition's economic demands lay a liberal feminist dead end, working for less money in feminized sectors. As the decade wore on, these frustrations took an overtly political turn when D'Anne (1974) ran for shop steward in her local chapter of the Service Employees International Union. She became a dedicated labor activist in San Francisco, working tirelessly in solidarity with civil service workers, especially on women's wages (see D'Anne 2011).The analysis of transition through the lens of class is just one example of the shift in thinking to which we are treated in this issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. That transition is less a volitional act of identification, let alone a subversion of the gender binary, than a concrete response to living and working in the world, is only one provocation from D'Anne's life that a trans Marxist analysis might further engage. The resentments of middle-class "success" and their conversion into decades of labor organizing remind us that the terrain of trans politics is not inevitably identity or its deconstruction. The collective scene of labor organizing can contest the primacy of gender in forms of capitalist alienation too. Yet I also begin with D'Anne because even her public-sector unionism manifested a relationship of class bisecting trans femininity. Middle-class transitions and their correlation to professional work have proliferated significantly in the past several decades, particularly as medical transition has become tied to employer-sponsored health insurance in the United States. However, the form of intense poverty that characterizes working-class trans women's lives remains glaringly like the form it took in the late 1960s when it was first targeted by medicine and the welfare state for "rehabilitation." D'Anne's professional solidarity enacted by turning inward to union work in the civil service left undisturbed the class relationship on which her own transition relied. The history of medical transition since World War II is nothing if not the history through which transition has been made middle class, intensifying the gross inequities and alienation attending the classes of trans people on whose backs it has been achieved. Indeed, the class enclosure has reached such hegemony that it has become possible to claim with a straight face that it is politically radical not to medically transition and instead reduce gender to a matter of private taste in clothes and pronouns, as if those were not quintessentially bourgeois criteria for advancing antitranssexual interests directly against poor trans women.This history backgrounds the work gathered in this issue, sharply edited by Ira Terán and Emrys Travis. The vantage points and projects of trans Marxism do not boil down to class analysis the likes of which I have just sketched without any real Marxist inflection. But I wanted to give a small sense of the longevity, if not historicity, of the concrete class character of a practice as canonically transgender as transition because this issue, among its many accomplishments, treats the peculiar form of contemporary capitalist alienation to which some classes of trans people are especially well suited to immanently critique. Indeed, the growth of trans Marxism in recent years represents in part a reckoning with the capitalist crises of the present and the failure of liberal trans politics, not to mention liberal trans analysis, to mount a compelling political alternative. In that sense, Denise D'Anne's middle-class dilemma is one entry in a longer history of liberal trans thought and reformist politics butting up against the starker fact that trans does not name a group of people with shared interests in the first place; trans, rather, denotes people riven by gendered relationships of class in which the prevailing interests of different segments are often explicitly opposed.In that sense, it's not surprising that an academic organ like TSQ is noticeably late to this party, catching up to vibrant and transnational networks of trans Marxist thinkers and researchers. Trans studies, like queer studies, has mostly ignored materialist analysis, no doubt to conceal the field's characteristically middle-class interests, correlate to a highly educated, predominately white, and professional social class that prioritizes individual self-identification and self-description, aesthetics, and performative style as the arbiters of good political taste while simultaneously claiming to represent a vanguard of radical leftism. The wellspring of writing growing under the banner of "trans Marxism" therefore has often been para-academic, which is to say, it has developed outside the charmed circle of university resources as an insurgent intellectual movement, advancing the analysis of people who have long been construed as a problem wherever they think, even within conventional definitions of the proletariat. These dynamics are reflected in the how differently trans studies proceeds with the interlocutors gathered in this issue. The galvanizing impact of the collection Transgender Marxism (2021), edited by Jules Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke, is evident in how many of its chapters are taken up at length by contributors to this issue. It strikes me, too, that despite being irreducible to a singular analytic, critique, or approach, trans Marxism generates a decidedly trans feminist practice of citation and solidarity. Kay Gabriel's, M. E. O'Brien's, and Nat Raha's bodies of work figure centrally in the references of contributors to this issue, alongside critical readings of Marxist feminism in Sylvia Federici, the books and journals published by Endnotes, and of course, Karl Marx herself. The issue's articles also largely decenter the United States, reflecting the strength and political diversity of trans leftist movements throughout certain zones in Europe, the United Kingdom, and Latin America. The intense degree to which anticommunism has structured and continues to structure the US academy sits apposite to those geopolitical differences.There is much that dazzles in this issue, and it is best encountered simply by reading on. But I will underline, in closing, how delightful it is to read materialist and imaginative engagements with just how excruciatingly some trans subjects have been made to both represent and work at the most alienating forms of this era of capitalism. The total privatization of socially reproductive labor achieved through five decades of neoliberal austerity, as well as the extractive economies of attention, creative work, and obligate self-making that have grown alongside them to squeeze ever further value out of exhausted people, correlates interestingly with certain trans people's experiences—and not only in the romantic idioms of resistance or subversion. The trans hyper-pop artist, no less than the trans girl streamer or literary provocatrice, figures in this issue alongside "the transsexual" and other forms of enclosure in the global North. Experiments in living that are at once immanent critiques of those forms and attempts at disalienation (both in the antipsychiatric and anticapitalist sense) must be read in their relationships with groups rendered as collective subjects in a dehumanizing sense. Read and think across the articles in this issue from leftist movements in Europe or the United Kingdom to campesinas in Latin America, whose failures to proletarianize generate interesting possibilities for solidarity, or racialized populations in any number of nation-states whose disavowal by liberal trans politics generates urgency to think otherwise about the collective end of exploitation and suffering.The vibes in this issue, no less than its references to memes and trans girl DJs, are choice. In risking materialist analysis and experimentation from the vertiginously immersed position of how some of us feel alienated today, "The Trans Marxist Issue" touches some of the electrifying implications of a proposition elegantly captured, in one iteration, by Harry Josephine Giles (2019: 20): "The work of transition is the work of class struggle."

Jules Gill-Peterson

TSQ Transgender Studies Quarterly

General Editor's Introduction

Abstract Online news outlets have published a fair amount of journalism concerning Isabel Fall's 2020 science fiction short story, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” later retitled “Helicopter Story.” Yet the highly polarized reception the story received has made up the bulk of the discourse. This is a tragic oversight, as the most interesting thing about “Helicopter Story” is not the online reaction to its original title but how the content of the story itself serves as an illustration of a dialectical history of gender in the United States. In Fall's story, gender is partially demystified by acknowledging the eradication of Indigenous cross-gender practices, racially imbricated plasticity, and the fusion of state and medical power that determines and shapes gender. Even so, some mystification remains. Gender is a reified social relation whose origins are an attempt to install binary biological sex. However, this reification does not result in the reinstallation of gender as ineluctable truth. Rather, it provides the opportunity for the expression of utopian desire, as theorized in the queer Marxism of Kevin Floyd or the dialectical literary criticism of Fredric Jameson, both of whom draw heavily from Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse when proposing that the only way out of reification is through. A proposed subgenre of science fiction, “speculative gender fiction,” is a literary form uniquely suited for exploring both the reification of gender and the utopian desire to escape from it.

JD Fulloon

Shadows of the Empire/A New Hope

Abstract This article aims to explore the political economy of trans life through an examination of the category of the “femboy” as a means for understanding the concrete processes of sexuality and social activity responsible for the internally differentiated valuation of kinds of trans labor and the wider regime of accumulation of which these valuations form a part. Following Kevin Floyd's historical materialist account of gendered performativity, it details the femboy's historical emergence within hierarchies of racialized sexuality. Using the case of online streaming, the article argues that femboys’ disavowal of transness, and intelligibility to dominant regimes of sexuality, subtends their higher valuation than trans women in comparable lines of work. Making use of the case study, the article argues that identification itself appears to affect the judgment and valuation of individuals within the labor process and that such aesthetic judgements—the contours of how capital “sees” its subjects—are both ineliminable and constitutive of the concrete differences that emerge in the process of production. Aesthetic judgment and the process of abstraction therefore offer an entry point into both the analysis of the labor process more generally, and the relations of desire, abjection, and identification that enforce the present subordination of trans people.

Alexis Davin

Femboys in the Factory

Abstract This article proposes to engage with the etiological question haunting the transsexual subject as a sociogenic project of identifying and analyzing relevant problematizations of transsexuality. The article elaborates on the social contexts of the biomedical, sociological, and genealogical problematizations of transsexuality, critically assessing their onto-epistemic stances and political fields. Building on the limitations of these three problematizations, the article projects a fourth problematization drawing from Marxist-feminist approaches. To this end, it engages critically with four different conceptualizations of transsexuality in current trans Marxist debates and establishes the conditions for a distinct historical materialist problematization. Finally, the article puts forward a definition of transsexuality as a technology of containment of the possibility of gender mobility and ambiguity within the Western biopolitical generative dispositive in its functional relation to the capitalist mode of production. The containment works through the displacement of a structural conflict of social reproduction specific to the Western modern/colonial gender order to the interiority of the trans subject, ultimately foreclosing the possibility of the democratization of relations of procreation. Gender intransigence is proposed as an epistemic and political category for historical materialist problematization of transsexuality which can provide an alternative to the hegemonic framework of gender identity.

Eric Llaveria Caselles

Contours of a Historical Materialist Theory of Transsexuality

Abstract This article recasts agrarian studies’ concerns with nature, productivity, and subjectivity through the provocations raised by transgender Marxism. Transgender Marxism has interrogated how normative gender, sexuality, and racial dynamics are inseparable from the material and reproductive matrices required for capital. Critical agrarian studies has a long history of carefully tracing out the political economy of agrarian capitalism and resistance to it. Engaging with the unruly materialisms of transgender Marxism would further the work of critical agrarian studies, particularly in regard to the ways gender and sexuality are taken up in the field. The project of transgender Marxism offers a scathing critique of rights-based recognition, hetero- and homonormativity, apoliticized science, and the ways in which the biological family figures at the heart of capitalist reproduction. Such questions have been taken up in small corners of queer and feminist critical agrarian studies, particularly those rooted in the United States, but transgender Marxism offers a new opportunity to bring together the material and historical concerns of the ways agrarian capitalism takes place and creates conditions for unruly forms of resistance. The article demonstrates their possible interconnectivities by exploring three themes: theories of change, the centrality of gender/sex in the agrarian, and unruly, ungrounded materialisms. While primarily a theoretical intervention, the article draws some insights from the authors’ ethnographic work in Paraguay and Colombia to ground the theoretical possibilities in place.

Jamie C. Gagliano

Alexander Liebman

Trans*agrarian Marxisms?

Abstract This article outlines the epistemological foundations of transmarxism through a decolonial Marxist humanism taking up groundwork laid in Transgender Marxism (2021) by Nathaniel Dickson as a starting point. The transmarxist critique of alienated life via the continued subjection of trans people to an arbitrary and finite set of external determinations coincides with hi[r]storical materialism and a decolonial humanist critique of racial capitalism. While there are many debates around various forms of humanism, this article takes the position that a decolonial Marxist humanism does not have to put forward a problematically sexist, racist, or anthropocentric understanding of the human to say that there is nothing proper to the human other than impropriety. As argued in the latter half of the article, the historical and conceptual relations binding revolutionary Marxist humanism to the theory and praxis of autonomous queer, trans, and feminist struggles found in the work of Sylvia Wynter, Wages Due Lesbians, and the concept of hi[r]storical materialism are critical to ending colonial capitalist imperialism, fighting fascism, and revealing the limitations of liberal inclusion as a long-term solution to antitrans violence.

Alex Adamson

Epistemological Foundations of Transmarxism

Ira Terán

Emrys Travis

A Small Piece of Red Sky to Fly In

Abstract This article makes a case for developing a theoretical account of historically determined gendered, trans, and queer epistemologies out of value-form readings on social reproduction. The materialist turn in queer studies is revisited here first by critically engaging with Meg Wesling's GLQ article “Queer Value” (2012) in order to present a non-ontologizing conceptualization of labor that would avoid politically affirming stances toward historically feminized positions within the process of reproduction of labor-force. Second, the author reads the Foucauldian account of sex through the fetish character of capitalist social forms to expose the functioning of a sociohistorically specific epistemology of the body. Ultimately, the article unfolds a negative understanding of queer and trans processes of embodiment as precariously inaugurating new modes of sociality unrealizable under capitalist social reproduction.

Bruno Monfort

The Political Economy of Sexual Identity

Abstract Often defined by its characteristic and heavy use of autotuned vocals, the microgenre hyper-pop is perhaps just as recognizable for the ubiquitous transness of its most important artists. Reading trans hyper-pop performers Blackwinterwells, laura les, and quinn's uses of the figure of the “bedsheet ghost,” this article explores trans artists’ responses to late capitalism's regimes of alienation as a means of desubjectivization through strategies of becoming spectral—resisting commodification through a spectral orientation toward their sonic corporeality.

Westley Montgomery

Becoming Spectral

Abraham B. Weil

Abstract In 2016 long-standing activism culminated in the implementation of Bill C-16, which added “gender and gender expression” to the protected classes of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Despite a commitment to consistency across federal policy, wide discrepancies occurred between the changes to the passport and those to the prison. On the one hand, Citizenship Canada announced that “people who do not identify as female (‘F’) or male (‘M’)” could change their passport sex to be an X. On the other hand, the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) begrudgingly introduced Interim Policy Bulletin 584, which provides accommodation based “on gender identity or expression” within the binary system. Through a comparative analysis, this article queries the enactment of nonbinary recognition between two foundational sites of Canadian federal control: a site of mobility (the passport) and a site of immobility through mass incarceration (the prison). Arguing against expanding prisons or the creation of nonbinary correctional institutions, this article traces the racial geographies that X is both embedded within and enacts, exposing the violence that ushers forth new forms of trans citizenship reliant on anti-Blackness, captivity, and fungibility. Building from these case studies, this article mobilizes the state deployment of gendered expression and determination to nuance theories of gender self-determination. Specifically, this article considers how the theoretical application of the term may dissimulate distinctions in (in)violability, vulnerability, and capacity between and within Blackness and transness.

Joshua Falek

Passports, Prisons, and Every Space Between

Joshua Bastian Cole-Kurz

You Can't Go Home Again

Abstract This roundtable is a place-based conversation on Black anarchism, transfeminism, and transmisogynoir with edxi betts, NZ Suékama, and g, three Black trans femme activists, organizers, and independent scholars. Moving deftly between topics like Marxism, Afro-pessimism, and abolition, this roundtable outlines problems of co-optation within radical-movement work and critiques Eurocentric modes of knowledge production. Through organic relations built within organizing spaces, special issue editor Ren-yo Hwang reached out to edxi betts to be part of this featured roundtable, and edxi, in turn, contacted NZ Suékama, who connected us with her frequent interlocutor, g. Edxi first encountered NZ's intellectual writings online, in 2020, offering that “it was refreshing and affirming seeing another Black trans femme go through such similar issues of having to navigate liberal, statist, respectable, and even white anarchist politics.” Likewise, NZ recounts first meeting “both g and edxi on social media, connecting individually around theories of transmisogynoir as well as critiques of abuse in leftist organizations.” NZ and g describe themselves as “theoretical co-conspirators, both publishing our ideas with Red Voice,” an online publication. NZ, edxi, and g had an opportunity to review and edit their contributions, and this issue's guest editors sought to honor the flow of their conversation as much as possible by retaining its conversational syntax, which purposefully rejects traditional academic forms.

edxi betts

NZ Suékama

None g

Ren-yo Hwang

Black Transfeminist Anarchism

Research Article| February 01 2024 Grow with People Inside Stephen Wilson; Stephen Wilson Stephen Wilson is a currently incarcerated writer, activist, and student. He is a founding member of Dreaming Freedom Practicing Abolition, a network of self-organized prisoner study groups building abolitionist community behind and across prison walls. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Eric A. Stanley Eric A. Stanley Eric A. Stanley is the author of Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (2021) and is associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google TSQ (2024) 11 (1): 171–173. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-11131794 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Stephen Wilson, Eric A. Stanley; Grow with People Inside. TSQ 1 February 2024; 11 (1): 171–173. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-11131794 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2024 by Duke University Press2024 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Stephen Wilson

Eric A. Stanley

Grow with People Inside

Abstract In this roundtable discussion, the interlocutors interrogate the settler utopian logics underlying apparently liberatory movements within a North American context—such as radical queer and trans movements—to examine how these identities and politics tell narratives of liberation that reinscribe the aims of the settler colonial project under new names. Visions of radical utopias as yet to be realized (or, as yet to be colonized) discount the ongoing presence of Indigenous alternatives to the current settler colonial dystopian reality, and instead preserve a view of geographic and social space as blank and ready to be “improved” with a “new” model. In this discussion, the interlocuters argue against linear narratives of societal and environmental collapse that promise to bring about a future idealized world and instead propose ways for radical politics, particularly those espoused by non-Indigenous people, to disavow settler colonial mindsets.

Shuli Branson

E Ornelas

Kai Rajala

No Blank Slates

Anyone who has ever encountered Miss Major Griffin-Gracy can attest to the might living inside her. She is uncontainable and vibrant, unbothered and honest. She may give off the allure of giving no fucks, but as you learn more, it becomes crystal clear that she gives all the fucks. Attempting to contain Miss Major in any kind of written form is not for the faint of heart, but damn, does Toshio Meronek understand the assignment. Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary feels like a breath of fresh air and a vital conversation one might have with an elder at a family reunion, eager to pass on their knowledge to those that will listen.Miss Major Speaks is the love child of Bay Area writer Toshio Meronek, Miss Major, and a bouquet of other people closest to her. While the pages are few, the impact is vast, just like her lived experiences. Through the text, the reader is exposed to radical history lessons about prison abolition, harm reduction, and trans liberation. Understanding these histories through Major's lens is a gift to those that came after her, but also to those that fought before and next to her. Major complicates mainstream/dominant narratives about queer and trans histories and showcases a life spent working on grassroots organizing. She speaks her truth not because she believes her story is unique (in fact, quite the opposite), but because she can hold the reality of our history and remain hopeful that it can get better; "she can cut through the noise without raising the volume" (18).The intentionality surrounding tone, form, and accessibility is clear from the very beginning. The introduction, "TILFI," or "Telling It Like It Fucking Is," sets the reader up for the fast facts and hard truths coming their way. "TILFI" is the only section that is not in interview form but is instead a place for Meronek and others that are close to Major to share how special she is to them and to the movements she has been a part of, while also sharing how this project began. According to Meronek, Major declared early in the process that she "want[ed] it warm and embracing. Like a big hug" (28). This is delivered throughout the text, and I am sure it came to no surprise to Meronek, as they describe their friend and subject as "a hope-giving anomaly who wipes away cynicism and helps us believe that better worlds are at once possible and worth fighting for" (3). This warmth feels like an embrace wrapped in a Molotov cocktail, with Major holding no qualms about the real danger Black trans people are experiencing in this country, and a call to keep fighting back.The nature of the interview format between friends allows the reader to take in Major's sentiments as if you are with them in the room. Meronek recorded hundreds of hours of audio between them as well as conducted interviews with others in Major's orbit to bring readers a look into Major's past, present, and visions for the future. The rest of the book is divided into four parts: "Stonewall Never Happened," "Fuck a Butterfly. Embrace the Caterpillar," "The Keys to Our Fucking Survival," and "Miss Major Futurism." Each part contains chapters that work together to highlight certain aspects of living as a Black trans revolutionary in the United States. While these sentiments have been structured and edited from larger conversations, Meronek's commitment to a conversational flow is successful. With as many conversations and places to connect with Major, I do leave wanting more. There is space for more perspectives from others close to her and her history as well as more contextual information that may help the reader situate themselves into the timeline of events being discussed."Stonewall Never Happened" opens with why the hell the eighty-year-old Black trans revolutionary has not retired yet, the problem she calls "The Powers That Be." The strongest elements of this section embrace the realities of memorialization, legal protections for trans folks, and tokenism within the greater LGBT+ community. Major discusses the harm that has been caused owing to events like the Stonewall Riots being whitewashed and remembered artificially, "becoming a symbol of nothing" (36), then turns her lens to Pride. She explains her personal disdain and professional decision not to appear in them anymore, most notably because of capitalism's ties to larger events. There is even a calling out of "Mark Zuckerberg ugly-ass" in the process, just one of the moments that made me laugh (41). In "Nobody's Token Black Bitch," she calls out neoliberal gay and lesbian organizers and leaders for tokenization and erasure of Black trans experiences within the larger movement. Major has no time for that and is unbothered by the feathers she may ruffle. She puts it best when she says, "I didn't get to eighty years old being sweet and gentle. I'm no flower. Fuck that. I'm a cactus—get over it" (72).In "Fuck a Butterfly. Embrace the Caterpillar," Major and Meronek chat about intergenerational support, the trauma of passing/not passing, and the power of building community lines of connection. In "Embrace the Brick" Major recalls lessons learned from her elders, including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. She dives into the differences in their tactics and the ways their legacies live on in her work. Centered here is not the Johnson and Rivera of queer and trans lore, but real gurls working to survive within a system that wants them dead, just like Major and countless others. Major shares her perspectives on gender expression, pronouns, and the politics of the acronym, signaling the importance of identity and identification within intergenerational discourse The impact of communal support and care is also highlighted in "Late-Night Epiphanies with Big Black from Attica," which provides a look into the organizing relationship between Miss Major and Big Black, a prison organizer who survived the Attica prison rebellion in 1971.While the first two sections feel like a family scrapbook, cultivated to hold space for the truth of the past for future generations to connect to, the third section feels like a beloved family recipe being passed down. In this case, Major focuses on steps for survival and nourishment in the present. "The Keys to Our Fucking Survival" reads like a message straight to younger generations of Black trans folks and their allies. This chapter still leverages the past but focuses on what can be done now and what community care and safety tactics look like on the street. She reminds the trans and queer readers that no one else is going to protect them. They must protect themselves and others through harm reduction tenets. She directly pleads to allies to become more vocal in "Allies, Be Visible." Here Major reminds us that trans visibility is a trap and demands that "allies need to be more visible. You can't miss us! We've been visible since time began, and as a result, for just as long we've been harassed, or something worse" (137).The fourth and final section, "Miss Major Futurism," serves as an epilogue of sorts. Here the feeling shifts from a family recipe to the passing down of a family heirloom. Major's legacy, past, present, and future, reminds us that we must understand the stakes we are working with and still have hope for better times ahead. Make no mistake. This heirloom is not one to keep in a cabinet or locked away in a box after someone is gone. Major wants her legacy to have nothing to do with being a shiny object, revered and unusable. Instead, she asks you to let her experiences and wisdom act like foundational flavor found with cooking in a well-seasoned cast iron pan, passed down from one generation to another. Centered in her call is a focus on grassroots work and harm reduction on the ground, right now, and she urges the reader to do the same, stating, "Go outside. Get wet" (73).Miss Major Speaks has something for anyone interested in working from a Black trans feminist and abolitionist lenses. Miss Major's history and hopes for the future remind readers that liberation is possible only through communal care and solidarity against "The Powers That Be." This book can provide weight to conversations in a variety of academic and community-based settings. It also is an example of trans joy. The text will make you laugh out loud, blush, and celebrate trans love while being grounded in hard truth. This is a reflection of Major herself, who has not only survived but also "suck[ed] every last drop of cum out of life" (26), and she wants you to as well.

Arlowe Sue Clementine

Hug from a Cactus

Abstract Gay Shame is a direct-action collective that has been active in the San Francisco Bay Area for over twenty years. The group has never had any funding, and its members have met almost every week for decades and produced a wide range of interventions articulating an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, abolitionist queer politics. The author has been following the work of Gay Shame since its beginnings, engaging in related work in other cities and sometimes overlapping and collaborating with Gay Shame's members, since the early 2000s. Gay Shame's work has been prophetic. Compared to the other groups and people the author has worked with on this same intersecting set of concerns and interventions since the mid-2000s, Gay Shame has anticipated the conditions of reductive identity politics, the conditions of gentrification, and the methods of neoliberal co-optation with more accuracy and precision than anyone else. Again and again, Gay Shame has anticipated these conditions before others, making interventions that were often quite controversial because others were not yet ready to identify and name the contradictions and antagonisms that Gay Shame was naming. At this moment, when resistance is more necessary than ever, but groups and projects struggle under the weight of conflict, co-optation, and counterinsurgency, it is particularly useful to study how a group like Gay Shame has initiated and sustained this work.

Dean Spade

Gay Shame

It Is Easier to Hate Gay Shame than to Hate a Murderous World

Christopher Joseph Lee

Jemma DeCristo

Introduction

Abstract Special issue editors Ren-yo Hwang and Christopher Joseph Lee interview Zhi (Yu) Lu (@hotbirdbath), a trans Han/Hakka artist working in tattoo and other media as a collaborative sculptural practice, and an organizer with Trans Revolutionary Action Network (@tran4ny). In this interview, Hwang, Lee, and Lu discuss the connections between tattoo art events, nightlife, and mutual aid fundraising, while reflecting on the importance of body adornment for trans people. Alongside examples of their art, Lu explains how they see tattoo as a therapeutic medium that connects diasporic and trans communities through retellings of migration and transformation.

Zhi (Yu) Lu

“A Reminder of How to Live in One's Body”

These selected photographs serve as a representation of the activist work carried out by documentary photographer Eugenia Azar, who accompanies the struggle of the travesti trans collective Las Históricas Argentinas (The Historic Trans Femininities and Travestis). Las Históricas are at the forefront of the fight for historic reparations as victims of a genocidal state whose organization is designed to systematically eliminate them. This claim emerged in 2005 but was overshadowed by other demands for civil rights, such as marriage equality and a law recognizing gender identity. It resurfaced with renewed strength in 2021 amid the pandemic. Faced with the socio-sanitary crisis and state abandonment, the travesti trans collective self-organized. The pandemic exposed the ongoing material deprivation of socioeconomic rights for the collective that results in avoidable deaths under conditions of extreme poverty. Settling this debt, along with the generational trauma of having survived genocide, entails laying the foundation to ensure a different future for new generations.

Eugenia Azar

Pili Cabrera

Marlene Wayar

Tania Libertad Balderas

To Exist and Resist

Marlene Wayar is an internationally recognized and leading figure in the Latin American travesti-trans activist movement with over forty years of experience in the TTTLGBI community. Since the 1990s and the movement's emergence in Argentina, she has confronted the federal police and, alongside Nadia Echazú and Lohana Berkins, formed part of this foundational activist trio in the Argentine travesti struggle. She is the founder of Futuro Trans, a critical hub for T thinking, the cofounder of the Nadia Echazú Textile Cooperative, and the creator of El Teje: Primer periódico travesti de Latinoamérica (El Teje: First Latin American Travesti Newspaper). She has pioneered the development of Latin American travesti-trans theory as an independent field, distinct from other theoretical frameworks, with the publication of her foundational books Travesti: Una teoría lo suficientemente buena (2018) (Travesti: A Good Enough Theory) and Furia travesti: Diccionario de la T a la T ([2019] 2021) (Travesti Rage: A Dictionary from T to T).The following words are an exercise in translation befitting a half-century-old, Argentinian-born travesti. Together with a handful of friends, comrades, and some feminists, she achieved the rights that the travesti-trans community enjoys today in Argentina. This exercise similarly consists in rereading this self-history to draw forth new inquiries that may guide us in a world of constantly changing appearances.I want to approach the problem of translation not as an act of translating between languages but, rather, to consider the translations that become imperative within the realm of a single language. In other words, travesti and transgender bodies must translate themselves within a binary and a heterocentric system that demonizes them. As travestis we are forced to translate ourselves to exist. Thus, I understand translation as an act of agency, a reclamation of our meaning-making practices in the absence of a signifier that can truly name us and illuminate our own desires.As travestis we are born in diaspora. I make this assertion because each travesti/trans person is born into a heteronormative family built on the idea of the binary nature of human reality. This societal structure, to which individuals seemingly conform, contradicts what we recognize as our experience of selfhood. We are born into a reality in which the only legitimate alternatives are Man or Woman. Despite the self-evident artificiality of this conceptual box, it is conceived and presented as something natural, logical, and necessary. As travestis, we know and feel that it is not so. We understand our psychic and physical reality, and we find no contradiction between our bodies and feelings as we experience them. Society, however, poses an absurd paradox: our bodily existence, particularly sexuation, does not agree with our psychic reality. It's absurd, but that's how it works.Our diasporic condition will continue to grow because of our expulsion from the central institutions that organize life, which is to say, we are living in an expulsive reality. We are not recognized by nuclear or extended family structures, by the barrio, by community centers, by schools, or by hospitals. Meanwhile, other more informal institutions, such as cultural productions, resemble a barren desert when it comes to our existence. This untranslatability configures our experience within a world in which we cannot find a connection from any point of view. The solitude is absolute, for human reality can fragment into infinite parts like an image in a kaleidoscope, refracted by ethnicity, religion, nationality, and so on. However, the kaleidoscope in which these divisions themselves are generated is the binary and heterosexual system. Despite their differences, this system unites them. Our experiences do not fit within this structure. We are mere shadows to the kaleidoscopic system while Woman and Man reflect the light.The expulsive and refracting reality we experience condemns us to the exile of prostitution at an early age as the sole option for survival. It is in this light that we must perceive the travesti community as migratory. Travestis migrate from the heterosexual family into a state of exile: one of dispossession and vulnerability. They are stripped of a childhood and translated into objects of sexual consumption. This exploitation is made invisible or untranslatable, owing to the dispossession of their status as girls on being discarded by their families and inserted into an adult sexual economy. These girls are both discarded and translated as detritus. This occurs because the category of "travesti" has been dehumanized through the historical exercise of stigmatization, criminalization, and pathologization.This expulsive reality exposes us to a fundamental condition that shapes our being: violence. I always say, "In my mind there is a cemetery." Death stalks us through an unrelenting continuum of violence. We are murdered by state and civilian hands, fueled by discourses of hate from the pulpits to the press. We die when we are denied medical attention. We die in the pursuit of constructing our bodies. We die from hunger. We die by suicide. We die in prison cells, and we die from HIV. We die in the crossfire, and we die when we are intentionally run over by cars for some passenger's amusement. Ultimately, we die from the dehumanization that has operated on our travesti-trans identity.One of our most prominent referents, Lohana Berkins, engaged in translation by identifying our subjective position as "sewerized identities." This is a profound consolidation and analysis of the modes of abandonment and violence to which we are subjected because of our travesti identity. "Travesti" as a trash or sewerized category exposes us to living conditions that keep us from reaching thirty-two years of age. That is to say that these societies have constructed us as "AIDS-ridden, delinquent, scandalous, infected, marginalized" subjects, dumping anything and everything relating to sexual, moral, and gender panic onto us, converting us into detritus/garbage (Berkins 2006). It is from this abject position that we are compelled to negotiate our subsistence, with society condemning us to the precarious foothold of prostitution.In such circumstances, these young travesti girls, expelled from central social institutions, develop what I refer to as a prostitutive epistemology, which enables their survival. This is an act of translation and creation. Prostitutive epistemology (noun): the knowledge production that travestis generate within the context of prostitution and that is shared among them. These forms of translation and creation are central to travesti theory. Prostitutive epistemology also functions as a translation of the narratives imprinted on these bodies. It prevents the disintegration of the self in a world that insists on their transmutation into garbage.A prime example of travesti epistemology surges in relation to the lead actor on the prostitutive stage: the police. They regulate the territories and times that travestis can engage in prostitution. Travestis, in turn, translate these restrictions into possibilities for survival. For example, in the recent past, incarceration could not be avoided. Under such conditions, the challenge of translation became: how to turn those hours of confinement into playful moments of socialization? They transformed those conditions of imprisonment through quotidian elements by staging another world—as if in a living room—in which they would have shared the experiences stolen from them. Little by little, they stripped away the oppressive aspects of carceral reality, imagining themselves in an alternate, imaginary setting. This meant playing within confinement, exchanging knowledge, laughing, and engaging in the latest gossip about who was getting silicone injections, whose birthday it was, and their current rates. Questions would arise, such as: Where can you find a hotel that accepts travestis and treats them well? Which taxi drivers can provide connections and transport? And where can you buy clothing and makeup with kind and attentive service? If someone went to the movies or traveled to Europe, how did they manage it? All this shared knowledge transformed the prison cell into a grand living room, where sipping tea with imaginary teacups dissolved prison bars.When they are not imprisoned and to survive, travestis engage in this prostitutive exercise. Their strategy is seduction, enticing this other (the client) who seeks their services. And even if it is in the context of sexuality, it creates the mirror illusion of being seen and acknowledged by another. In the presence of this other, a travesti must carefully read their intention. They must read this intention in the client's face, behavior, manner of speaking, and the items in the car, all while seducing him. As it were, she does her best to appear beautiful and accentuate those features she believes will benefit her the most—the lips, the cleavage, the derrière. She must be friendly, seductive, and harmless while keeping a certain distance. The tactic lies in positioning herself as the one who always has the final say, the yes or the no. This is crucial because, beyond money, the aim is to get out of the car alive. Thus translation constitutes a game of seduction in which survival is at play.Historically, prostitution has implied a singular mindset: a puta merely presents herself to be seen and observed as available. For the prostitute in the ancient temples of Mesopotamia, this entailed adorning herself with a flower crown, indicating she was available that day. In our present times, this mindset learned through the prostitutive must be translated and sustained as a politics of negotiation with the state and with society. It entails demonstrating openness vis-à-vis the proposals of inclusion and diversity put forth by the state while not committing until a clear economic benefit is explicitly outlined. Negotiating with the state is to negotiate with a client.What happens today, however, is something we have always tried to avoid in the context of prostitution: allowing the client to feel us up to the point of premature ejaculation where the client leaves satisfied without the requisite economic transaction. In Argentina the travesti-trans community remains trapped in the precarity of prostitution, despite the passage of laws securing gender identity rights and travesti-trans work quotas. In other words, these laws have not been negotiated with prostitutive strategies. With these laws, the state and society ejaculate their seminal guilt onto the travesti-trans body. Strictly speaking, they fail to generate universal public policies with corresponding budget allocations. In doing so, they find cheap, ethical-moral peace of mind.One of the first lessons I received on the streets from a seasoned puta can be summed up as follows: "No chongo, no matter how much love he professes, is going to propose marriage and set you up in a house equipped with a fridge, TV, kitchen, and weekend barbecues.1 For all that, you have to demand payment upfront, in Argentine pesos." Nowadays, the progressive movement, like the worst of the chongos, declares their love for us with public policies aimed at integrating us into their binary system without even recognizing our identity and with zero budget allocations. In short, not even a fridge. They fuck us, but there's no barbecue.At present, within certain small political sectors (and along party lines), there is an initiative for reparations regarding human rights violations. As we reach old age, those of us who have experienced this structural violence throughout our lives find ourselves in extreme poverty; we are even excluded from prostitution. They exploit our desperate hunger to cleanse themselves of guilt and responsibility for these crimes, proposing reparations through meager handouts that hardly satisfy that hunger.However, owing to our activist labor, they can no longer ignore the cruelty to which we have been subjected. Nevertheless, up until now, this has meant that these sectors propose public policies of recognition without the logical consequence of reparations proportional to the horrors experienced within the jaws of a systematic apparatus of death and disappearance. To be exact, a genocidal apparatus. Translating this complexity would imply restoring the humanity they stole from us as children, reducing us to garbage, a burden we carry into old age. We demand recognition of this violence as genocide perpetrated against the travesti-trans community, which they must repair with parity to the shared humanity they believe belongs exclusively to them, Man and Woman.What does reparation entail? It involves translating the language of international human rights, as shaped by heterosexuality, into the experience of the TTT community. This would include the legal and social right to truth and public acknowledgment of the facts; proper investigation and classification of crimes; opening police and state archives; removing the silicone from our bodies; restoring stolen property and the life paths we were unable to live, let alone imagine; ensuring employment; offering educational opportunities through scholarships; repairing material and immaterial harm; tending to our psychological trauma; allocating budgets to support collective memory projects; healing our bodies; establishing museums and art galleries to preserve our T culture; providing housing and lifelong pensions; embracing our souls; and, above all, ensuring nonrepetition.

In My Mind There Is a Cemetery/Tengo un cementerio en la cabeza

"Love is love." "Gay is good." "Respect my pronouns." So much of the bite-sized slogans used in mainstream LGBTQ speech is focused on positive affects, creating love, respect, and connections across various communities, particularly for those who have been demonized or marginalized by society. Our inclinations have been to embrace the positive attributes of community building and acceptance of our identities rather than stew in the negative aspects of being a trans person in a world that cannot and/or will not fully accept you. However, there is a loss to not acknowledging that the ways we are forced to exist outside accepted categories, to be seen as maladjusted to the rest of the world, can help us grapple with the notion that "the affirmable trans subject is the affirmed subject, the one who has moved from bad feeling . . . into cheery forms of social life" (147). In his recent book, The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment, Cameron Awkward-Rich embraces the negative feelings that exist throughout trans identity, particularly in trans[masculine]1 texts created by white Americans and in the responses trans people have created in broader discourses, and demonstrates the value they have in a world that wishes to move past them with little regard.The Terrible We is divided into an introduction, four chapters, and two smaller sections. The introduction, "On Staying with the Terrible We," lays out the initial ideas that his book is contrasting against, the belief that trans people are not sick and that labeling them as such demeans their existence. Instead, utilizing a detailed analysis of the trans possibilities and failures within Carson McCullers's novel The Member of the Wedding, Awkward-Rich instead asks that we embrace "the terrible we," a "place where a vast, uneven collective assembles" (19) in recognition of their outsider status, their freakishness, and the fact that society wants little to do with them. The introduction also notes how trans people took authority over their own lives and identities by removing the harmful discourses around them, even if they were potentially useful. Awkward-Rich also describes his reason for focusing on transmasculinity within the book as being due to the questions it raises about supposed universal trans experiences. The first chapter, "Disabled Histories of Trans," is primarily a historical examination in which Awkward-Rich describes the archives of three trans[masculine] individuals in American history whose gender identities intersected with the legal system and considerations of disability and madness. The chapter also considers more recent histories, such as the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which presents transness as a bad kind of disability, "a particularly immoral kind of madness" (54). The spaces of these histories range from the freak show to the courtroom to the news office, but all of them demonstrate that it is vital to consider a trans/crip mindset in examining the world, as "knowing from a trans position . . . requires taking seriously orders of sense and ways of knowing usually cordoned off as mad" (59). After a short section that helps introduce the main three chapters of the book, chapter 2, "Trans, Feminism; Or, Reading like a Depressed Transsexual," looks at affects of pain and haunting with pro- and anti-transgender archives to argue that the titular depressed transsexual, a figure that demonstrates "the production of life under trans-antagonism, racial capitalism, and so on" (74), is a figure that should be respected rather than ignored. The third chapter, "Some Dissociative Trans Masc Poetics," analyzes the emphasis on fractured identities, often in relation to gendered violence, within transmasculine narratives. Focusing primarily on the life and death of Brandon Teena and the 1999 film about them, Boys Don't Cry, Awkward-Rich also discusses the work of Eli Claire and the 2011 novel Refuse by Elliot Deline, both of whom intersect their trans experiences with a sense of being dissociated owing to trauma, providing "a way of knowing that is inextricably tethered to unbearable social and historical conditions" (98–99). The final main chapter, "We's Company," moves the book's focus to the figure of the trans recluse and how the social aspects of inhabiting a trans identity can be expressed through relations to other narratives and utilizing a lyrical form of story creation that creates "a subject defined . . . by a curious simultaneity of absolute interiority and publicity" (136). Awkward-Rich's "Afterword/Elegy" reflects on recent suicides of trans youth and questions why these figures and their lost futures are considered more important over the present that they have been denied.The most dynamic aspect of Awkward-Rich's analysis is his ability to showcase how much trans studies and disability studies can learn from each other and their ways of viewing the world. For Awkward-Rich, being transgender is not necessarily a disability per se; rather, as "the coproduction of disability/transgender [allows] for fleeting, unexpected freedom," and the two identities are bound to each other in both medical and legal practices (32–33), one must work with the other to better understand how each identity complements and contrasts the other. Using a disability framing also allows Awkward-Rich to handle sensitive subject matter, such as the sexual violence and self-harm that is viewed as common in trans narratives, in a manner that is both respectful to the trauma of these experiences and interrogative into why these specific moments are so valued in this type of narrative. Awkward-Rich also utilizes a wide archive for his arguments, demonstrating how widespread these ideas and concerns are; literature, film, government documents, and self-help books all provide examples for maladjustment to be identified and understood within a variety of trans experiences. Of particular note in this context is the first chapter, which does an expert job of taking seemingly minor archives of potentially trans experiences and using them to broaden the horizons of how we should consider trans lives.However, a limitation to Awkward-Rich's work is one that is self-described, that being his focus on white trans[masculine] lives and texts. While he does bring in Black and Brown trans experiences in his afterword, Awkward-Rich still primarily bases his analysis on a Western, Anglo-American framework of both trans and disability. It would be vital for writers in Asian, African, and Latine spaces to examine whether their own communities can utilize this idea of maladjustment within their particular frameworks of gender identity and physical/mental ability or if a completely new concept is needed owing to their historical, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds. Overall, The Terrible We serves as an important guide for those interested in new ways of viewing trans life in both its positive and negative aspects and those wanting to use everyday archives in a method that is more interested in fractures and gaps rather than acceptance and completion.

Jacob DeBrock

Who Said We Gotta Feel Gay All the Time?

Jolie Chea

Toward a Trans* Refugee Critique

Abstract Recently, deadnaming has been the predominant terminology invoked to describe the act of referring to a trans* person by a former, but no longer used, name. While it is perceived as a formidable language to condemn this type of anti-transgender harm and violence, the necropolitical implications of referring to this act as “deadnaming” necessitates a trans* Indigenous critique of the manifestation of settler coloniality within transnormativity and its rhetoric. By analyzing the polarizing tension between birth name and deadname, this article turns to US legal documents, specifically the language within states’ legal birth certificates, for the better-for-now language of the “given name,” which might provide the destabilization needed to disrupt the temporal specificity implied within the “birth name” and “deadname” binary to imagine and embody an otherwise of the trans* imaginary. In thinking with Billy-Ray Belcourt's (Driftpile Cree) feral queer Indigeneity, this article concludes by surveying the possibilities of anti-colonial trans* experiences beyond the US settler nation-state's socio-legal surveillance, with its insistence on (trans*-/settler-) normative legibility (for “citizenship” within its biopolitical sphere).

Emerson Parker Pehl

On “Deadnaming” the “Vanishing Indian”

Hil Malatino's artfully written book unpacks the emotional landscape of trans experiences through fatigue, numbness, envy, rage, and burnout with careful consideration of trans beingness. Both deeply personal and political, Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad functions to alleviate the alienation of intimate categories of emotion to broaden a communal scope of feeling and promote a discourse on healing and survival. Malatino intervenes in an academically distanced observational approach to transness and transgender studies. In turn, they position the study of trans being and embodiment as belonging within intimate epistemologies of inquiry. The content within Side Affects marks the essential transcendence of this approach from institutional planes toward methods of advocacy, organizing, community building, and survival.With pointed articulation, Malatino opens Side Affects with the primary issue that space has yet to be made for trans people to "think through, let alone speak of, such bad feeling with any degree of nuance or complexity" (1). They present their work as one that allows for such nuances to take place as well as a tool to remove one-dimensional portraits of experience from trans living. Beginning with fatigue, Malatino introduces their theoretical lens of cruel optimism from scholar Lauren Berlant (2011), which acts as a throughline that is interwoven throughout each chapter. Chapter 1 establishes a reference point for how cruel optimism operates within a trans context, using an example of trans vloggers whose aims were to inspire a positive view of the future while, incidentally, promoting transnormativity (23). Malatino utilizes Berlant's cruel optimism with contemporary and historical accounts of trans medias, creating a space where trans emotions can be captured in a mainstream and generational framework. As their previous publications pertain to the necessity of community building and healing, Side Affects successfully continues their efforts while deconstructing institutional, nonemotive distance. Their use of cruel optimism provides a depth to trans narratives that unravel singularity and universality. Such is seen in chapter 2, titled "Fuck Feelings," wherein Malatino discusses the joy of visibility that is countered by the omnipresent fear of being "discovered" (51–52).As they shift from the disorientation and numbness to envy, they utilize theorist Gilles Deleuze to discuss temporality and the reprieve from anxious yearning for how others present. Unlike the other emotive categories featured in this book, a feeling of reprieve can exist in envy, owing to "a reverie of becoming, a fantasy space of what might be" (95). Envy is not a cut-and-dried emotion in Side Affects, as it can create a vision of hope and trans futurity while operating on a continuum that can alter internal and external perceptions of a "trans authenticity" (102). Thus Malatino finds that cruel optimism is its own complex construct that can be combatted, but through very specific means.In "Tough Breaks," the concept of rage captures the explicit importance of this traditionally negative emotion as a propulsive mechanism in trans mobilization. Using James C. Scott's infrapolitics, Malatino builds on feminist care ethics introduced by Nel Noddings and Fiona Robinson. In doing so, they rightfully reconceptualize an approach to care by converging infrapolitics with the ethics of care to "explicitly position care ethics . . . as the integral to political movement in a way that disrupts any rending" in private and public spheres (119). This chapter finds that rage is an integral emotion in this reconceptualizing of a feminist care ethic that attends to systemic violence through community care, resistance, and survival. Thus Malatino constructs an approach that opens space for healing and disrupts a one-dimensional understanding of an ethics of care that advocates the importance of vocalizing rage, frustration, and anger as a survival method.As Malatino navigates these negative emotions, the question of self and communal care follows, leading them to "Beyond Burnout." Focusing on advocacy work, they unpack compassion fatigue and secondary traumatic stress while mapping a history of trans medicalization. Ultimately, this encompasses their shift toward healing and survival in the final chapter. Malatino concludes that healing is not linear and is continuous as new forms of violence emerge or undergo a reconfiguration in social, political, and institutional structures, as they have located specifically within transness and the medical establishment. Their resolution of trans negative emotions is to address, work within and alongside, invoke in advocacy and organizing, and open up space for an ethics of care. Therefore, Side Affects operates as a tool for trans people to contend with their negative emotions as well as a mode to disrupt the institutional conception of trans being and embodiment.Throughout Side Affects, Malatino's goals never go undetected as they trace fatigue, numbness, envy, rage, and burnout to locate a means of healing. The scholar attends to theorists that are common in trans discourses, including Lauren Berlant, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, for evidentiary support to locate trans negativity. Tracing media, organizational, and medical histories, they find that healing is nonlinear and that the negative emotions discussed in each chapter can act as propulsions toward advocacy. In no small feat, Malatino successfully argues against a one-dimensional portrait of transness within a general scope of academia. They promote the integral discourses on emotion to better conceptualize trans experiences in a historical and contemporary context. Furthering this point, Side Affects acts as a book that can be accessed by trans communities as a therapeutic or mobilizing tool. Malatino artfully crafts a publication that does what it argues for: community building, healing, survival, and adding nuance. Side Affects provides an integral framework on emotion and communal care for the future of transgender studies that assists in further deconstructions of one-dimensional trans being and embodiment.

Marian Phillips

Articulating Emotions as Trans Care Ethics

In Western art the trans body exists most often in lens-based media. Rarely do trans people see ourselves in traditional mediums, and when we do, it is almost always through the lens of the cis gaze. In these drawings I am confronting the eradication of my body from art and society through the appropriation of the processes, tools, and visual vocabulary of what are predominant white cis male heteronormative mediums and practices. Over the past year and a half, I have been developing a series of works called "Her Body." These works are based on my photographic documentation leading up to and recovering from my penile inversion vaginoplasty and breast augmentation. These images depict the blood, flesh, stitches, tools, refuse, and the eventual glory of my sculpted form. They are based on photographs but are not photographic in their style of production, seeking a more aesthetic and emotional space for viewer engagement. Having grown up in the darkness of nonexistence, I reject the notion that transness should be quiet and conforming. The recent attempts to force trans stories back into the shadows is already directly impacting my art career. As opportunities for exhibiting my work in certain states disappear with each new legislation that criminalizes trans existence, I feel abandoned by the art world. Self-determination for marginalized people is always an act of rebellion. The drawings here depict parts of my body that society is always demanding people like me reveal, while simultaneously insisting we never show. These works negate my fear of exposure by giving me agency to tell my story for both cis and trans viewers.

Molly Jae Vaughan

Her Body

Occasionally one reads scholarly reviews in which the reviewer's opinion about a text is expressed with subtlety and deftness, but this is a book about Tumblr and porn, so: I think this book is fucking great and everyone should buy it.Of course, it is also true that no discussion of Tumblr and its aftereffects would be complete without discourse, and I will thus make a longer argument for the importance of this thin, nonacademic volume to the field of transgender studies in this particular moment. Sitting on a precipice of early institutionalization and cultural backlash, trans studies can feel under pressure to simultaneously embrace the legacy of trans sexual cultures and to become more "professional," to elevate itself above the teapot-tempests of social media drama and to remain accessible to nonacademics. What Tumblr Porn offers is a model of hybridity: a text that simultaneously takes seriously the legacy of erotic cultural production and social connection as part of trans life, while not taking itself so seriously that it risks becoming illegible to those participants and creators themselves.Ana Valens's book argues that Tumblr was an imperfect but crucial space for marginalized and fringe sexual expression—and therefore for the flourishing of marginalized communities broadly—until it fell victim to the widespread anti-sex legal panics exemplified by the passage of FOSTA-SESTA in 2018. Valens, a trans writer herself, expertly narrates the rise and fall of Tumblr alongside the macropolitical forces that made the space such a pressure cooker for queer and trans thought during its short but notable life. As any top-notch historian would, she weaves together this story through connecting deep strands of context: the extreme financialization and consolidation of digital corporations, the overlap between sexual panics and the expansion of digital cultures since the late 1990s, the rise of a commodified "gay and lesbian" politics that disavowed explicit sexual practice, and Valens's own reminiscences of an online adolescence. In particular, Valens makes clear that Tumblr's lack of anti-sex content moderation was fertile soil for trans political and social discourse during "the pre-tipping point era" (78). While I disagree with Valens's contention that the pre-Tumblr era was a time when "trans rights were neither largely understood nor discussed" (78) (indeed, this "discussion" has been happening for many centuries, although it is true that little of it would use the "trans rights" rhetorical frame), I overall found her account of the unique technical, financial, and social convergences that made Tumblr a trans space extremely persuasive.Adding to both the scholarly and aesthetic value of the book, Tumblr Porn borrows a composition strategy from the social blogging platform itself: multimedia and multigenre collage. Tumblr, the platform, was designed to host images, GIFs, text, and conversation threads with equal algorithmic weight delivered in a real-time order on an endless scroll. What this meant in practical terms is that, depending on which blogs one followed, it was not uncommon to read heated analysis of the racial identities of children's cartoon characters and then scroll down to find out-of-context quotations from A Thousand Plateaus and then scroll down to encounter a GIF file of anal penetration excerpted from a coach/player porn video (for example). Similarly, Tumblr Porn opens with an epigraph from Imogen Binnie's novel Nevada (a "quote" post), followed on the next page by a reproduced digital drawing of a half-naked Satanist trans original character (an "image" post), followed on the next page by a first-person discussion of the author's discovery of finding porn for the first time on DeviantArt. Like biyuti press's Decolonizing Transgender 101, which likewise translated the uniquely collaborative, digressive form of Tumblr into print (and likewise deserves to be understood as an important text within trans studies), Tumblr Porn performs a high-wire act of transcoding digital and print media as a meta-analytic. In constructing her collage of images, personal writing, and fully cited scholarly argumentation, Valens expertly shows as well as tells, building her case at the level of form as well as the level of text.That overarching case—that Tumblr was a uniquely inclusive space for kink, sexually explicit material, and sex work and therefore generated a space where "trans people were welcome to express their sexual desires" (79)—makes Tumblr Porn an invaluable resource for understanding the gulf between trans lives and trans academia, which rarely takes seriously the types of shit-posting and catgirl hentai that really do make up an unknowable but probably large percentage of trans cultural production. As evidenced by the trans porn issue of TSQ and the resultant wave of response, sex and sexuality is still a hot-button topic within the field, and for good reason. But there are also good reasons to dive into this particular wreck, and the legacy of Tumblr and its sexual cultures is as good a place to start as any. Indeed, among the many open secrets of trans academia is the fact that a lot of us used to hang out on Tumblr dot com, and some of us even came out there. It was an environment of theory discussion and theory-adjacent combat: full professors crossed swords with graduate students and got dunked on by teenagers, all parties hiding behind usernames that we'd largely cringe to remember now. Now these fights take place on X (formerly Twitter), a platform that is not only much less amenable to long-form argumentation but also void of the key ingredient that made Tumblr in 2009–14 such a hotbed of trans energy: very, very lax regulations of sexual content.As Valens herself points out in Tumblr Porn, no digital platform owned by a major media company can be a utopia. Tumblr culture also fostered an outbreak of what Tada Hozumi calls "accountability abuse" (58), according to Valens, and the site's architecture—which prioritized swift transmission of content across multiple different chains of reaction, making context collapse essentially a design feature—maximized the extent to which a perceived transgression could be magnified beyond proportion. Valens also lightly touches on, but could have spent more time discussing, the extent to which Tumblr's notoriously bad system of hashtags meant that individual trans people could find themselves subject to pornification, their selfies and life updates unknowingly recast via tagging as masturbation fodder for others. At the same time, this pocket-sized book does not represent the end of the conversation about porn Tumblr and its trans legacy. Hopefully, it is just the beginning.

Cassius Adair

Fucking Theory's Form

Abstract This essay explores the critical relationships among trans studies, game studies, and the environmental humanities to evaluate trans ecological media. I center two distinct gaming sites: a board game, Wingspan, and a social media phenomenon, Bowsette, based on Nintendo's video game, Super Mario Bros. These media tacitly incorporate tranimality into their ludic matrices. Within Wingspan, trans reproduction (male birds laying eggs) becomes the skeleton key to success. As a trans femme icon, Bowsette emerges through fan art and social media to imagine a means for Mario's nemesis, Bowser, to transition into a romantic partner as a result of a mushroom super crown. The opportunity to play with trans birds, turtles, and fungi on digital and analog platforms makes evident that games have always been trans.

Jeremy Chow

Games Have Always Been Trans

Abstract This article argues that trans rights are trapped within settler frameworks of gender and rights, therefore making them incompatible with and in opposition to Indigenous lifeways. Starting with the premise that engagement with the settler state is not benign, the authors argue that trans rights-based organizing diverts and thwarts the potential for solidarity work with Indigenous struggles for freedom and is inherently limited in its potential to secure Indigenous futurity. The authors hope that trans studies and collective struggles organized around gender embrace anti-colonial and anti-racist praxis to result in tangible and discursive outcomes to bolster Indigenous cultural continuity and land-based connections. The authors use this article to call for a collective movement toward gender self-determination that is sensitive and reflexive of settler colonialism and produces tangible decolonial actions that will benefit the lives of Indigenous Two-Spirit, trans, and nonbinary people and align with movements for Indigenous self-determination. Queer and trans settlers are urged to begin a process of accountability and to engage a decolonial praxis to support Indigenous decolonization in all its forms—fighting for land claims, defending water and land rights, and supporting the resurgence of Indigenous erotics and gender formations. To be truly decolonial we suggest that trans political organizing moves beyond the settler framework of rights and toward Indigenous solidarity in politics, practices, and shared struggles, foregrounding anti-colonial, anti-racist, and pro-Indigenous values.

Leon Laidlaw

Natasha Stirrett

Unsettling the Conversation on Trans Rights

Abstract In 2014, then doctoral student Saylesh Wesley published the now canonical TSQ article, “Twin-Spirited Woman: Sts'iyóye smestíyexw slhá:li,” gifting her story of “coming in” as a Stó:lō trans woman to all Two-Spirit people. Using similar “storywork” methods, the following oral history biography expands the written record of Saylesh's life before, during, and after her well-known narrative, as told by Saylesh to Jamey Jesperson, a trans historian who spent the summer of 2022 recording Saylesh's oral stories for the Stó:lō Library and Archives. Tracing Saylesh's multiplex life in seven parts, this biography provides a bird's-eye view of her birth, her complicated childhood and teen years, her early-twenties transition and foray into 1990s Vancouver nightlife, her infamous reception of the title Sts'iyóye smestíyexw slhá:li in 2012, and then her groundbreaking renaming ceremony four years later. The biography concludes with Saylesh's story today, as she is amid yet another grand transition: crystallizing into the Two-Spirit Elder she was always meant to be.

Jamey Jesperson

Saylesh Wesley

“Waking to Dream”

Abstract This article is a historical analysis of two nineteenth-century aerialists: Lulu, a cross-gender performer who went on to become a prolific photographer, and Zazel, who is said to be the first performer shot from a cannon. Working with image-based posters, audience accounts, and a document by E. K. Stimson (ca. 1885) narrativizing Lulu's life up until the age of thirty, this article employs film theory as well as queer and transgender historiography to develop two interconnecting arguments: first, the aerial apparatus during the late nineteenth century is a critical tool for teaching audiences how to perceive a body, thereby facilitating the movement of a body into the grammar of a sex/gender system. Second, with these aerial apparatuses testing the boundaries of gravity, space, and time, the aerialist Lulu specifically tested the boundaries of a sex/gender system to create a spectacle of gender multiplicity rather than merely an exploitation of femininity. This article offers the notion that aerial arts stage the art of the precipice—the art of not quite falling, yet not quite flying—and concludes by suggesting that looking toward other performances of the precipice is useful for further work in queer and transgender historiography.

Adin Walker

Lulu “Works the Trap<i>eze</i>”

Abstract In this article, the author visits filmmaker Wu Tsang's 2015 short film Girl Talk at the New Museum in New York. The film's documentation of a dance, the author's fieldwork in the museum, and Tsang's cinematography evidence how feminine boyhood and trans girlhood are better supported in the music, conversation, and dance of what the author calls “girlfriend performance.” Against the violence of adult-authored accounts of trans feminine childhood, this article argues that children's friends should tell the story of trans feminine childhood instead. The author examines Tsang's film for its depiction of friendship in queer and trans feminine childhood and develops a transfeminist educational theatre exercise inspired by its repertoire of conviviality—of “girl talk and hold music”—for applied theatre artists, drama educators, and art therapists working with queer and trans youth, specifically feminine boys and transgender girls, and their friends.

Annie Sansonetti

Girl Talk and Hold Music

Abstract What utility does trans hold and carry forward at this politically and ecologically volatile moment, when increasingly prevalent legal restrictions are preventing trans people from accessing gender affirming and reproductive health care and seeking to disallow our presence in public life altogether? Taking an autoethnographic approach to exploring trans life and scholarship across generations, this essay poses trans*plantation as a framework for navigating complex questions about how life comes to be defined and whose lives come to hold value or not over time.

Dylan McCarthy Blackston

Carrying Trans Forward

Edited by Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell, Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories is a collection of essays with contributions from a variety of authors that include community organizers, academics, architects, artists, creatives, historians, and archivists. This book is widely available and accessible, aiming at a general, as well as an academic, audience. This is one of the only attempts to collate such a global discussion of queer space. From a UK-based perspective, this book has a broad appeal—there were spaces I expected to be here: for example, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, but also, I found myself pleasantly surprised by all the spaces in the UK that I had not been aware of. The book is split into three parts—"Domestic," "Communal." "Public"—and the spaces under discussion stem from the historical to the contemporary. Many of the spaces explicitly acknowledge how they support, care, and include trans communities, and this takes on a particular importance in this current time, when a fracturing of LGBTQ+ communities is taking place in a way that often works to exclude trans people from what should be an inclusive space. The spaces presented are diverse, spanning not just geographically but across time as well. I appreciated the inclusion of historical spaces that did not just feature the opulent and upper class, as it can be difficult to find historical sources that feature the queer working class. These historical and archival discussions also include trans history, which is important for making clear that trans space is not new and has long and interesting histories. Of note, the archival projects Archivo de la Memoria Trans and the Museum of Transology showcase the power of a community-led retrieval of trans history.In the introduction of the book, the editors speak of the project as "queer heirlooming, a gifting by simple example" (x), and the book does well to achieve this. The book as a whole offers windows into various queer worlds. I use the metaphor of windows because the short length and sheer number of essays means that the reader only gets a small window of time to linger and look into these spaces. I often found myself wanting more, but I'm glad this book exists so that I can revisit them. Each article features roughly about a page of the book, and on the other page(s) are full-color photographs of the space. I do enjoy the inclusion of these photographs because, although they can never quite capture the feeling of existing within a space, it allows us to glimpse into these worlds in a wonderful way. You get to see the variety, vibrance, ingenuity, and creative nature of queer space. There are ninety-four articles, and while there is certainly a great deal of breadth in the book, what ends up being sacrificed is the depth of the pieces. I felt some pieces, such as the piece on Prospect Cottage, lacked some of the contextual information to engage with the piece fully, whereas others, such as the pieces on Bishopsgate Institute and Fonthill Abbey, served as an explanatory introduction to the space. There are, however, a lot of pieces that hit a healthy middle ground, critically engaging with a specific part of the space while also making it clear why that space was included in the book. I really enjoyed Regner Ramos's discussion of Loverbar, a queer-run club in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as it offered insight into the space through creative analysis and personal anecdotes that bring the space to life: "(I saw an Instagram story of a drag queen that jumped in high heels from the mezzanine to the ground floor's stage, and survived)" (110).This is exactly what is needed from such a broad book on queer space—it acts as a good and thought-provoking introduction to the topic and does well to draw out some of the tensions and common themes of queer spaces. I particularly liked that this book does not offer a specific version of queer spaces: you can find the usual suspects, such as nightclubs and saunas, but also roaming bands of drag artists, queer courses, and spaces that you would not realize were queer unless you were in the know. Queer space takes on a variety of meanings, often contextually and culturally significant to the geographical place under discussion. A key tension that is brought up throughout is the temporality that often permeates queer space and the wish for a more secure space. Some spaces and authors embrace this temporality, for example Ruhul Abdin discusses pop-up queer spaces that offer club nights and events ephemerally to keep individuals safe. There is also the tension of creating a space within a capitalist society. Some spaces, such as the Women's Anarchist Nuisance Café, which took place in squats and semiautonomous spaces, reject this capitalist notion of permanence and profit making. Others worked around this; MASTERplano offers queer raves/temporary nightclubs and gives trans individuals free admission in acknowledgment of the low employment rates in the trans community. Some of these spaces operate as businesses, with some even using their queerness as a business tactic—Campy! bar in Tokyo employs drag queens to serve drinks and converse with guests, even designing their new branch with a neutral color palette to ensure the drag queens stand out. Finally, there is the tension of having queerness "sanctioned" through public acknowledgment, legal sanctioning, and so forth, versus trying to remain subversive.I feel that this entire book offers hope, hope that queer spaces can continue, and that new spaces can be born, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic that took so many of our vital spaces away. It reminds me of José Esteban Muñoz's (2009) theory of queer futurity, which states that queerness is not yet here and instead is something we strive toward. When applied to space, we can think of us ever striving toward queer space as an ideal, and the multiplicities of space that can come from this.

Hannah Ayres

Where Do We Reside?

Abstract The inaugural issue of TSQ featured a selfie of Chelsea Manning, marking the way that Chelsea Manning, and the attendant and related controversies of treason and trans identity, began a newly formed figure in the trans imaginary. This tenth anniversary issue returns Manning to the cover in a multitude of forms, courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg's Probably Chelsea (2017). This annotation explores the themes of Probably Chelsea and the larger collaborative efforts between Dewey-Hagborg and Manning, including Radical Love: Chelsea Manning (2015).

Kelly Sharron

Cover Annotation

Marquis Bey's Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender is a collection of essays that explore the inherent carcerality of gender and the various ways Blackness subverts cisness. Bey homes in on the violence that is the assignation of gender and specifically discusses the coercive assignation as male at birth. The categorization of cisgender becomes a flattening label unfit to describe the wide array of embodiments that go beyond the cis normative presentations of gender. Bey builds on Jack Halberstam's anarchitecture as a method to wreck, unbecome, and batter the fortress of binary gender.Bey's argument centers Blackness in anti-Blackness as they move toward illuminating whiteness as a necessary subtenant of cisgender. Blackness becomes a critique, a refusal, an inherent nonbinary-ness. Bey positions Blackness as "radical abolition of the violent tethers of the world" (27). Building on Hortense Spillers and her notion of ungendered Blackness, and pulling from their own experiences with gender discipline, Bey argues gender is a territory that throws the subject into cisgender, and we must take steps to throw ourselves out of that terrain. However, this throwing ourselves out of cisgender is dangerous, Bey concludes, because masculinity requires conquest and violent acts become currency. Bey ends with a call to become bad cis subjects and lean into coalitional relation. They offer vicissitudes to think about how those who claim to be cisgender, have choice, and can mutate and shift into more freeing modes of existing through gender insurrection.In "How Ya Mama'n'em," Bey theorizes Black sociality and linguistic expression as nonbinary itself in relation to white Western culture and mutually exclusive categories of femininity and masculinity. Black communities' syntax provides an opportunity to exist in collective while speaking to a person, as well as give space to a person as not a gendered subject, but the subject being in relation to someone else. Cisgender requires a specific way of being in the world that is directly antagonistic to Blackness. Bey marks a unique potentiality embedded in they and them that forsakes individualism and neoliberal logics. Blackness and transness require a constant entanglement. Building on racialized gendered discourses, Bey sees Blackness disintegrating the coherence of gender and undermining the immutability of cisness. To be cisgender is to align with the normative scripts of gender; Blackness is to be misaligned. Bey views Blackness as a disruption to racialization, building on Fred Moten's para-ontological.Trans as a prefix refuses to situate transition in relation to a destination, thus unsettling cisgenderness as the default for racialized subjects. Bey uses the metaphor of Narnia, a space that must obscure to position itself as natural and the vantage point of life. Cistem Failure calls on the readers to blow up Narnia; we should destroy that which creates the powers that instruct how we hierarchize. Bey describes cisgender as a regime that expulses gender variance and mutability to define itself; cisgender is a fabrication that obscures itself and presents as natural.In the essay "RE: [No Subject]," Bey compiles a series of email exchanges that explore the violence of meaning making through gendering. They write, "We are corralled into confining grammars of surveillance, policing and circumscription impeding full-scale liberation" (116). Returning to a project of abandoning individual identity, Bey calls for the reader to forsake the identificatory project and work toward exploring the potentiality Black and trans politics have toward gender abolition and a refusal of individuation. This call for gender abolition specifically centers the mechanisms in place, the histories and discourses, systems, structures, and institutions that create antagonistic hierarchies. The abolition of gender is not a flattening of gender differentiation but a refusal to begin said categorization, the eradication of the vectors endowed with meaning. Abolition is antithetical to gender, as Bey identifies gender itself as carceral: one is imprisoned in order to be visible.Cistem Failure provides tools in which scholars of Black studies, trans studies, and gender studies can pull from toward thinking about gendering and racialization as processes are inseparable. Bey analyzes characters from cartoons and fictional tales that show interesting representations such as The Power Puff Girls, Dragon Ball Z, Steven Universe, and Narnia. They provide a series of assemblages, including reflective writings and media analyses, to think about the question of how Blackness disrupts the normative criteria of cisgender. Building on Spillers's notion of Blackness being ungendered, Bey references Maria Lugones and Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, who center coloniality as inherent in the gender binary and discuss the process of becoming human to the colonizer through fitting into binary gender.Cistem Failure provides readers with rich dialogue grounded in feminist theory as it unravels the coloniality of gender and centers Blackness as a disruption to the construction of gender and human. Bey's conceptualization of gender as a prison and the surveillance that comes with it enriches the field of feminist abolition studies to think about how gender and carcerality are inherently entangled. Cistem Failure is an incredible contribution to destabilizing cisgender normativity and gender itself, as we move toward more liberating ways of existing through gender abolition.

Kimberly Soriano

Blowing Up the Cistem

Abstract This essay makes the case that the author's friends, all of them, are or are becoming trans. Not in a way that indexes a medico-juridical demographic, but in the sense that trans as a mode of living is the grounds on which the author forges relationality. Thus it is no surprise that time and again, friends the author has long had keep consistently shifting their identifications, moving more radically in unrelation to gender, becoming, in a word, trans.

Marquis Bey

All My Friends Are Trans (or Will Be Soon)

Abstract This essay animates the concept-metaphor of the sexological floorplan across sites of sexological self-reflection in its incipient institutional form to propose a model of trans study. We begin by speculating on the relationship between the history of sexological incorporation and the hesitant institutionality of trans study. In the context of a racially segregated postwar American culture reorganizing its senses of normative gender and moral sexual practice, the sexological project to limn the category “trans” became a site of interaction between multiple vectors of social experience and varieties of scientific classification. This essay considers four women differently subjected to sexological scrutiny on the basis of sex, and tracks how that sexual basis articulates with gender, race, and sexuality to map the floorplan of institutionalizing sexual knowledge. We consider four women whose circulation through and labor within the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, Inc., maps the terrain of sexology's bids for credibility. Their respective roles in the business of sexology (the public face of gender transformation, a working housewife, a sympathetic social scientist, a long-suffering librarian) and respective racial, gender, and sexual identities made each differently disposed to and differently subjected to sexological ways of looking. By attending to each of these figures in turn, a view onto the sexological floorplan emerges with social and historical density, overlaid with the labors of self-determination inside the architectures of scientific capture.

Joan Lubin

Jeanne Vaccaro

The Sexological Floorplan

Abstract Faced with the proliferation of TERF rhetoric outside academia, this article proposes a case study of an anti-trans, anti-gender, anti–sex work graduate student at a progressive American institution to challenge feminism to address the ways in which it is providing a space of unchallenging silence for TERF views to remain a nonissue and receive academic support and accreditation. An examination of this specific student highlights a narrative of radicalization occurring during her studies at the university. A challenge for cis feminists to self-reflect and step up, this article argues that cis feminism has for now failed to address the transphobia in its midst, thus forcing trans students and scholars to lose faith in feminism and to find care and support elsewhere.

Jordan J. Tudisco

The Failure of Cis Feminism

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has made clear how precarity has become a fact of life for many of us within capitalism, as millions of already-precarious workers in the United States have lost their jobs and others have had to adapt to a new landscape where their job requirements put them at increased risk of infection. The authors of Technoprecarious acknowledge this reality in the preface, noting that the book was written shortly before the onset of the pandemic and offering a eulogy to the lives lost to COVID-19. Nearly four years into the pandemic, the arguments the authors make feel even more salient, revealing how deep these inequalities run in the global capitalist economy. Technopracrious really could not be more timely.Technoprecarious was published in November 2020, written collaboratively by a collective of academics called the Precarity Lab, including Cassius Adair, Iván Chaar López, Anna Watkins Fisher, Meryem Kamil, Cindy Lin, Silvia Lindtner, Lisa Nakamura, Cengiz Salman, Kalindi Vora, Jackie Wang, and McKenzie Wark. (For the sake of brevity, I refer to them collectively as "the authors.") More a manifesto than a typical monograph, Technoprecarious sets out to define and elaborate on a growing form of precarity that is tied to the rise of digital capitalism. "Technoprecarity," they write, "is the premature exposure to death and debility that working with or being subjected to digital technologies accelerates" (1). Precarity, of course, predates digital technologies, but this emergent form of precarity is one that is uniquely fueled by digital capitalism. Drawing on diverse scholarly and activist traditions, including but not limited to Black and Indigenous feminist thought, disability justice, environmental racism, and Marxist theory, the authors set out to describe the many ways in which digital technologies have contributed to the disenfranchisement of marginalized groups, including women, Black and Indigenous peoples, immigrants, queer and trans people, and disabled people, by exploiting their labor and mining their resources.The chapters are presented as a series of interconnected essays and case studies; indeed, the authors advise, "This manifesto need not be read in a linear fashion from front to back, following the numbered sequence of the chapters" (15). This is not to suggest that the chapters are disorganized; I would actually suggest reading in order first, as chapters build on each other, with a clear line of argumentation developing through each. The flow of chapters also underscores how pervasive technoprecarity is in so many spheres of life and in so many historical and international contexts. The bulk of these chapters detail specific manifestations of technoprecarity. "The Undergig" explores the emergence of the post-2008 gig economy, in which workers, including Amazon warehouse workers, Uber drivers, and social media content moderators, "perform the often invisible labor needed to create the conditions of digital life for everyone else" (17). In other words, their labor must be made invisible in order for these digital systems to function seamlessly. The following chapter, "Techno Toxic," discusses how digital technologies physically and mentally debilitate workers, offering examples such as the mining of rare metals that are used in building digital devices, or the emotional trauma content moderators experience when screening for violent, sexually graphic, or abusive content. Taken together, these two chapters reveal the harms caused by digital technologies to precarious workers' bodies and psyches.In "The Widening Gyre of Precarity," a term borrowed from a William Butler Yeats poem, the authors use the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, as a case study on the intersection of environmental racism and digital technology. Here they describe the city as a laboratory, one that seeks to "'[solve] the problem' of labor"—which, they remind us, "was always also the problem of race" (33). The Flint water crisis, the authors argue, illustrates how digital technologies that promise to reduce labor ultimately fail to do so and end up harming communities: the city of Flint used a machine-learning algorithm to predict which water pipes would need to be replaced. However, the algorithm was only accurate 70 percent of the time; moreover, this accuracy decreased as more and more pipes were replaced. The city's experimental use of a digital technology that was intended to save the lives of its residents—and to save the city millions of dollars in labor—ultimately caused more harm to the majority-Black residents of the city, increasing their exposure to contaminants."Automating Abandonment" takes into consideration the "computerization of the welfare state" (38). Focusing particularly on the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program and Medicaid, the authors examine how the use of algorithms to make decisions has resulted in more people being excluded from these programs on technicalities, producing "welfare programs without welfare recipients" (43). The chapter "Fantasies of Ability" draws on disability justice frameworks to explore how disability politics can be a "radical reordering of what types of bodies signify as human" (51). The authors offer the concept of "social safety networks" (55), contrasting with the failing safety nets of the welfare state described in the previous chapter, to show how interdependence allows communities to provide care for each other through, for example, crowdsourcing funds on GoFundMe.In "Dispossession by Surveillance," the authors trace the rise of surveillance capitalism and the use of surveillance technologies to control racially and ethnically subjugated groups across time and place, such as enslaved peoples in the American South, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, or undocumented immigrants at the US-Mexico border. "The Affronted Class" names an emerging class of people, predominantly white men, who are now finding themselves implicated into precarity when they previously thought themselves exempt. This newfound precarity, the authors argue, has resulted in a conservative backlash and a culture of nostalgia that is "fundamentally about recuperating masculine privilege and protection from . . . precarity" (68).In the final two chapters, the authors offer hope for new ways of being that push back against technoprecarity. In "Restoring the Depleted World," they discuss two case studies: the Detroit Digital Stewards Program, a program that installed mesh networks in predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods in Detroit, and Maps.me, a crowdsourced navigation app that was created to provide accurate maps of Palestine when Google Maps failed to do so. Finally, in "Covens of Care," the authors use the metaphor of a witches' coven to imagine alternative ways of providing care for one another that do not rely on institutions that fail to care for those who are most vulnerable. "We coven," they write, "because our survival depends on it" (86).Technoprecarious is not a trans studies book, although two of its authors (Adair and Wark) are trans studies scholars. However, trans people are one of many communities implicated in the precarity produced by digital capitalism. The concept of technoprecarity affords one framework with which we might understand how trans people—particularly trans women of color—inhabit spaces made precarious by uncaring institutions and how they might oppose the technologies of precarity. The authors give examples of trans resistance: Natalie Wynn, who uses her YouTube channel ContraPoints to "[persuade] those attracted to the language of affronted masculinity to think otherwise" (73); a hypothetical coven of care consisting of trans women who take care of each other when institutions fail them; even the ethos of T4T (trans-for-trans), which they describe as another coven of care. I think of Technoprecarious as in conversation with other recent publications in trans studies, such as Hil Malatino's (2020) book Trans Care, and work on trans life and the US surveillance state by Toby Beauchamp (2019) and Mia Fischer (2019). Technoprecarious's strength is in its interdisciplinarity, showing how insidious technoprecarity is in contemporary life, how widespread its reach. To this end, the authors effectively demonstrate that technoprecarity is a phenomenon that doesn't affect any singular population, but one that impacts us all.

Erique Zhang

When Technology Fuels and Is Fueled by Precarity

In TSQ's inaugural issue, founding editors Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker (2014: 6) pose that "one critical aspect of transgender studies is to consider the work that the term transgender does." Currah demonstrates the purchase of this hermeneutic in his brilliant monograph Sex Is as Sex Does, which focuses on the movement of governmental sex markers to and from F, M, and X in myriad US contexts from the 1950s to 2021. Surveying the contemporary US political scene, Currah turns his attention to what the term transgender elides. In so doing, he offers a timely and much-needed intervention into a field he helped define.Trained as a political scientist, Currah has a particular gift for returning various discourses to the discrete settings that animate their intelligibility. His method, unmoved by ontology, centers how (not why) in this moment "the immense number of state institutions defining sex in the United States has ensnared [transgender people] in a Kafkaesque web of official identity contradiction and chaos" (8). Declining the dominant narrative of trans discourse, which supposes a state technology of transphobia weaponized against those with a transgender identity, Currah prioritizes "local, micro, particular" (89) contexts in which "transgender identity" emerges on the political stage, to adeptly argue that, in general, sex classification is a technology of governance. That sex categorization in its postbirth (re)application affects transgender people, in particular, is for Currah "just the most obvious manifestation" (29) of what this system does. The case studies in the book's last two chapters offer stunning analyses of these mechanisms of governance, which implicate not just transgender people but all those governed by the state—in other words, everyone.Though disinterested in "theoretical closure" (xiv), Currah is not indifferent to injustice. The book's introduction cites the 1994 case of Jane Jones, a woman arrested and imprisoned for "false impersonation" because of incongruous M/F markers on her driver's license and marriage certificate (6). Rather, Currah finds that the "minoritizing approach" (11) of trans studies and advocacy fails to account for the larger picture of what (state) systems do. In Jones's case, positing the state's misrecognition of immutable "gender identity" as a casual node misses how "technologies of sex classification have long been a necessary mechanism for the state-sponsored oppression of women" (38). The first part of the book, then, aims to denaturalize "sex" as well as "the state" by deftly glossing the historical concepts of sex and gender (chap. 1), popular sovereignty (chap. 2), and social theories of deconstruction (chap. 3). Motivated by the insight that "we don't know what a politics of resistance would look like until we understand what it is we're resisting" (xvi), these chapters distinguish differential state apparatuses of power and authority and stage the affordances and limits of discourses aimed at apprehending them.By chapter 4, readers are primed to bracket the assumption of a singular entity called "the state" and its "transphobic" misrecognition of "true" gender identity, in order to understand how the asymmetrical logics governing US identity documents and marriage led to "apparently contradictory" (25) regulations of sex (classification) from 1999 to 2004. During this five-year period, though sex was largely changeable on IDs across the United States, several appellate courts ruled that sex was "fixed at birth" and annulled marriages involving people with incongruous sex markers (102–3). Currah's intellectually generous, accessible writing demarcates the divergent institutional investments of surveillance (in the case of identity documents), and nation building via resource distribution (for marriage), foregrounding that "this inconsistency makes sense only if we understand that these very dissimilar constructions of sex furthered different government projects" (103). On incarceration, chapter 5 similarly dazzles. Here Currah elucidates how the oft-employed "trans-vs.-cis analytic paradigm" (14) obscures, in its false equivalence between incarcerated and nonincarcerated transgender people, the more global problem that prison and white supremacy (again, in general) subtend US civil society. This chapter provides a rich topography for further thought—entire books could be written on the philosophical implications of the carceral "freeze-frame" policy, which mandates "maintaining prisoners at precisely the level of gender transition they had attained at the moment of incarceration" (132).That Currah abstains from heady, abstract wanderings is, in fact, central to his project. Holding and intertwining multiple viewpoints at once, Sex Is as Sex Does offers a glimpse of what it might look like to strategically deploy discourse in the register it best suits, without collapsing it into other contexts and thereby concealing what its terms make visible. Currah's capacity to graze and mobilize, without committing to, various discourses also makes him an exceptionally agile storyteller. The book's hyper-readable—dare I say fun?—prose artfully navigates an archive of governmentality that Currah quips "even Foucault found too dull to look into" (87)—bureaucratic and judicial guidance, procedures, rules and rulings on sex (re)classification—while incorporating personal anecdotes and clear, distilled readings of high-theory concepts, like sovereignty. Nowhere else have I found a completely intelligible, three-page exegesis of language performativity that, somehow also reinforcing the book's central claims, interweaves the theories of J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Judith Butler (81–83). As implied in the imperative grammatical mood of its title (which also serves as a description of Currah's critical method, 144), Sex Is as Sex Does is principally concerned with how language—whether in a department of motor vehicles handbook, legal proceeding, or demand for trans rights—does things through its constant slippage between constative and performative modes (I'm telling you: see pp. 81–83!). An essential, course-correcting contribution to the fields of trans and gender studies, as well as feminist, social, and political theory, Currah's book also serves as an entry point for those not particularly versed in these interdisciplines.In the last twenty years, Currah argues, transgender has consolidated various incoherent, messy lived experiences, epistemologies, identities, frameworks, and material positions into a politically efficacious discourse, featuring a "singular motif of the wronged transgender subject" (26). On one hand, the legibility of this figure has enabled successes in the realms of policy and business: North Carolina, for instance, rescinded an anti-trans bathroom bill in 2016 because of mainstream and corporate support for trans issues (146). However, in naturalizing gender/identity, this "authoritative discourse" (46) has rendered larger-scale, feminist critiques of gender systems "quaint, or even unrecognizable to progressive millennial and Gen Zers" (15)—something especially problematic as policies restricting abortion and limiting reproductive health care continue to snowball across the United States. Modeling a nuanced, "heterodox method for transgender studies" (24), Sex Is as Sex Does gives a remarkable account of which imbricated gendered and racial histories and systems fade into the background when trans discourse assumes its terms to be objects, rather than political effects.

El Friedman

What “Trans Studies” Does

Abstract In this article, the author focuses on Juliana Huxtable's (2019) exhibition Interfertility Industrial Complex: Snatch the Calf Back to theorize a Black trans affective posture toward pleasure. Contextualizing Huxtable's artistry within histories of Black feminine reproductive control, the author demonstrates how Huxtable's invented hybrid figure of the cow-woman builds a Black trans femme perspective on reproduction, which exceeds gendered capacity and bio-reproducibility. Then the author moves to analyze Huxtable's intimate account of learning how to perform bovine animal husbandry on a family farm. This account demonstrates a close embodied attunement that seeks to elicit pleasure for both the heifer as well as the farmer. The author analyzes how this relationship articulates a reproductive coalitional politic that crosses species as well as time. Throughout, the author draws on Black feminist theory, as well as trans and queer approaches to interspecies studies, to articulate how Huxtable's artistry offers a strategy for navigating the complex structures and relations that emerge from feelings of pleasure.

Lillian Wolf

Juliana Huxtable's Cow-Woman; or, A Black Trans Femme Route Toward Pleasure

Abstract As the notion of biological sex becomes increasingly invested with binary, anti-trans meanings in US discourse, some scholars suggest that “reimagining biology” as diverse and not dichotomous might help affirm trans identities. Instead of ignoring science and emboldening its reductionist forms, it is said that theorists should celebrate trans identities as biological diversity. This essay explores the fraught terrain of this hopeful project. The first section examines how dominant histories of the sex-gender distinction autopoietically flatten trans lives by conflating them with the passive materiality of biological sex. The second section turns to two histories of trans life that challenge this historiographic tendency—Jules Gill-Peterson's Histories of the Transgender Child and C. Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides. Following Sylvia Wynter's call to forge liminal sciences, the article shows how Gill-Peterson and Snorton reimagine biology by encountering marginalized modes of trans scientific practice. In the margins, gaps, and opacities of the archive, there are encounters with trans experimentation, rearrangements of biology and science that do not “affirm” transness as much as they rebel against the racist order of cis-normativity.

Sid Hansen

Beyond Autopoiesis

Abstract Marcuse advocated for what he called a Great Refusal of the idea that there was no plausible alternative to capitalism. He rallied against what he called the performance principle, a passive submission to the logic of exchange, particularly in respect to alienated labor and consumption. This essay takes the idea of a great refusal and applies it to transgender people, and trans women in particular, who refuse to submit to the demands of society to conform in their identity and practices to the gender given at birth. There are manifold implications, both personal and collective, that this essay examines. Drawing on Marxist and psychoanalytic concepts, it describes how a generalized aversion and repudiation of femininity born of an androcentrism of the unconscious must be addressed and the institutions of today's reality principle radically recalibrated to favor the feminine.

Ciara Cremin

A Great Refusal

Transfeminists "understand that sexism and transphobia are interconnected, and that the liberation of trans people is intrinsically linked to the liberation of all people" (interview with Garriga-López, in Domínguez et al. 2021: 5). Transfeminists are a coalition of people differently situated across axes of power. We share a commitment to transgender liberation and to uprooting transphobia from our lives. Ínaru de la Fuente Díaz (2022), an activist with the group La Sombrilla Cuir, rightly points out that "there is no transfeminism without trans leadership." However, cis people have an important role to play within this movement. Susan Stryker's (2023: 174) essay "On Groundlessness" is a call to action for cis allies to "take the lead in pushing back against transphobia." Since transphobia is mainly enacted by cis people, it is cis people who hold the most responsibility to combat it. We must each find our voice and recognize our role as vital in bringing about a transfeminist social transformation (Lorde [1977] 2001). Like all coalitional movements, transfeminisms run the risk of centering the work of those who are most privileged, but also hold the potential of combining our strengths toward a more just future for all.Transfeminism is not an abstract theory; it is a praxis informed by trans and travesti knowledges and worldmaking strategies that respond to the immediate material needs of trans and gender nonbinary people. Through those actions, transfeminist activists take on an intersectional framework that integrates other social movements. The Latin American and Caribbean region is an emergent stronghold for transfeminisms that offer us rich examples of how social movements weave together. Like the region itself, Latin American transfeminisms are heterogeneous, dynamic, and traversed by tensions. Therefore, so as to not create a false idea of homogeneity, in this article we will use the term in the plural.Despite their differences, transfeminisms in Latin America and the Caribbean share important characteristics. Mainly, they take on intersectional issues related to race, class, sex work, environmental racism, and migration, and they have a common set of core concerns which includes: access to universal and gender-affirming health care; improving the living conditions of travesti, trans, and nonbinary people and pushing for laws that fully recognize their rights (Domínguez et al. 2021: 6); and putting an end to the multiple forms of state-sanctioned or extralegal violence they endure that exposes them to premature death (Gilmore 2007).Given the shared legacy of colonization in the region, many Latin American transfeminists recognize and actively challenge the contemporary economic, political, social, and cultural effects of coloniality. These include a cissexist biological essentialism that divides the world's population into supposedly distinct "races"; presents sex as binary (a belief still strong in many feminist, women's, faith-based, and conservative movements alike); presents gender and race as hierarchical; and imposes compulsory heterosexuality and conformity to cissexist standards as the only natural, legal, moral, viable, and desirable sexual orientations and gender identities. As Siobhan Guerrero, one of Mexico's leading transfeminist voices, explains, "We need a transfeminism that involves a series of dialogues with other movements, especially with decolonial thought. . . . Part of it is the idea that the bodies of men and women have always been understood in the same way throughout history, which comes from a bias in the coloniality of knowledge. . . . The shift towards decoloniality is a shift towards the appreciation of the historical nature of bodies and identities, of how oppressions also mutate and are transformed" (interview with Siobhan Guerrero, in Domínguez et al. 2021: 17–18).Intersectionality and decoloniality are intertwined frameworks within Latin American transfeminisms. While decoloniality historicizes, denaturalizes, and seeks to dismantle current sociopolitical and economic hierarchies based on colonial understandings of race, gender, and other social categories, intersectionality allows for a deeper understanding of how these categories coconstitute and mutually reinforce the systems of oppression experienced by individuals in their day-to-day lives.Brazil is a case in point of the centrality that intersectionality and decolonial work have for transfeminisms in the region. As Joseli Marai Silva and Marcio Jose Ornat (2016: 221) argue, Brazil transfeminists are "fighting to dismantle the existing links between gender and biology, and to introduce the idea of intersectional oppressions, notably, class and race." To this end, María Clara Araújo uses the term Afro-transfeminism to stress the indissolubility of race and gender for Brazilian transfeminist thought and praxis: "Yes, we are all trans, we are all travestis, but in a structurally racist country such as Brazil, the last country in the Americas to end slavery, in a country that has a huge problem related to the fallacies of racial democracy, to only highlight our gender identity is not enough to understand what we experience in Brazilian society" (in Domínguez et al. 2021: 13–14).The centrality of decoloniality for Latin American transfeminisms can also be seen in the reappropriation and resignification of certain terms. Travesti is perhaps the best-known case.1 The use of the term travesti signals a refusal of the term transgender, which is imported from the global North and often carries with it a binary notion of gender. Travesti implies an indeterminacy between man and woman that in the context of the United States is referred to as nonbinary. As Malú Machuca Rose (2019: 243) says, "Travesti is the refusal to be trans, the refusal to be woman, the refusal to be intelligible."A lesser-known instance of this type of epistemic insubordination is the term cochón/a/x in Nicaragua. As Elyla Sinvergüenza explains, "Cochón, cochona, or cochonx is used to refer to people assigned male at birth, but whose identity and/or gender expression does not follow the traditional norms of masculinity or homosexuality. . . . Cochón is non-binary because it is attributed to someone who is neither man nor woman, but this term [nonbinary] comes from the North." In addition, cochón is a term that marks intersections with race and colonialism because those who call themselves cochones/as/xs are primarily Black and/or poor, (in Domínguez et al. 2021: 15–16). As a feminine, nonbinary, racialized gender identity that does not fit neatly into the increasingly contested LGBTQ+ acronym, cochón/a/x highlights the intersections of gender, sexuality, and coloniality, expanding the political and epistemic fields, and carving out spaces for Latin American transfeminist communities, resistance, being, and world making.The relevance of an intersectional perspective in the region's transfeminist movements can also be seen in Ecuador. Transfeminisms sprang forth in the country in the late 1990s in response to pervasive police abuse. A group of trans and travesti street sex workers successfully organized to repeal the criminalization of homosexuality in the penal code by connecting their struggle to broader social demands to end state violence against civilians. The success of their campaign to decriminalize homosexuality marked the start of a sustained period of rights-based, service-based, and cultural LGBT activism and is arguably the most consequential advancement in LGBT rights in Ecuadorian history. In the face of extreme social marginalization, they managed to change the material conditions of their lives in ways that reverberated across the LGBT community and Ecuadorian society. In the years that followed, explicitly transfeminist organizations emerged that continue the work of documenting and denouncing police abuse toward trans and travesti street sex workers.In Puerto Rico, transfeminism emerges within student movements that for the past two decades have been at the forefront of anti-austerity and decolonial movements at the University of Puerto Rico. In the midst of a struggle to resist massive reductions in financial aid for students, tuition increases, and budget cuts, transfeminist students educated their peers on queer and trans issues and confronted perpetrators of sexual violence in their midst. Also, since Hurricane María's devastating impact on the island in 2017, trans, queer, and feminist coalitions have organized to serve the most impacted communities, while also providing targeted support to trans and gender nonbinary individuals in need of gender-affirming care. This kind of transfeminist disaster response work has been ongoing with activists groups like the Espicy Nipplez Transfeminist Network mobilizing to care for those affected by the series of earthquakes that hit the southwestern part of the island in January of 2020, creating safe spaces for sex workers to ply their trade amid the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, and organizing "cuir" brigades to towns heavily impacted by the passing of Hurricane Fiona in September of 2022. In their collective responses to the compounding effects of heterosexism, transphobia, environmental racism, the coronavirus pandemic, and neocolonialism, these transfeminist activists envision a more just future by enacting it in the present.Finally, in the United States, translatina feminist organizations are especially effective at drawing out the connections between immigrant rights and trans liberation. El/La Para TransLatinas have been at the forefront of transfeminist struggles to combat public indifference and inaction toward the ongoing crisis of transfemicide against trans women of color and migrants (Ochoa 2008). TransLatina migrant activists like, Alexandra Gutierrez, Jennicet Gutierez, and Isa Noyola focus their work on bringing attention to the large number of trans people in detention centers and the specific dangers they face.However, the growing traction of "transfeminism" is also contested by some trans scholars and activists. For example, Mauro Cabral argues that the term does not always allow for politically productive conversations because it can be co-opted by cisgender feminists who, by claiming to be "transfeminists," do not have to work with trans and travesti people or critically rethink their epistemologies, agenda, and praxis. Cabral points out that, ironically, the term is all too often co-opted by cisgender feminists in order to define themselves as trans-inclusive without having to really include trans or travesti people within their political, academic, or social spaces. Cabral calls these "cis transfeminisms" and warns against this new form of tokenism and appropriation on the part of supposed allies to trans and travesti people, rights, and causes (in Domínguez et al. 2021: 13).Even with these limitations, transfeminism offers us a path through which to move beyond the gender essentialism and biological determinism that has plagued feminisms since the sex/gender divide was made a central principle by which to refute women's subordination. Transfeminisms push us to grapple with questions like, what will feminisms become when we do away with the centrality of cisgender women as the main political subject and agents of the movement? In other words, what is feminism beyond womanism? Will it lead us to move away from binary divisions like man/woman and cis/trans?Latin America and the Caribbean offer a lens through which to examine the principles and practices of transfeminism and attend to some of the contradictions and limitations of transfeminism as a coalitional politics. One of the most enduring legacies of colonialism is the belief that formerly colonized countries are especially regressive regarding gender and sexual politics. Rather than represent Latin America and the Caribbean as a bastion of gender and sexual liberation, we argue that in the face of political, religious, and social conservatism, transfeminisms propose an alternative worldview that is radical and creative.As we have shown, the concepts, practices, questions, and demands of transfeminist movements extend far beyond what is commonly thought of as "transgender issues." Transfeminisms are not solely or even mainly an identity-based politics. The highlighted cases in Brazil, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, and TransLatinx migrants in the United States are but a few examples of this broader form of politics that is intersectional, decolonial, and coalitional; that crosses national, conceptual, and thematic borders; and that seeks to transcend binary constructions of self in its quest for a more just society. This worldview, as well as the concepts, methodologies, practices, questions, and demands put forth by transfeminist movements in the region are thus urgent and necessary contributions in the struggle for the liberation of all peoples.

Claudia Sofía Garriga-López

Juliana Martínez

Transfeminist Latinx America

Abstract This essay responds to and expands the concept of the X for trans studies, theorized by Marquis Bey, as a graphic tool for thinking the intersection of gender, race, law, and crime. In doing so, the essay reads Howard Hawks's 1932 film Scarface, a work crossed throughout by the symbology of the X. Rather than providing a simple visual cue for death and closure, the X is vitalized, through a reading of Bey and Scarface together, as the (un)graphing of law that both inscribes and defaces the biopolitical state, which predicates itself on legislating the difference between genders, races, species, spaces, and criminals and law enforcement. The essay thereby moves toward a criminal reading of the Law, in which it becomes possible to see how the state's apparatus betrays its populous and itself, and to sketch out a vision of pluralized life otherwise, figured in the transgressions of a film in which crime becomes law, law becomes crime, and the riotously raced and gendered protagonist weave together the terms that the biopolitical state desperately attempts to hold apart.

Chris Hall

Scarred Flesh and the X of Law

Abstract At the heart of this project is an intergenerational dialogue, an elliptical tracing of languages and communities in their acts of reclaiming and renaming. In this dialogue the authors ask how does a linguistic archive of Black queer/trans culture, in particular the grammars of they, kiki/Ky-Ky, and fem and stud travel within and shape language and expressive culture? If the Black queer and Black vernacular overlap, how do we look to the creative influences of Black queer and Black trans historical symmetries and exchanges? Reexamining historical continuities and shared socialities of Black gender genealogies, the authors refuse the scholarly impetus to discover “new” nonbinary and transgender frontiers when Black working-class vernacular culture has always structured and enabled radical linguistic expression and gendered possibilities. Writing together, the authors transfigure intergenerational knowledges into a critical theory repositioning the terms of the debate and enabling possibilities for connections where there have only been closures. Talking Black to talk back to this current moment of ever-expanding gender narratives, the authors look toward Black epistemologies conveniently forgotten in current discourses of pluralized gender subjectivities.

Victor Ultra Omni

Laura Alexandra Harris

Who Is They?

Abstract This article meditates on the urgency and importance of gathering within the framework of trans lineages and place-making. The article focuses on advocating self-determined pathways for Filipinos in California by examining the effects of migration on their sense of belonging. It highlights the need for self-directed decolonial strategies and the exploration of trans lineages as a means of finding wholeness and connection in the face of intersecting challenges of violence against trans people of color and the environment. Drawing inspiration from the historical role of babaylans (Indigenous spiritual leaders) in resisting colonial power in the Philippines, the article proposes the concept of transcestral gathering as a form of resistance through community-based cultural production and trans* sociality.

isola tong

Transcestral Gathering

Abstract Scholars tend to envision the sexual politics of settler colonialism and slavery through masculinist conceptions in which penetration designates mastery and receptiveness subjugation. This article asks instead how white desires for sexual submission to nonwhite men operate within white supremacy. It augments white trans and queer studies' conceptualizations of bottoming with theories of white submission found in Black thought, particularly Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin. And it argues that both sets of ideas find themselves anticipated in the mid-nineteenth-century writings of the white, gender-variant author Theodore Winthrop—particularly their most popular novel, Cecil Dreeme (1861). For Winthrop, bottoming desires occasion two modes of self-expression. First, they facilitate transfeminine embodiment, staging an experience of womanliness predicated on the racist contrast between their own white body and that of nonwhite men they see as exceptionally virile. Second, they allow Winthrop to imagine ways of being other than the self-possession and corporeal autonomy of white subjectivity. In both instances, Winthrop's fantasies rely on the plasticity of the white body under the influence of nonwhite men, even as they underscore the biopolitical unidirectionality of plasticity, tracing patterns in which Black, brown, and Indigenous men exert influence on whites while remaining fundamentally incapable of transformation. This history of racialized access to malleability provides a cautionary tale about the incorporative nature of whiteness and how contemporary politics of self-determination might unwittingly replicate white supremacist logics.

短名
Journal Impact	1.86
国际分区	SOCIAL SCIENCES, INTERDISCIPLINARY(Q2)

ISSN	2328-9252, 2328-9260
h-index	12

涉及主题	社会学心理学哲学政治学性别研究法学计算机科学艺术精神分析历史认识论生物语言学美学变性人
出版信息	出版商: Duke University Press，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal
基本数据	创刊年份: 2019，原创研究文献占比: 100.00%，自引率:5.60%， Gold OA占比: 1.01%

Transgender Studies Quarterly

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