Obama, homonationalism, sex classification

April 1, 2013 By in Foucault, queer theory, same-sex marriage, Theory, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment
So, a short piece I wrote has just been published in a special symposium section on the 2012 elections in Theory & Event.The essay, “Homonationalism, State Rationalities, and Sex Contradictions,” is in no way a paen to Obama or his neoliberal agenda, but neither is it a typical rehash of the homonormative critique. (It does, though, explain what’s meant by homonormative, heteronormative, and homonational and go over each term’s provenance.) I try to move the discussion sideways, suggesting we displace the mainstream LGBT rights crowd and the queer left’s tendency to fetishize  ”the state.”

Spending most of my (unfortunately rare) research time poking through agency rules on sex classification, state court decisions on “transgender marriages,” and the “freeze-frame” policy governing incarcerated trans people, I can’t help but see a much more jumbled, complex picture.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the piece:

“While the queer critiques of homonormative and homonationalist agendas are more complex than the GLB mainstream’s celebration of recent victories, the emphasis on the interpellation of queer subjects through national biopolitical projects tends to frame the discussion around activities regulated by the federal government (commerce, war, immigration, national security, etc.) and national discourses of American identity (marriage and family). In doing so, this scholarship tends to overemphasize a unity of intention on the part of state actors and to imagine the “the state” as far more monolithic than it is. Similarly, while gay rights advocates have been forced to battle official homophobia at the state and local levels, they seek a singular, all powerful, champion to resolve the problem once and for all at the federal level. One act of Congress could end employment discrimination everywhere; one Supreme Court ruling could rid us of the patchwork quilt of laws and constitutional amendments on marriage, civil unions, and domestic partnership.”

“However, construing the election as presenting a choice between Obama the good and Romney the bad [the mainstreams LGBT position], or as a battle between Obama the not-so-great and Romney the bad [the queer left], elevates grand narratives and concepts—marriage, the state—over the thousands of ongoing and quotidian decisions that regulate life. That simplification is understandable. It’s certainly much easier to talk about same-sex marriage than to do archival excavations of applications of SSA policy, to delve into the cracks and crevices of the regulatory state apparatuses….Becoming swept up in the romance, or tragedy, of the electoral narrative, gets in the way of understanding the minute technologies of governance that regulate our lives.”




I simply can’t reduce all that I’ve found (apologies for the empiricism here) into a singular narrative–be it one of progress or not (the other being, what, something like neoliberalism in the age of declining empire).  What I can say, though, is that different decisions on sex classification represent different state projects. Sometimes those projects are contradictory.


Hats off to  Steven Johnston, of the University of Utah, for organizing the symposium and the convivial post-election conference in Utah.  You can see my piece and the other symposium contributions–including Paulina Ochoa Espejo on Obama and the Dream Act, Robyn Marasco  on “Romnesia,” and Michaele Ferguson on women as an interest group (not!)–in Theory & Event, Vol. 16, no. 1. Email me if you’d like to read it but don’t have access to Project Muse.


Next up…something on the Court, same-sex marriage, federalism, and–to add something new to this discussion–sex classification.

Revving up the engine

April 1, 2013 By in Uncategorized 1 Comment

Stay tuned, my two followers.  After a bit of a hiatus, I’m restarting this blog. I’ll  be using it to think through knotty problems or interesting but not quite thought through thoughts as I work through the home stretch of my manuscript, the long awaited opus, United States of Sex.  I’ll also be posting on topics of the day that excite or irk me.  You can expect to see musings on states and sex classification, my take on the transgender rights movement, academia, teaching, Brooklyn.

Imagined communities have their uses (they say)–but there’s nothing like imagining an actual audience to focus one’s thoughts.  Of course, one of my two blog followers is the supremely loyal but not particularly well read Alfie Mackenzie (below).

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CFP: Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary

November 5, 2012 By in Call for Papers, Transgender Studies Quarterly Leave a comment

Transgender Studies Quarterly 1:2: Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary

What would it mean to “decolonize the transgender imaginary?”

Popular narratives about transgender communities, identities, and practices outside North America and Europe often imagine non-Western locales as either idyllic havens of traditional acceptance towards gender diversity, or else as backward places in which trans people, like gays and lesbians (both Euro-American constructs) are universally shunned and hated. In both schemes, the non-West forms a premodern backdrop for the civilizing, tolerant liberalism of a homonationalist or trans-normative modernity. All the while, trans people and nonbinary gender systems find ways to survive, live and thrive. In these existences, we find important challenges and negotiations to localized discourses of modernity. A transnational transgender rights movement, at times sited in the global south, has taken shape over the last decade, enabled by new media technologies that are as symbolic of late capitalist industrial modernity as are the body technologies of changing sex. Together, these contradictory flows form a transnational transgender imaginary. Who are the players in this transnational transgender imaginary? What is at stake in such representational struggles? How does imagining globally networked communities of trans people interact with already-existing global flows: post- and neo-colonialism; global capital; immigration; diaspora; refuge and asylum seeking; global labor flows such as sex work or care work, and leisure travel?

Trans and queer of color scholarship has already begun to critique the homonationalism within emergent forms of “trans-normative” citizenship in many locations. And yet the very terms “trans of color” and “queer of color” signify, for some, a concern with the racial economies of the U.S. How do these optics and critiques work in a transnational context? How might such critique inform international NGO funding or human rights activism? How do “trans of color” and “queer of color” signify differently in different continents, regions, and locales? How are issues of linguistic diversity and translation to be addressed from a decolonizing perspective?
Multiple perspectives within and without queer studies about the “queer globe” have addressed similar questions for some time. Transnational queer scholarship comments on, and often participates in, a transnational LGBT justice movement. Much of the existing scholarship on transnational gender-variant social practices has appeared in the context of queer anthropology. While this cross-cultural work has made critical contributions to theories of how sexual and gender non-normativities emerge in relation to local, regional, and global flows, it also often assumes “homosexuality” as the default category of analysis within which gender-variance is subsumed. This raises important questions about the epistemological investments that contemporary Anglophone queer and transgender studies have in the categorical (dis)articulations of gender, identity, and sexuality.

We seek to call attention to the assumptions operating in much of this cross-cultural work that both biological sex and the categories “man” and “woman” are stable and self-evident across time, space, and culture, resulting in homosexuality being privileged as the essential framework in which to categorize sex and gender. These conceptual operations impose an Anglophone, modern, and western interpretive schema on historically colonized parts of the world. How might a transgender focus alter, sharpen, critique or inform such scholarship? Conversely, when scholars, activists, and funding bodies use the term “transgender” as an umbrella for local or regional categories indexing sex and gender diversity, we risk making a similar imperialist move. How might emphasizing a transgender studies perspective do more than simply offer “trans” as a better alternative to “homo,” and instead find new ways to encounter the global diversity of embodied subjectivities? How might transgender studies contribute to the decolonization of the sex and gendered imaginaries through which we grasp a world of difference?

Framed within the context of a transgender studies journal based in North America, this special issue itself is implicated in the colonialism of the North American academy. How do we decolonize our own ways of thinking transgender? How do we decolonize transgender studies itself?

We invite proposals for scholarly essays that address these and similar issues. Potential topics might include transgender studies in relation to:

• multiple, geographically disparate modernities• trans as a site of racial, class, anticolonial struggle• indigenous studies and settler colonialism• decolonizing transgender studies• trans of color critique• critiques of cross-cultural analysis• whiteness • anthropology• transgender necropolitics• transnationality• the “third gender” debate• transnational violence, transphobia, and responses to “hate crimes”• ethnographic methods• global trans movements• the uses of “transgender” in NGO’s and the academy• trans studies from the global south• south-south dialogues • global trafficking and sex work • citizenship and national belonging • global migration • trans inclusion within queer anthropology• the innocence of difference and trans studies globally• challenges in circulation/use of transposing theories and methodologies• local categories and vocabularies of trans survival and existence

To be considered for publication, please submit an article by Feb. 1st, 2013 to tsqjournal@gmail.com. Include a brief bio, your name, postal address, email, and any institutional affiliation. Final revisions will be due by May 2013.

Transgender Studies Quarterly: Announcement and CFP

July 14, 2012 By in Call for Papers, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Uncategorized Leave a comment

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly

Announcement of Publication and First Call for Submissions


Announcement of Publication

General Editors Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker are pleased to announce that TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly will be published by Duke University Press, currently planned for launch in the first quarter of 2014. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies, and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ will be a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces.

The first four themes have been selected to highlight the scope and diversity of the field:

• TSQ 1:1 will be a collection of short essays on key concepts in transgender studies, “Postposttransexual: Terms for a 21st Century Transgender Studies.”

• TSQ 1:2, “Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary,” will explore cross-cultural analysis of sex/gender variation, and bring transgender studies into critical engagement with ethnography and anthropology.

• TSQ 1:3, “Making Transgender Count,” co-edited with the Williams Institute’s GENIUSS group (Gender Identity in U.S. Surveillance), will tackle such issues as population studies, demography, epidemiology, and quantitative methods.

• TSQ 1:4 “Trans Cultural Production,” will be devoted to the arts, film, literature, and performance.

CFPs for TSQ 1:2-4 will be issued in the months ahead. Proposals for issues starting with TSQ 2:1 (2015) are welcome at any time, and will be reviewed on an on-going basis. Please send inquiries to tsqjournal@gmail.com.

Call for Submissions for TSQ 1:1 (2014)

We invite submissions of short pieces (250-1500 words) for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, “Postposttransexual: Terms for a 21st Century Transgender Studies,” to be published by Duke University Press and planned for launch in the first quarter of 2014. Our intention is to showcase a wide range of viewpoints on the present state of the field by bringing together fresh thoughts and informed opinion about current concepts, key terms, recurring themes, familiar problems, and hot topics in the field. Each piece should have a title consisting of a single word or short phrase describing its content; the volume will be organized alphabetically by that title.

Articles may be written in the style of a mini-essay, as in Raymond Williams’ classic Keywords; as a factual encyclopedia-style article such as might be found on Wikipedia; as a capsule review of transgender-related developments in a particular field (archeology, musicology), geographical location (Iran, Taiwan), or a topic (pornography, psychoanalysis). Creative interpretations of the required form are also welcome. However, each article must address the topic under discussion in relation to some aspect of transgender studies or transgender phenomena.

Contributors are free to propose topics of their own, or to choose from the following suggestions of key terms and concepts: ability, abject, activism, administration, aesthetics, agency, aging, affect, anarchy, animal, anti-heteronormativity, architectonic, archive, asexual, assemblage, authentic, becoming, bureaucracy, binary, biology, biopolitics, biotechnology, bisexual, body, body part, border, built environment, burlesque, capital, castration, children, choice, class, clinic, colonization, color, commodity, commons, community, condition, construction, cosmetic, cross-dressing, cut, dance, death drive, decadence, decolonize, deconstruction, degenerate, desire, deterritorialization, diagnosis, diaspora, difference, digital, disability, discipline, discrimination, diversity, drugs, embodiment, empire, employment, epistemology, erotic, error, essence, ethics,  ethnology, ethnic, ethology, etiology, eugenics, exception, exotic, experiment, fake, fantasy, fashion, feeling, feminist, fetish, film, forensics, freedom, fundamentalism, futurity, gay, gender, gender-variant, genderqueer, genetic, genitals, gesture, global, habit, haptic, hate crime, haunting, health, HIV/AIDS, homophobia, homosexuality, hormones, hybrid, hygiene, ICD, identity, indigeneity, information, incarceration, institutionalization, interdisciplinary, intersex, jouissance, joy, justice, LGBT, labor, lack, language, law, lesbian, liberation, man, Man, marriage, materiality, media, medicine, memory, migration, misogyny, modernity, monster, morphogenesis, movement, murder, mutilate, necropolitics, network, NGO, non-Western, normal, object, objectification, occupy, ontology, open, organ, origin, original, originary, paradigm, pathology, pedagogy, performativity, performance, pharmaceutical, phenomena, phenomenon, posthuman, policy, political economy, popular culture, population, pornography, poverty, power, practice, premodern, progress, privilege, prostitution, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychosis, public, queer, race, racialization, reality, reform, religion, resistance, revolt, revolution, representation, reproduction, reterritorialization, rhizome, rights, riot, ritual, sacrality, science, science fiction, segregation, sense, sensorium, separatism, sex, sexuality, smell, somatechnics, sound, space, state, sterilization, subaltern, subject, surgery, surveillance, swarm, taste, technique, temporality, terror, third, toilet, touch, trafficking, trans-, transgender, translation, transphobia, transnational, transspecies, transsexual, transversal, transvestite, underground, victim, virtual, vitality, visuality, violence, voice, WPATH, whiteness, will, woman, work, X, xenotransplantation, youth, zoontology.

To be considered for publication, please submit a one-paragraph proposal to tsqjournal@gmail.com, stating the term or concept you’d like to write on, the estimated length of the article, a brief indication of your approach or main idea, and a brief identification of yourself and your qualifications for addressing the topic.

Inquiries are due by Tuesday September 4, 2012; submissions will be due by December 3, 2012, and final revisions will be due by March 4, 2013.

Securitizing Gender

September 13, 2011 By in identity documents, Sex classification, Theory, Uncategorized Tags: , , Leave a comment

Tara Mulqueen and I have just published an article, ” “Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport.” It’s about how different security mechanisms in place at US airports assume that gender is an easily known, permanent, and reliable metric of identity, and the problems these assumptions pose for transgender individuals. If you don’t have access to Social Research, email me for a copy of the paper: pcurrah AT brooklyn.cuny.edu

Paisley Currah and Tara Mulqueen, “Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport,” Social Research 78:2 (Summer 2011): 556-582.

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

Salon on pregnant transgender bodies

July 3, 2008 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

A good piece on the cultural fallout of the intense press coverage of the Beatie story from Salon: “What the Pregnant Man Didn’t Deliver”– “Thomas Beatie brought us a media circus and late-night punch lines. But there’s something missing, say some transgender advocates — more respect,” an article on the July 3, 2008 edition of Salon, by Thomas Rogers.

According to the activists interviewed, jury is still out on the long-term implications for trans rights of the media attention — good, bad, or none.

Larval Subjects .

The Feminist Wire

Unlawful Entries

Author of the forthcoming United States of Sex

Corey Robin

Author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin

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