This book advances a broad constellation of critical concepts situated within the field of queer studies and education. Collectively, the concepts take up a cross-section of scholarship that speaks to various political, epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical concerns. Given the ongoing global centrality of sociocultural and political developments related to the topic of LGBTQ in the twenty-first century, the concepts in this volume and the issues raised by each contributor will have wide international appeal among researchers, scholars, educators, students, and activists working at the intersection of queer studies and education.
TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the rapidly emerging field of transgender studies. The inaugural issue, "Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a 21st-Century Transgender Studies," pays homage to Sandy Stone's field-defining "Posttranssexual Manifesto" and assesses where the field is now and where it seems to be heading. Comprising over eighty short essays by authors ranging from graduate students to senior scholars, the issue takes on such topics as biopolitics, disability, political economy, childhood, trans-of-color critique, area studies, translation, pathologization, the state, and animal studies. Some keyword entries resemble encyclopedia articles (sports, psychoanalysis); others are poetic meditations on concepts (capacity, transition); still others offer whimsical and eccentric expositions of words that are more unexpected-and unexpectedly productive (perfume, hips). Some entries pose trenchant resistances to the keyword concept itself. The issue includes a substantive introduction by the editors and serves as a primer for readers encountering transgender studies for the first time.
Written for entry-level survey courses in queer or LGBTQ+ Studies for students from all majors, this engaging text covers a wide range of topics. Early chapters consider the meaning of “queer” and examine identities such as trans, bi, and intersex. Intersections between sexuality/gender expression and other identities such as race, ethnicity, and class are also examined. The book then reviews life experiences such as families, friendship, religion and spirituality, health, and politics through the lens of queerness. Queer Studies: Beyond Binaries: -Engages undergraduates with a narrative that applies key ideas to their own lives and experiences -Questions various binaries (“either/or” pairings) to help students examine their own sexual identity and gender expression -Reviews foundational concepts from queer theory and queer history to create a deeper understanding of the concepts -Emphasizes an intersectionality approach that demonstrates how one’s identity is the product of multiple characteristics such as sexuality, gender, race, class, and dis/ability -Uses a multidisciplinary approach drawing from the social and natural sciences, humanities, and arts to provide a broad overview of perspectives -Details an individual or an event in Spotlight on sections to highlight the experiences of queer people. -Provides questions for class discussion or field activities in Issues for Investigation sections that apply the ideas covered in the chapter -Allows instructors to shape the class with different foci using the stand-alone chapters in Part III -Features an Instructor’s resource manual available to adopters with 20+ PowerPoint slides for each chapter, sample syllabi for a variety of courses, teaching tips for using the Spotlight On and Issues for Investigation sections and the suggested readings, a test bank with objective and essay questions, and student aids such as keywords, chapter outlines and summaries, and learning objectives Designed for undergraduate courses in queer or LGBT+ Studies requiring no prerequisites, Queer Studies: Beyond Binaries also serves as an excellent supplement in courses on queer theory or history, or on sexuality, gender, and women’s studies.
Transitioning: matter, gender, thought takes the body, its ontologies and temporalities, as a primary ethnographic heuristic to explore transition contexts, relations and life processes. Although in Britain the Gender Recognition Act has, since 2004, provided a framework for identity recognition for those who seek to live as a member of the opposite gender, this book draws on trans men’s experiences to conceptualise transition outside this framework. Thinking through changing materialities, cultures and epistemologies of transition, the book brings together perspectives in anthropology, transgender studies, and social theory to think through how bodies happen, and the scales, assemblages, transmissions and indeterminacies in their process of becoming something other than themselves.
In Shimmering Images Eliza Steinbock traces how cinema offers alternative ways to understand gender transitions through a specific aesthetics of change. Drawing on Barthes's idea of the “shimmer” and Foucault's notion of sex as a mirage, the author shows how sex and gender can appear mirage-like on film, an effect they label shimmering. Steinbock applies the concept of shimmering—which delineates change in its emergent form as well as the qualities of transforming bodies, images, and affects—to analyses of films that span time and genre. These include examinations of the fantastic and phantasmagorical shimmerings of sex change in Georges Méliès's nineteenth-century trick films and Lili Elbe's 1931 autobiographical writings and photomontage in Man into Woman. Steinbock also explores more recent documentaries, science fiction, and pornographic and experimental films. Presenting a cinematic philosophy of transgender embodiment that demonstrates how shimmering images mediate transitioning, Steinbock not only offers a corrective to the gender binary orientation of feminist film theory; they open up new means to understand trans ontologies and epistemologies as emergent, affective, and processual.
This book sets out a theoretical framework for thinking about equality as a cultural artefact and process, drawing on work from the GRACE (Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe) project. In revisiting and reframing conventional questions about in/equality it considers the processes through which in/equalities have come to be regarded as issues of public concern, the various ways that equalities have been historically defined, and how those ideas and imaginings of equalities are produced, embodied, objectified, recognized and contested in and through a variety of cultural practices and sites. Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary group of contributors, the book will be of interest to scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology, sociology, and women’s and gender studies.
It is only recently that transgenderism has been accepted as a disorder for which treatment is available. In the 1990s, a political movement of transgender activism coalesced to campaign for transgender rights. Considerable social, political and legal changes are occurring in response and there is increasing acceptance by governments and many other organisations and actors of the legitimacy of these rights. This provocative and controversial book explores the consequences of these changes and offers a feminist perspective on the ideology and practice of transgenderism, which the author sees as harmful. It explores the effects of transgenderism on the lesbian and gay community, the partners of people who transgender, children who are identified as transgender and the people who transgender themselves, and argues that these are negative. In doing so the book contends that the phenomenon is based upon sex stereotyping, referred to as 'gender' – a conservative ideology that forms the foundation for women's subordination. Gender Hurts argues for the abolition of ‘gender’, which would remove the rationale for transgenderism. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of political science, feminism and feminist theory and gender studies.
Trans seems to be everywhere in American culture. Yet there is little understanding of how this came about. Are people aware that there were earlier periods of gender flexibility and contestability in American history? How well known is it that a previous period of trans visibility in the 1960s and early 1970s faced a vehement backlash right at the time that trans, in the form of what was then termed transvestism and transsexuality, seemed to be so ascendant? Was there transness before transsexuality was named in the 1950s and transgender emerged in the 1990s? Barry Reay explores this history: from a time before trans in the nineteenth century to the transsexual moment of the 1960s and 1970s, the transgender turn of the 1990s, and the so-called tipping point of current culture. It is a rich and varied history, where same-sex desires and identities, cross-dressing, and transsexual and transgender identities jostled for recognition. It is a history that is not at all flattering to US psychiatric and surgical practices. Arguing for the complexity of a trans past and present, Trans America will be a groundbreaking work for the trans community, as well as anyone interested in the history of medicine, sexuality, psychology and psychiatry.
This volume offers a comprehensive introduction to and investigation of the multivocality of women’s experience in the Middle Ages. In medieval Europe women saw their role in the Christian Church and society progressively confined to conflicting models of femininity epitomised by the dichotomy of Eve/Mary. Classical views of gender, predicated on misogynistic dichotomies which confined women to matter and the corruption of the flesh, were consolidated in powerful male-dominated clerical institutions and widely disseminated. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, however, women’s corporeality and somatic spirituality contributed to and influenced burgeoning modes of piety centred around the cult of the Virgin Mary and the veneration of the suffering body of Christ on the Cross. This shift in devotional practices afforded women as bodily beings the space for an increased level of self-expression, self-realisation, and authority. Ranging from philosophical and theological enquiry to education and art, as well as medical sciences and popular beliefs, the essays in this collection account for the complexities and richness of the conceptualisations and lived experiences of medieval Christian women. The book will be especially relevant to students and scholars of religion and history with an interest in medieval studies and gender. Whilst expounding the key strands of thinking in the field, it engages with and contributes to some of the latest scholarly research.
The widely recognized “Dreamer narrative” celebrates the educational and economic achievements of undocumented youth to justify a path to citizenship. While a well-intentioned, strategic tactic to garner political support of undocumented youth, it has promoted the idea that access to citizenship and rights should be granted only to a select group of “deserving” immigrants. The contributors to We Are Not Dreamers—themselves currently or formerly undocumented—poignantly counter the Dreamer narrative by grappling with the nuances of undocumented life in this country. Theorizing those excluded from the Dreamer category—academically struggling students, transgender activists, and queer undocumented parents—the contributors call for an expansive articulation of immigrant rights and justice that recognizes the full humanity of undocumented immigrants while granting full and unconditional rights. Illuminating how various institutions reproduce and benefit from exclusionary narratives, this volume articulates the dangers of the Dreamer narrative and envisions a different way forward. Contributors. Leisy J. Abrego, Gabrielle Cabrera, Gabriela Garcia Cruz, Lucía León, Katy Joseline Maldonado Dominguez, Grecia Mondragón, Gabriela Monico, Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, Maria Liliana Ramirez, Joel Sati, Audrey Silvestre, Carolina Valdivia
