Transgender Studies Quarterly 8.4, Guest Editors: Emmett Harsin Drager and Lucas Platero (Web)
Proposals by: 01.10.2020
Where do we find the transvestite and the transsexual? The ascendance and mainstreaming of “transgender” and its offshoots in its Anglo-American idiom represent more than a shift in nomenclature. While “transsexual” and “transvestite” were central categories that organized trans experience across a wide array of geographies, genders, and racial and class coordinates during the twentieth century, these categories have receded into the background of Anglophone activism and academia. Trans studies, which has been dominated by US and English-based scholarship, has largely moved on from transsexuals in favor of ostensibly more open-ended and proliferating models of gender variance.
Transvestites, for their part, have never occupied the center of the field. Rendered anachronistic, both groups are more vulnerable than ever to long-standing stigmas with a new temporal twist. Either tragic figures who could never be their “true” selves, in the case of transvestites, or hyper gender-conforming figures limited by the time in which they lived, in the case of transsexuals, the forward march of transgender has buried the fact that there are many living people who still identify with and live under those signs. Just as importantly, a colonial spatial logic has also exported transsexuality and tranvestism out of the global north, embedding them as racial markers of gender in the global south. This process is taking place in spite of vocal counter-claims from communities that reject a Euro-American telos to trans identity and politics.
This special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly seeks a critical reevaluation of transsexuals and transvestites, at once temporal, geographical, and political. Where do transsexuals and transvestites reside–historically, temporally, geographically, regionally? How have these categories been rendered untimely, retrograde, or counterrevolutionary? And how do they manifest geographically, regionally, and racially? The editors seek contributions that challenge the relegation of the transsexual and transvestite to another time and place in a broad sense, not just by or in transgender studies. And they seek to problematize how these categories do and don’t easily convene people across transnational, temporal, and linguistic boundaries. The editors particularly invite contributions from the global south that challenge the racialization of Continue reading
