…ment journal (Web)

Deadline: 10.09.2014

„How can I explain what is happening to me? What can I do about my desire for transformation? What can I do about all the years I defined myself as a feminist? What kind of feminist am I today: a feminist hooked on testosterone, or a transgender body hooked on feminism? I have no other alternative than to revise my classics, to subject those theories to the shock that was provoked in me by the practice of taking testosterone. To accept the fact that the change happening in me is the metamorphosis of an era.“ (Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie, p.22)

The forthcoming issue of …ment, is dedicated to transfeminism, as an emergent thinking of radical, gendered alterity. Responses to Beatriz Preciado’s game-changing book Testo Junkie are especially welcome.

Here we are using the term transfeminism as follows: In Preciado’s own words, transfeminism ‘marks the displacement of the site of enunciation from a universal “female” subject to a multiplicity of situated subjects. It involves a conceptual overturning of the debates concerning equality/difference, justice/recognition, and essentialism/constructivism in favor of debates concerning the transversal production of differences.’[1]

“Borrowing” the term from Preciado, Antonella Corsani defines transfeminism as ‘a feminism that is a thinking of and a political experimenting with multiplicity’, and which, crucially, has reconfigured itself as such in response to its ‘confrontations’ with queer and postcolonial theories. [2] Thus, binary oppositions and their dialectics make way for intersectionality.

We could hardly announce a call for contributions to a trans/gender themed issue and fail to notice the surge of popular media interest in transgender. Laverne Cox on the cover of TIME magazine; it hardly gets more mainstream. However, as Preciado observes in Testo Junkie, while embarking on a sovereign, self-experimental course of testosterone; the medicalised gender reassignment programs which many trans people enter into in order to access hormones and “corrective” surgeries serve to enforce and reinforce the naturalized, normative construct of the gender binary.

Meanwhile, perhaps most visibly in America, where Men’s Rights groups state their wish to eradicate (what they call) feminism for bringing down the old order, the old Western masculinities are in crisis; entrenched in a fearful state of ‘aggrieved entitlement’[3], it’s manifesting as misogyny and violence. That some of their accusations of feminisms’ role in wreaking certain socio-economic changes are borne out by e.g. Antonella Corsani’s own transfeminist, post-marxist analysis is—well, kind of powerful.

But we prefer lines of flight to fight-or-flight, and we’d like to think transfeminism can help with this deterritorialization. If ‘multitudes are rhizomatic connections in the process[es] of their becoming[s]’; if, with Edouard Glissant, ‘We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone’[4] (where opacity is taken to mean a ‘kind of unclassifiable poetics, or aesthetics that doesn’t attempt to reduce the alterity of another person’[5]) then this has to include men as well, privileges notwithstanding: even the archetypal classifying, objectifying, universal white cis-male subject. Otherwise, as long as we effectively conspire to reproduce the construction whereby (white cis-) males occupy the universal subject position of the One against which all others are Othered; as long as we, too have them backed into a corner, ‘flatten[ed] into the enemy’,[6] it’s an impasse: it’s also a fiction.

Here too, Preciado’s gender-hacking Testo Junkie provides a resource for the making-strange of masculinities: e.g., the account of what it feels like to take testosterone, the performance of sexual roles and pleasures and the drag king workshop. But here as elsewhere, feel free to surprise us with other sources.

• We invite contributions that consider the emergence and potentialities of transfeminism as a feminism; in context of the history of feminisms, and those that investigate the feminist theory at the core of Preciado’s thinking.
• We invite further responses to Testo Junkie, and Preciado’s post-Foucauldian articulation of the pharmacopornographic regime: its somato-politics, its techno-sexuality, its toxic-pornographic subjectivities.
• We invite contributions that engage more broadly with postbinary gender thinking; including the case for the cis- genders and the gender binary as naturalized constructs.
• Lastly, with Elliot Rodger (and germinal others) in mind, we also urgently invite contributions which move toward a thinking of masculinities as also other: also alterior, multiple, intersectional.
• We accept essays, poetry, fiction, text and images for publication.

As a way in to thinking this call for proposals, we offer the following preliminary resources:

• Beatriz Preciado’s “Pharmaco-pornographic Politics: Towards a New Gender Ecology” which introduces several main themes of Testo Junkie, can be found here.
• Antonella Corsani’s “The Becoming Transfeminist of (Post-)Marxism” can be found here.

Please send proposals/contributions by September 10, 2014 to: editors@journalment.org

Dr. Theresa M. Senft
Liberal Studies Program
New York University
726 Broadway, Room 615
New York NY 10003
on the web: terrisenft.net
on twitter: terrisenft

Source: female-l@jku.at