In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu's “After Trans Studies,” this c... more In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu's “After Trans Studies,” this collaborative essay also turns to questions of field formation and the ethos of trans studies. Situating the growth of the field in the material conditions of precarity under which trans knowledge-workers work, the authors argue that trans studies can't be “over” because, in fact, it isn't yet here. Rather than viewing this as only a dismal proposition, however, they insist that the tenuousness of trans studies provides us with the opportunity to envision and enact more sustaining ways of being “in the field.”
This essay argues that certain print pornography featuring “crossdresser,” “transvestite,” and “t... more This essay argues that certain print pornography featuring “crossdresser,” “transvestite,” and “transsexual” subjects was, counterintuitively, part of a distributed information and care network by and for US transfeminine people between the 1970s and 1990s. While this genre of “transploitation” magazine did reproduce transfeminine bodies as fetish objects, transfeminine individuals themselves also used the adult magazine and bookstore market to distribute clandestine information on hormonal, sartorial, and social self-fashioning and support. This symbiotic relationship with the pornographic allowed information about transfeminity to circulate to individuals with little economic means as well as to reach people who did not have regional or cultural access to the respectable “CD,” “TV,” or “TS” community media of the era. In this way, these magazines formed part of a social safety network: a shadow system of circulating subcultural knowledges within mainstream media in order to surviv...
Drawing on personal teaching experiences, this pedagogical reflection asks whether a “pedagogy of... more Drawing on personal teaching experiences, this pedagogical reflection asks whether a “pedagogy of access” might connect various strands of trans, disability, and critical race teaching methodologies. Such a pedagogical practice centers questions of nonnormative embodiment and histories of inclusion/exclusion from academic spaces within “trans” instructional praxis.
Recent antitrans discourses have critiqued trans masculinity in particular as a site of social pa... more Recent antitrans discourses have critiqued trans masculinity in particular as a site of social panic and contagion for proto-trans adolescents. In extreme cases, this is framed as a seduction. Turning “seduction” from a social danger to a benefit, this essay theorizes masc4masc t4t erotics as a type of contagious gendering. The authors discuss the coming into identity that takes place via desire for trans people, including a sexual urge toward or attraction to people who look like the person one wants to be. They examine the cultural representations of ftm4ftm erotics, and what it means to think about these relationships now, in the face of their new emergence as cultural threat. The authors make a close reading of 2000s-era erotica and pornography to argue that Daddy/boy and group sex dynamics can be read as gender labor, affective and intersubjective work that produces gender and that in t4t erotics works within a framework of differentiated reciprocity. The article concludes by g...
In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu's “After Trans Studies,” this colla... more In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu's “After Trans Studies,” this collaborative essay also turns to questions of field formation and the ethos of trans studies. Situating the growth of the field in the material conditions of precarity under which trans knowledge-workers work, the authors argue that trans studies can't be “over” because, in fact, it isn't yet here. Rather than viewing this as only a dismal proposition, however, they insist that the tenuousness of trans studies provides us with the opportunity to envision and enact more sustaining ways of being “in the field.”
MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2014
Thy Phu’s Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture neatly captures in ... more Thy Phu’s Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture neatly captures in its title the key themes that it explores throughout. The word picturing describes its focus on visual—specifically photographic— representations of Asian Americans and Asians by themselves and by others. The term model refers both to the ideal of Asian Americans as a model minority and to the embodiment of this ideal in the physical model before the camera, and citizens addresses the uneven incorporation of Asian Americans and Asians in American understandings of civility and membership. At the same time that her title tightly defines the book’s focus, Phu takes a much wider angle on these subjects. The broad range of photographs she considers—from Chinese railroad workers, to Japanese picture brides, to still lifes of internment camp vegetables, to the Vietnamese “napalm girl,” to individuals wearing masks during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) crisis—is not entirely encompassed by the idea of Asian American visual culture. Further, Phu addresses citizenship through photographs that circulate in “sites where citizenship is most fiercely contested, ranging from the confined spaces within the nation-state (such as the ethnic enclave of San Francisco’s Chinatown at the turn of the last century and the internment camp during the mid-twentieth century) to those spaces that lie beyond, yet still stretch at, the nation-state’s ‘proper’ boundaries (such as the Pacific theater of war during the postwar and Cold War periods and increasingly securitized airport borders)” (20). In her analysis of both Asian Americans and citizenship, Phu effectively presses at the edges of how these terms have been defined. In particular, Picturing Model Citizens provides a new prism through which to view established understandings of the model minority myth and Asian American citizenship. In her brilliant introduction, Phu convincingly argues that civility is central to thinking about citizenship, particularly in relation to the emergence of
This article traces the publication history of the canonical woman of color feminist anthology Th... more This article traces the publication history of the canonical woman of color feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back through its official and unofficial editions as it has migrated from licensed paper to PDF format. The digital edition that circulated on the social blogging platform Tumblr.com and other informal social networks constitutes a new and important form of versioning that reaches different audiences and opens up new pedagogical opportunities. Though separated by decades, Tumblr and This Bridge both represent vernacular pedagogy networks that value open access and have operated in opposition to hierarchically controlled content distribution and educational systems. Both analog and digital forms of open-access woman of color pedagogy promote the free circulation of knowledge and call attention to the literary and social labor of networked marginalized readers and writers who produce it, at once urging new considerations of academic labor and modeling alternatives to neoliberal university systems. Keywords digital pedagogy, social media, free labor, publishing, open access, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga Despi te encountering the book more than two decades apart, both authors of this article view the edited collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981) as a cornerstone of our feminist consciousness. Perhaps this is not surprising: published in 1981 by the collectively run woman of color press Kitchen Table, This Bridge is now countercultural canon, one of many radical interventions into white feminist theor y that now undergirds much intersectional work on gender, race, class, and homophobia. What is striking, however, are the stark differences between the pedagogical contexts in which each author first read This Bridge. Lisa encountered the book as a teacher
Recent anti-trans discourses have critiqued trans masculinity in particular as a site of social p... more Recent anti-trans discourses have critiqued trans masculinity in particular as a site of social panic and contagion for proto-trans adolescents. In extreme cases, this is framed as a seduction. Turning "seduction" from a social danger to a benefit, this essay theorizes masc4masc t4t erotics as a type of contagious gendering. The authors discuss the coming into identity that takes place via desire for trans people, including a sexual urge toward or attraction to people who look like the person one wants to be. They examine the cultural representations of ftm4ftm erotics, and what it means to think about these relationships now, in the face of their new emergence as cultural threat. The authors make a close reading of 2000s-era erotica and pornography to argue that Daddy/boy and group sex dynamics can be read as gender labor, affective and intersubjective work that produces gender and that in t4t erotics works within a framework of differentiated reciprocity. The article concludes by gesturing toward future possibilities for trans masc 4 trans masc politics and pleasures.
This essay argues that the use of racial categories on identification documents is a critical pie... more This essay argues that the use of racial categories on identification documents is a critical piece of transgender history. By tracing the development of driver’s licenses as part of a Progressive Era racial project, this essay contends that the discourse of licenses as measures of fitness and citizenship was constructed partly in response to the supposed recklessness of “Negro” drivers. Thus driver’s licenses as tools to regulate mobility are embedded in anti-Black criminalization projects. In addition, African Americans protested racial designations on driver’s licenses, correctly anticipating that licenses would take on extraordinary status as a racialized identification document. Therefore, when transgender people argue against gender designations on driver’s licenses and other identification papers, they build off work begun by Black activists in the 1930s. Without making a fallacious analogy between race and gender, this essay argues that transgender theories of administrative violence must be rearticulated in light of the anti-Black origins of these commonplace identification documents, a rearticulation that trans and antiracist activists have already begun.
In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu's “After Trans Studies,” this c... more In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu's “After Trans Studies,” this collaborative essay also turns to questions of field formation and the ethos of trans studies. Situating the growth of the field in the material conditions of precarity under which trans knowledge-workers work, the authors argue that trans studies can't be “over” because, in fact, it isn't yet here. Rather than viewing this as only a dismal proposition, however, they insist that the tenuousness of trans studies provides us with the opportunity to envision and enact more sustaining ways of being “in the field.”
This essay argues that certain print pornography featuring “crossdresser,” “transvestite,” and “t... more This essay argues that certain print pornography featuring “crossdresser,” “transvestite,” and “transsexual” subjects was, counterintuitively, part of a distributed information and care network by and for US transfeminine people between the 1970s and 1990s. While this genre of “transploitation” magazine did reproduce transfeminine bodies as fetish objects, transfeminine individuals themselves also used the adult magazine and bookstore market to distribute clandestine information on hormonal, sartorial, and social self-fashioning and support. This symbiotic relationship with the pornographic allowed information about transfeminity to circulate to individuals with little economic means as well as to reach people who did not have regional or cultural access to the respectable “CD,” “TV,” or “TS” community media of the era. In this way, these magazines formed part of a social safety network: a shadow system of circulating subcultural knowledges within mainstream media in order to surviv...
Drawing on personal teaching experiences, this pedagogical reflection asks whether a “pedagogy of... more Drawing on personal teaching experiences, this pedagogical reflection asks whether a “pedagogy of access” might connect various strands of trans, disability, and critical race teaching methodologies. Such a pedagogical practice centers questions of nonnormative embodiment and histories of inclusion/exclusion from academic spaces within “trans” instructional praxis.
Recent antitrans discourses have critiqued trans masculinity in particular as a site of social pa... more Recent antitrans discourses have critiqued trans masculinity in particular as a site of social panic and contagion for proto-trans adolescents. In extreme cases, this is framed as a seduction. Turning “seduction” from a social danger to a benefit, this essay theorizes masc4masc t4t erotics as a type of contagious gendering. The authors discuss the coming into identity that takes place via desire for trans people, including a sexual urge toward or attraction to people who look like the person one wants to be. They examine the cultural representations of ftm4ftm erotics, and what it means to think about these relationships now, in the face of their new emergence as cultural threat. The authors make a close reading of 2000s-era erotica and pornography to argue that Daddy/boy and group sex dynamics can be read as gender labor, affective and intersubjective work that produces gender and that in t4t erotics works within a framework of differentiated reciprocity. The article concludes by g...
In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu's “After Trans Studies,” this colla... more In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu's “After Trans Studies,” this collaborative essay also turns to questions of field formation and the ethos of trans studies. Situating the growth of the field in the material conditions of precarity under which trans knowledge-workers work, the authors argue that trans studies can't be “over” because, in fact, it isn't yet here. Rather than viewing this as only a dismal proposition, however, they insist that the tenuousness of trans studies provides us with the opportunity to envision and enact more sustaining ways of being “in the field.”
MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2014
Thy Phu’s Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture neatly captures in ... more Thy Phu’s Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture neatly captures in its title the key themes that it explores throughout. The word picturing describes its focus on visual—specifically photographic— representations of Asian Americans and Asians by themselves and by others. The term model refers both to the ideal of Asian Americans as a model minority and to the embodiment of this ideal in the physical model before the camera, and citizens addresses the uneven incorporation of Asian Americans and Asians in American understandings of civility and membership. At the same time that her title tightly defines the book’s focus, Phu takes a much wider angle on these subjects. The broad range of photographs she considers—from Chinese railroad workers, to Japanese picture brides, to still lifes of internment camp vegetables, to the Vietnamese “napalm girl,” to individuals wearing masks during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) crisis—is not entirely encompassed by the idea of Asian American visual culture. Further, Phu addresses citizenship through photographs that circulate in “sites where citizenship is most fiercely contested, ranging from the confined spaces within the nation-state (such as the ethnic enclave of San Francisco’s Chinatown at the turn of the last century and the internment camp during the mid-twentieth century) to those spaces that lie beyond, yet still stretch at, the nation-state’s ‘proper’ boundaries (such as the Pacific theater of war during the postwar and Cold War periods and increasingly securitized airport borders)” (20). In her analysis of both Asian Americans and citizenship, Phu effectively presses at the edges of how these terms have been defined. In particular, Picturing Model Citizens provides a new prism through which to view established understandings of the model minority myth and Asian American citizenship. In her brilliant introduction, Phu convincingly argues that civility is central to thinking about citizenship, particularly in relation to the emergence of
This article traces the publication history of the canonical woman of color feminist anthology Th... more This article traces the publication history of the canonical woman of color feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back through its official and unofficial editions as it has migrated from licensed paper to PDF format. The digital edition that circulated on the social blogging platform Tumblr.com and other informal social networks constitutes a new and important form of versioning that reaches different audiences and opens up new pedagogical opportunities. Though separated by decades, Tumblr and This Bridge both represent vernacular pedagogy networks that value open access and have operated in opposition to hierarchically controlled content distribution and educational systems. Both analog and digital forms of open-access woman of color pedagogy promote the free circulation of knowledge and call attention to the literary and social labor of networked marginalized readers and writers who produce it, at once urging new considerations of academic labor and modeling alternatives to neoliberal university systems. Keywords digital pedagogy, social media, free labor, publishing, open access, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga Despi te encountering the book more than two decades apart, both authors of this article view the edited collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981) as a cornerstone of our feminist consciousness. Perhaps this is not surprising: published in 1981 by the collectively run woman of color press Kitchen Table, This Bridge is now countercultural canon, one of many radical interventions into white feminist theor y that now undergirds much intersectional work on gender, race, class, and homophobia. What is striking, however, are the stark differences between the pedagogical contexts in which each author first read This Bridge. Lisa encountered the book as a teacher
Recent anti-trans discourses have critiqued trans masculinity in particular as a site of social p... more Recent anti-trans discourses have critiqued trans masculinity in particular as a site of social panic and contagion for proto-trans adolescents. In extreme cases, this is framed as a seduction. Turning "seduction" from a social danger to a benefit, this essay theorizes masc4masc t4t erotics as a type of contagious gendering. The authors discuss the coming into identity that takes place via desire for trans people, including a sexual urge toward or attraction to people who look like the person one wants to be. They examine the cultural representations of ftm4ftm erotics, and what it means to think about these relationships now, in the face of their new emergence as cultural threat. The authors make a close reading of 2000s-era erotica and pornography to argue that Daddy/boy and group sex dynamics can be read as gender labor, affective and intersubjective work that produces gender and that in t4t erotics works within a framework of differentiated reciprocity. The article concludes by gesturing toward future possibilities for trans masc 4 trans masc politics and pleasures.
This essay argues that the use of racial categories on identification documents is a critical pie... more This essay argues that the use of racial categories on identification documents is a critical piece of transgender history. By tracing the development of driver’s licenses as part of a Progressive Era racial project, this essay contends that the discourse of licenses as measures of fitness and citizenship was constructed partly in response to the supposed recklessness of “Negro” drivers. Thus driver’s licenses as tools to regulate mobility are embedded in anti-Black criminalization projects. In addition, African Americans protested racial designations on driver’s licenses, correctly anticipating that licenses would take on extraordinary status as a racialized identification document. Therefore, when transgender people argue against gender designations on driver’s licenses and other identification papers, they build off work begun by Black activists in the 1930s. Without making a fallacious analogy between race and gender, this essay argues that transgender theories of administrative violence must be rearticulated in light of the anti-Black origins of these commonplace identification documents, a rearticulation that trans and antiracist activists have already begun.
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