Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles by B L . - H . Aultman
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2024
[PRE-PRINT]: This paper explores the epistemic agency of American trans students/youths by emphas... more [PRE-PRINT]: This paper explores the epistemic agency of American trans students/youths by emphasizing the ordinary practices of life-making as they are enacted or rather reflected textually. It draws on Latina feminist María Lugones’s scholarship on relationality to conceive of Trans students/youths as ‘streetwise theorists’, or callejer@. I illustrate how new knowledges about streetwise trans youth can be generated through employing what I call the ‘trans*intramural protocol of reading. I draw on texts retrieved from university archives and open access collections; resource guides and anthologies written by and for trans communities; as well as trans and queer zines published in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to illustrate the epistemic significance of such a reading practice. I conclude with a meditation on how an aesthetic relation to a text can rekindle memories to our past as trans subjects and therefore contribute to a different relation to histories of our own embodiments.
Gender & Development, 2024
This article proposes a theory of ‘trans infrastructuralism’. Through narrative and phenomenologi... more This article proposes a theory of ‘trans infrastructuralism’. Through narrative and phenomenological description, trans infrastructures illuminate the enabling conditions for emergent, material, and intersubjective forms of trans masculine desire. We argue that the reproduction of intimate affects remains paradoxically obscured by the physical presence of public infrastructure. This is paradoxical because being intimate or maintaining intimate queer loving located an interstitial relation that contradicted the intended uses of public works. The odd intensities that emerge in the trans ordinary can therefore range from techno-social objects that comprise trans people who seek gender-affirming medical care to the important spatial relations that serve to propel new socialities. Many readers may find the insights gleaned from such scholarly writing about trans infrastructuralism. We do not depart dramatically from what construes public works as socially meaningful signs in ordinary life.
Beyond Queer Words, 2024
Poem concerning the interactions of gender, death, and the relational body.
Journal of Narrative Politics, 2021
This narrative intertwines theory with the memories of ordinary life. The temporality of the piec... more This narrative intertwines theory with the memories of ordinary life. The temporality of the piece revolves, in non-serial movements, around the slow death of my mother and its effects on my gender identity.
Writing From Below, Dec 2, 2019
This essay argues that not every practice toward achieving the good life can fit neatly into cate... more This essay argues that not every practice toward achieving the good life can fit neatly into categories of the healthy and the normative-happiness. It argues for an aesthetic reconsideration of everyday life via the trans ordinary: scenes of everyday life-making for trans people. These scenes can problematize normative conceptions of the good life, or of happy living. In this sense, this essay explores how variously embodied practices can make a less-bad life possible. Employing phenomenology and recent trends in affect theory, this essay explores how trans narratives establish scenes of carrying on that, while not immediately heralded as happy, complicate the notion of healthy well-being altogether.
Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies, 2019
Trans studies has been argued to be at a defining crossroads. The discipline needs to reorient it... more Trans studies has been argued to be at a defining crossroads. The discipline needs to reorient itself toward new theories of transness and subjectivity or face its own dissolution. This means contesting received dogmas of gender determination , identity, history, and narrative convention. This essay examines how recently proposed uses of narratives, poetry, and satire can enable such contests in generative ways. It theorizes the trans complaint as an index for how popularly and academically mediated trans cultures, or intimate publics, might turn toward ordinary life theories in order to understand desire, fantasy, and their interlocking complexities of making a life.
Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies, 2016
Using cases and legal precedent on transgender employment discrimination in the US-American conte... more Using cases and legal precedent on transgender employment discrimination in the US-American context, this article investigates the epistemological consequences of creating a gendered legal subject. It interrogates the ways that courts enact certain kinds of knowledge claims that deny the experiences of transgender litigants as transgender. It argues how judicial reasoning tends to create conditions of transgender legibility that reproduces preconceived notions of normative, cisgender sex/gender experiences and knowledges, contributing to hermeneutical injustice.
The term cisgender (from the Latin cis-, meaning “on the same side as”) can be used to describe i... more The term cisgender (from the Latin cis-, meaning “on the same side as”) can be used to describe individuals who possess, from birth and into adulthood, the male or female reproductive organs (sex) typical of the social category of man or woman (gender) to which that individual was assigned at birth. Hence a cisgender person's gender is on the same side as their birth-assigned sex, in contrast to which a transgender person's gender is on the other side (trans-) of their birth-assigned sex.
Peer-Reviewed Chapters in Anthologies by B L . - H . Aultman
The Futures of Cartoons Past: The Cultural Politics of X-Men: The Animated Series (Forthcoming), 2025
The following chapter is divided into three sections. The first is an elaboration a description o... more The following chapter is divided into three sections. The first is an elaboration a description of how the narrative universe of TAS recapitulates the world of the 90s as “allegories of difference.” Our “actual” narrative universe of the 20th century is one that I will argue grows out of the long durée of racially motivated and phobic socio-economic policies. These policies targeted communities of color and queers—the very substance of otherness then and into our present—through the ruse of freedom’s underlying ideology of personal responsibility. The narrative realities of the 20th century are ones that reproduce the carceral ambience of TAS’s affective background. By negotiating how this ideology is re-presented through the lens of TAS’s narrative construction I present Magneto as a figural rupture of two interlacing rhetorical forces: political resentment and love’s multiplicity. The second section is an extended meditation on how the productive tension between the political and the poetic conceptualization of love complicate Magneto’s character development. He is no longer a singularly villainous foe whose vision is either right or wrong. He is, rather, a complex relation between a utopic vision of community and the affection of friendship as a way of life. I argue that Magneto embodies the paradox of love’s poetic multiplicity. By allowing love to cross over and, in one episode to actually dissolve him, Magneto-as-allegory opens the possibility to rethink ordinary forms of love taking shape in nonnormative ways. This possibility has been, in the final analysis, love all along. Without amorous or libidinal content, my conceptualization of love requires subjects to renegotiate their proximity to normative boundaries—without the destruction of normativity itself. This is what I elaborate as love’s nonnormative politics and affect. In the third section, I conclude by further refining this political aesthetic of love and reimagine its effects on our historical present. I then provide an answer to the pressing question, Was Magneto Right?
LGBTQ Politics: A Critical Reader. Marla Brettschneider, Susan Burgess, and Christine Keating, eds., Sep 5, 2017
The successes of the transgender rights movement in the US have taken place in the institutions w... more The successes of the transgender rights movement in the US have taken place in the institutions where politics is imagined to take place--the courts, legislatures and administrative policy venues. However, struggles outside these venues are much less visible to scholars in political science. That invisibility is not surprising for two reasons. First, in political science, these institutions are often constructed as the horizon and limit of politics. Secondly, in order to be legible within US legal architecture, claims for equality are generally constrained within a “but for” arithmetic: for example, but for characteristic X, one would have been treated equally. The legal subject is thus reduced to a singular trait, which is belied by the lived reality of most. As a result, those whose oppression results from linkages between structures of racism, ethnocentrism, class, (dis)ability, and gender/sex are much less legible to political scientists and to the mainstream of LGBTQ equality movements. Moreover, the illegibility of trans politics outside the law produces its own effects, recursively reifying a “transnormative” subject of rights. In other words, illegibility can help constitute and reinforce what a “normal” trans person must be like. This essay will first briefly review the successes of the mainstream transgender rights movement in the US. We will then shift our analysis and examine the embodied practices of trans political resistance. Embodiment includes the lived realities of transgender people, from gender expression to varied gender identities, as they are performed outside of the law’s rational gaze. We frame our analysis with the concept of epistemic injustice, using it to critique the erasure of lives, experiences, and the variability of trans politics at the level of shared knowledge. It is our hope to resituate trans resistance in ways that do justice to their political lives highlighting the embodied and epistemic frontiers they inhabit.
Invited Peer-Reviewed Encyclopedia Entries by B L . - H . Aultman
The SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies Discrimination, 2021
Discrimination is defined as the unjust mistreatment of a person or group of persons on the basis... more Discrimination is defined as the unjust mistreatment of a person or group of persons on the basis of perceived differences such as race, gender, sex, class, ability, and/or sexual orientation. This entry addresses the social, political, and legal domains of discrimination that trans people face in the United States. It also addresses the ways in which social, political, and legal discrimination are entangled. Further complicating the matter is the
fact that trans people belong to many other relational classifications such as race. Racism and transphobia can often overlap. As a consequence, trans Black women and trans youth of color are disproportionately affected by discrimination. Thus, discrimination against trans people takes many forms, from the highest levels of representative government to everyday encounters in the public sphere.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2021
Trans is both an umbrella term for heterogeneous identities and a discrete collective identity ty... more Trans is both an umbrella term for heterogeneous identities and a discrete collective identity type unto itself. It now encompasses a wide range of binary and nonbinary identifications like transsexual and transgender. Social movements arising that take up trans issues do so with certain caveats. Many make the important distinction that "trans" describes human practices and social identities preceding the construction of its modern name and meaning. Furthermore, social movements and activism advance the argument that trans embodiments are not confined to Western or medical imaginaries. Indeed, what is expressed within trans identity narratives have gone by other cultural names, with diverse histories all their own. The rise and ongoing role of American trans activism within social and political domains are careful to consider the narrative histories being summoned. Trans social movements are generally aware of the risks that analytic terms like movement or protest might imply. For better or worse, scholars often associate the rise of social and political protest movements of the 20th century in broadly fantastic terms. The emergence of trans communities, however, unfolded over the course of a century. The episodic ruptures that mark historical events (Compton's Cafeteria or the Stonewall riots) tend to spur organizational consolidation. Indeed, many of the most recent trends in trans activism then consolidated into organized interests. On that many scholars can agree. But the historical process that led to this point of trans politics is not clear-cut. Often eclipsed by the twin narrative of queer liberation, trans social movements linger among a number of narrative histories. Three periodizations help identify how trans narratives of identity and social justice are deployed, by whom, and for what purpose. The nominal period marks the rise of transsexual identities as they emerged within the space of medical currents in the early 20th century. Trans people in mid-century America may have participated in the power of medical discourse in their own lives. For example, autobiographical texts describe psychic pain, depression, and suicidal ideation that were alleviated only through transition. Naming provides intelligibility to an otherwise opaque set of phenomena. The symbolic period moves away from privileging the medical archive to highlight the connections made between radical identity groups and the growth of organized resources by and for trans activists. Narratives here are socially symbolic and detail how terms like transsexual and transgender(ist) entered a complex cultural milieu. Many activists would permanently shape the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, and agender (LGBTIA) communities for decades. The symbolic emphasizes a politics of narrative origins. Identifying the events and voices that shaped the mainstream conception of trans issues is critical to contemporary movements for social justice. The pluralist period reflects upon the various institutional interventions that shaped popular
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2019
Nonbinary trans identities have historically referred to a range of gender non-normative embodime... more Nonbinary trans identities have historically referred to a range of gender non-normative embodiments and self-making practices that stand on the outside of, or sometimes in di rect opposition to, the Western binary classifications of sex/gender (i.e., man or woman, male or female). These identities include but are not limited to androgyny, genderqueer, genderfluid, gender nonconforming, and genderf*ck. Increasingly, nonbinary has become its own free-standing identity, without many of the historical connotations that gen derqueer, for instance, might invoke. Nonbinary people identify themselves with gender-neutral pronouns or a fluid mixture of gendered pronouns in social practices. Some tran sition and take on embodiments that have a particular gendered aesthetic. This may or may not include sexual reassignment surgeries and other procedures that are body con firming. In short, nonbinary people have varied and robust social lives. The umbrella category of "trans" helps to situate some of the meaning and history of gen der-non-normative identities. On the one hand, it can be a productive political vehicle that mobilizes communities of similarly felt histories toward collective action. On the other hand, it can limit the range of recognized embodiments and practices that have partici pated in the historically pertinent conventions that trans describes. The history of nonbi nary identities is then a complex prospect. Such identities alter the categorical assump tions that underscore transsexual and transgender identities within binary terms. The complex narratives and histories of nonbinary trans identities raise some timely questions about the conventions of sex/gender in contemporary life. What constitutes one's endur ing sense of gender now that the binary itself has come under dispute? Should the gender binary be protected and for whom? In what varied ways do nonbinary identities alter a commonly shared imaginary of the bodily aesthetic? What role does desire play in the on going social changes in this long revolution of the body? The politics that emerge from these questions are becoming increasingly pressing as technology can now link otherwise isolated people across global boundaries. And finally, the reception of nonbinary identities offers important spaces of dialogue about the proliferation of identity politics, political movements, and the social divisions of labor these forces demand.
PhD Dissertation by B L . - H . Aultman
This dissertation is a critical intervention into the literatures on epistemic and phenomenologic... more This dissertation is a critical intervention into the literatures on epistemic and phenomenological claims about trans experiences, and embodied knowledge more generally. It also addresses the conception of ordinary affects, or feelings of self-adjustment in everyday life, and their political implications for trans people. Traditional literatures on the political tend to avoid questions of embodiment and the experiences of everyday life in favor of institutional interpretations of courts, elections, and protest movements. This has become particularly true of scholarship on trans politics and theories of ordinary life. These literatures often reduce political movements to their presumed universal intentions for constitutional equality and legal parity. Theories of life, for example, biopolitics and recent attention to neoliberalism, more often describes trans people as effects of power relations. Bodies are disciplined bodies otherwise evacuated of any sense of agency and being. In the most generalized instances, trans people are represented in two ways. On the one hand, they possess a liberal desire toward a normative life of assimilation. On the other hand, they are rebellious, possessing an anti-normative desire to abolish sex/gender binaries altogether. Each of these representations of trans people severely impairs understanding their how gender nonnormative forms of life actually live in under ordinary circumstances. These representations also reduce the richness of trans knowledge claims. Such commitments create the conditions for misunderstanding, and misreading, the complexities of trans histories, narratives, iv and even what it means to possess an embodied sense of selfhood. These misunderstandings create the conditions for many continued forms of epistemic injustice, a form of injustice that is characterized by the reduction of a person's, or a group's, capacity to engage in claiming knowledge about the world as well as the production of knowledge itself. Descending into what this dissertation calls the "trans ordinary" is a means for arguing that feeling, that is to say the live sensations during scenes of ordinary moments, serves as a co-present condition for knowing and thus making claims about the world. This work is a theory of feeling as knowing. v Preface The Latina philosopher and phenomenologist Mariana Ortega, whose work I found exceptionally incisive and inviting, write about "hometactics" in her book In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. Really, the term is articulated at the very end of her erudite discussion of marginally gendered and racialized selfhood. She argues that writing that book was an exercise in finding herself, in locating a home in a series of academic worlds that might feel uninviting. I didn't know it yet, but I too wanted to write an extended dialogue about our attachments to gender and what this dissertation (intentionally or not) might do to complicate movements toward or away from those attachments. I had felt an uneasy but durable sense that political science in particular and theories of the political in general lacked a sustained conversation with the plurality of gendered existence. It was at first a stinging realization that transgender and gender nonconforming (trans) political life had (and has) been given very little attention other than what investigators find as reactions to institutional action against trans communities, a study of their social movements, or the backlash when their constitutional rights were asserted. So, what are we thinking about when we think about gender? Bodies, sex, experiences, identity, subjectivity, theories, living moments, and/or psychic states? Are they common and shared by all or simply personal and isolating in nature only to us? To get at some answers to these broad questions, this work is situated within the larger literatures of queer theory, political theory, and transgender studies. My visit to the Transgender Archives in Victoria, British Columbia, in 2015 proved to be one of the most transformative events in my graduate career. The archive, in general, has a peculiar kind of affective economy. It is often cold and silent. Few people are there. Books don't speak. The experience of the daily walk to the archive (I was on campus as a visiting scholar and vi the Archive was only a few building away), the routine of requesting the cart of boxes that I had requested the day before and interacting with the pleasant staff gave it a more relational feel. Sifting through pages of books and newspapers, adult magazines and stickers, pins and other ephemera, I was often up and out of my seat scanning material into my online cloud storage. I read closely any word that might indicate something political in the ordinary lives these files contained. It could simply be the description of a scene at a pageant or an eruption of violence in a protest. Often I would find headlines concerning the death of trans people. It struck me that each folder contained not only words-but life. There were texts that merely represented facts, such as newspapers and academically oriented books. But there were personal effects, diaries, poems, stream-of-consciousness notes, and other miscellanea. These words were typed by human hands. Most were typed by trans people long since passed away. It was history in the present, what Walter Benjamin might have called human knowledge in the nucleus of time. But I was affected, particularly, by a typewritten page, stuck between two old newspaper clippings, so out of place. A single line on a blank page. I scanned it (see image below): Image 1.0 Scanned Fragment from the Archives The mystery of this note, its affective attachment of this short typed piece I still carry with me, haunts this dissertation in a way. I find these perennial words of Thomas Paine's "American Crisis" moving anyway. But, I wonder if not all times, in the sense of our ordinary coming undone, isn't somehow always already trying our souls. Through the many literatures I started vii searching in order to find meaning in the process of what this dissertation will be frequently referring to as "meaning-making," Lauren Berlant's work stuck out the most. She argues that everyday life is filled to some extent with a broad array of attachments and that these attachments, however banal, create the conditions for our own unhappiness. This is particularly heightened when the ordinary comes under siege. As I will repeatedly explain throughout the following chapters (perhaps to a fault), the ordinary is how everyday life (from pain to joy) is folded and otherwise justified so as to make do. When these concerns of making do are jeopardized, when "The fantasies that are fraying include, particularly, upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy...the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expectation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to 'have a life' that adjustment seems like accomplishment" (Berlant 2011, 3). If being trans these days means putting up with open political hostility, denied access to health coverage, bathroom access, and continued sustained everyday violence-then, indeed, these are trying times. Affect theory could be described as observing how things affect, and are affected by, other things. It's a nebulous term-affect-that describes an array of unthought and taken-forgranted forces that shape our orientations to the world around us. To be affected by ordinary circumstances offers insight into where everyday life emerges as more than variables in a complex discourse. To feel at home, to be at home, to rest in bed, to feel upset, the feelings of anxiety or sadness, the amorphous feelings that circulate in our ordinary day on a commute, all compose our attunement to the world. Indeed, to be in the world is human being-to belong in a world, to act in a world, to associate in a world. So to invite affect from ordinary life into our thinking about gender would be critical to thinking gender, full stop. (As an exercise: begin to viii sense your body's shape and position in which is currently situated; notice how it relates to the space and objects within it, the feeling of the elastic bands from your clothing, the tightness or looseness of your pants or dress, the way a shirt falls over your chest, or the tingle of hair over your eyes or neck. These are feelings, illegible at first, but are shaped by some of the very assumptions we have about the gendered body itself. Weight, height, hair length, the presence of hair on the body at all, our (non)reproductive organs-these are all conditioned by a litany of discourses, memories, stories, and objects that shape your relation to your body and the world it moves within.) The ordinary is, in fact, gendered. But suppose that I don't read philosophy or social theory in a manner, as scholars would like presumably, from a purely academic angle in this dissertation. Thus, I wouldn't read Ludwig Wittgenstein's (1958) monumental Philosophical Investigations (PI) as a philosopher, or a social theorist, but as a human, in what Heidegger called my everydayness, endeavoring in what humans do: make a life. The book was supposed to be about, as I've learned over the course of writing this dissertation, ordinary language and forms of life. I think this becomes a more illuminating ground for how one might approach Wittgenstein's theories of games and language. It was for me. In other words, it isn't for the philosopher to determine what constitutes language as such. It isn't for the social theorist to let the people know what is social and cultural. It is, rather, people who do it. The contextual arrangements among collectives of human "we's" that crystalize in order for (personal, social, cultural) meaning to happen. That, as for language, speaking and action is a "form of...
PhD Dissertation Proposal by B L . - H . Aultman
Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, 2015
Political resistance is often theorized through the lens of institutions: the courts, the ballot,... more Political resistance is often theorized through the lens of institutions: the courts, the ballot, and mass protests. Thus, literatures on resistance tend to avoid questions of embodiment and the experiences of everyday life in favor of macro-level cultural interpretations of policyrelated ends. This has become particularly true of scholarship on trans people-and even of the popular media that reports on them, as well as the activist organizations that conduct advocacy on their behalf. In many instances, representations of trans peoples' capacities as knowers, speakers, and agents are limited by already known classifications and already known goals. This limited view creates the conditions for epistemic injustice, limiting their capacities as understood political agents. Such discursive formulas create trans subjects whose politics are completely misunderstood, and whose goals are often blurred by the ally narrative of LGB(T). My work will provide a more holistic epistemology of transgender, through reading texts that attempt to represent both their political, legal, and social realities-asking what embodied aspects are missing, and how those lacunae constitute trans-specific epistemic injustices.
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Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles by B L . - H . Aultman
Peer-Reviewed Chapters in Anthologies by B L . - H . Aultman
Invited Peer-Reviewed Encyclopedia Entries by B L . - H . Aultman
fact that trans people belong to many other relational classifications such as race. Racism and transphobia can often overlap. As a consequence, trans Black women and trans youth of color are disproportionately affected by discrimination. Thus, discrimination against trans people takes many forms, from the highest levels of representative government to everyday encounters in the public sphere.
PhD Dissertation by B L . - H . Aultman
PhD Dissertation Proposal by B L . - H . Aultman
fact that trans people belong to many other relational classifications such as race. Racism and transphobia can often overlap. As a consequence, trans Black women and trans youth of color are disproportionately affected by discrimination. Thus, discrimination against trans people takes many forms, from the highest levels of representative government to everyday encounters in the public sphere.