Introduction

SUSAN STRYKER and PAISLEY CURRAH

W elcome to TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, which we intend to be the

journal of record for the rapidly consolidating interdisciplinary field of
transgender studies. Although the field is only now gaining a foothold in the
academy, the term transgender has a long history that reflects multiple, sometimes
overlapping, sometimes even contested meanings. For some, it marks various
forms of gender crossing; for others, it signals ways of occupying genders that
confound the gender binary. For some, it confers the recognition necessary for
identity-based rights claims; for others, it is a tool to critically explore the dis-
tribution of inequality. The term transgender, then, carries its own antinomies:
Does it help make or undermine gender identities and expressions? Is it a way of
being gendered or a way of doing gender? Is it an identification or a method? A
promise or a threat? Although we retain transgender in the full, formal title of this
journal, we invite you to imagine the T in TSQ as standing in for whatever version
of trans- best suits you—and we imagine many of our readers, like us, will move
back and forth among several of them. We call your attention as well to our use of
the asterisk (symbol of the open-ended search) in the journal’s logo, our hopefully
not-too-obscure gesture toward the inherently unfinishable combinatorial work
of the trans- prefix. Whatever your critical, political, or personal investment in
particular trans- terminologies, we hope that you will find—or make—an intel-
lectual home for yourself here.1
It is worth pausing to reflect on the historical moment in which TSQ has
appeared. For starters, as we write this introduction in September 2013, Chelsea
Manning, the Wikileaks whistle-blower and ‘‘cover girl’’ of this, our inaugural issue,
has just announced her gender transition within the US military prison system.
There could be no better illustration of the timeliness or significance of paying
careful attention to transgender issues. For some, Manning’s decision to announce
her transition provoked dismissive accusations of mental illness and narcissistic
attention seeking, charges that exemplify a sorry history of pathologizing and

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 1, Numbers 1–2 * May 2014 1

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2398540 ª 2014 Duke University Press

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stigmatizing transgender phenomena. For others, her transition has drawn focus to
the porous and shifting boundaries between some articulations of gay and trans-
gender identity and highlights the evolving, and achieved, nature of identity for us
all. And for still others her transition shines a light on transphobic and homo-
phobic oppression within the military, conditions that no doubt bolstered her
resolve to disseminate classified documents in order to expose wrongdoing in the
inner workings of the US security apparatus. In some quarters, Manning evokes
shopworn stereotypes of the transgender figure as subversive, terroristic, danger-
ous, or pathetic; in others, she redefines courage and patriotism; elsewhere, she
exemplifies the principled resistance to state-based repression to which we should
all aspire. For some, Manning’s transgender status is a random if not bizarre detail
in her story, while for others it is the causal explanation on which the entire plot
hinges. Whatever one’s opinion of Manning’s actions, her case raises complex ques-
tions about the relationship of transgender identity to issues of state, to moral and
political agency, to visions of social justice, and to strategies of social transforma-
tion. Her case already exemplifies the inexcusable dearth of transgender-specific
medical care in prisons—an unconstitutional ‘‘cruel and unusual punishment’’
routinely suffered by trans people within the carceral system—and adds fuel to
trans activist demands within the prison abolition movement. At the very least, in
one of the biggest news stories of the decade, she has compelled mass media outlets
and the general public to ponder the proper use of pronouns and to grapple with
issues of gender self-determination in the absence of medical and legal supports for
gender transition. It is virtually impossible, in the wake of the Manning case, to
ignore transgender issues or not to have opinions about them.
Moreover, Chelsea Manning represents but one of many contemporary
moments of cultural attention to transgender phenomena. As she begins her
undoubtedly long ordeal in prison, the most talked-about television program in
the United States is the Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black, a prison
show featuring as a secondary character an African American transgender lesbian,
played by African American transgender actress Laverne Cox. The Wall Street
Journal’s website coverage of Trans*H4CK, a ‘‘hackathon’’ (profiled in the New
Media section of this issue) in which ‘‘hackers use code to break gender barriers’’
(fakerapper), exemplifies the increasingly prevalent opportunities for transgender
identities and practices to positively represent the entrepreneurial values of flex-
ibility and fluidity within the digital information economy. Matrix trilogy codi-
rector Lana Wachowski finally goes public with her long-rumored transition from
male to female. The Palm Center, a think tank at University of California, Santa
Barbara, announces that it has received a $1.35 million grant to study transgen-
der issues in the military. The Arcus Foundation convenes a national gathering of
US transgender rights and advocacy organizations to explore possibilities for

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 STRYKER and CURRAH * Introduction 3

increased funding, while the Open Society Institute convenes a similar gathering
at the international level. The University of Arizona (which hosts the editorial
office of TSQ) announces an unprecedented transgender studies faculty cluster
hire, with the intention of building a graduate degree program. At the same time,
scarcely a day goes by—if one subscribes to the right listservs or visits the right
news sites—without encountering a report of deadly violence against a trans
person somewhere in the world, which undermines any credible progress narra-
tive on transgender rights and calls for an explanation of how it is that whatever
‘‘progress’’ can be claimed remains so unequally distributed. What might be
characterized as the ‘‘transgender turn’’ in recent affairs provides a context for the
advent of TSQ while simultaneously demanding the in-depth analysis of this
turn’s conditions of possibility that we hope to provide in these pages in the years
to come.

History and Scope of the Field

Arguably, transgender studies was first articulated as a distinct interdisciplinary
field in Sandy Stone’s foundational ‘‘Posttranssexual Manifesto,’’ which she began
writing in the late 1980s and first published in 1991. It is in homage to this work of
roughly a quarter-century ago that we have called the first issue of TSQ ‘‘Post-
posttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies.’’
Stone’s task at the time was to explode the concept of the ‘‘transsexual,’’ then often
perceived (particularly by the people who lived a transsexual life) as a restrictive
category that required gender-changing people to be silent about their personal
histories as the price of their access to the medical and legal procedures necessary
for their own well-being. Her goal was to break that silence and transform what
she called the ‘‘textual violence inscribed in the transsexual body’’ into a critical
‘‘reconstructive force’’ (295). Stone argued that juxtaposing medically constituted
transsexual embodiments against the backdrop of culturally intelligible gendered
bodies generated ‘‘new and unpredictable dissonances’’ in which ‘‘we may find the
potential to map the refigured body onto conventional gender discourse and
thereby disrupt it.’’ She wanted ‘‘to take advantage of the dissonances created by
such a juxtaposition to fragment and reconstitute the elements of gender in new
and unexpected geometries.’’ Stone’s intent was to point past what ‘‘transsexual’’
then meant and to call our attention to new genres of problems ‘‘whose potential
for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to
be explored’’ (296). These genres constitute the domain of transgender studies.
Our task now is to look back, briefly, over the work already conducted in
the field of transgender studies before turning our sights toward what the next,
postposttranssexual, iteration of that field now seems to hold in store. We are
honored to include among the nearly ninety authors who have supplied keywords

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and key concepts for this inaugural issue of TSQ a contribution from Stone her-
self, in which she proposes an ongoing guerrilla intervention into field formation
in order to guard against sterile professionalism at this moment of accelerating
institutionalization.
Since at least the nineteenth century, medical, scientific, and legal insti-
tutions in Europe and North America have construed individuals who manifest
transgender behaviors or characteristics as particular kinds or types of beings
whose bodies are thereby rendered susceptible to various sorts of social inter-
vention (consensually or not). In this sense, there has been a ‘‘science’’ of trans-
gender phenomena for more than 150 years, and a voluminous professional and
technical literature on transgender topics has existed for many decades. The long-
term biopolitical project of cultivating ‘‘gender congruence’’ while eliminating
incongruity has achieved a high degree of institutionalization over the past cen-
tury and a half, including the development of professional organizations, medical
standards of care for transgender individuals, a significant body of case law and
public policy, peer-reviewed social-scientific publications, and academically affil-
iated research centers and clinics. Most notable in this regard is the World Pro-
fessional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), formerly known as the
Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, which publishes
the clinically oriented International Journal of Transgenderism, this journal’s
nearest though somewhat distant kin.2
The interdisciplinary field of transgender studies that began to emerge more
than two decades ago differs from these previous approaches. Unlike the medico-
juridical and psychotherapeutic frameworks, it does not merely investigate trans-
gender phenomena as its proper object; it also treats as its archive and object of
study the very practices of power/knowledge over gender-variant bodies that con-
struct transgender people as deviant. Transgender studies, in other words, is to the
medico-juridical and psychotherapeutic management of transgender phenom-
ena what performance studies is to performance, or science studies is to science.
Transgender studies does not, therefore, merely extend previously existing research
agendas that facilitate the framing of transgender phenomena as appropriate targets
of medical, legal, and psychotherapeutic intervention; rather, it draws upon the
powerful contestations of normative knowledge that emerged over the course of the
twentieth century from critical theory, poststructuralist and postmodernist epis-
temologies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies of science, and identity-based
critiques of dominant cultural practices emanating from feminism, communities
of color, diasporic and displaced communities, disability studies, AIDS activism, and
queer subcultures and from the lives of people interpellated as being transgender.
Transgender studies began to take shape as an interdisciplinary field con-
currently with the emergence of the term transgender itself in the early 1990s, as a

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 STRYKER and CURRAH * Introduction 5

broadly inclusive rubric for describing expressions of gender that vary from
expected norms. The term came to name a range of phenomena related to deep,
pervasive, and historically significant shifts in attitudes toward, and understand-
ings of, what gender itself means and does. The work of the field is to comprehend
the nature of these shifts and the new forms of sociality that have emerged from
them; it seeks as well to reevaluate prior understandings of gender, sex, sexuality,
embodiment, and identity, in light of recent transgender phenomena, from
critical perspectives informed by and in dialogue with transgender practices and
knowledge formations. As historically new possibilities for gender self-perception
and expression emerge, as states reevaluate and sometimes alter their practices of
administering gender, as biomedical technologies blur customary boundaries
between men and women and transform our mode of reproduction, as bodies
and environments collapse into one another across newly technologized refi-
gurations of subjects and objects, transgender studies appears an increasingly vital
way of making sense of the world we live in and of the directions in which con-
temporary changes are trending.
In its narrowest sense, transgender studies revolves around the category
‘‘transgender’’ itself—its history, dissemination, application, uptake, logics, pol-
itics, and ongoing definitional and categorical transformations. Indeed, the cir-
culation of the term itself functions as a marker of the deep sociopolitical and
cultural shifts with which the field is concerned. Some of the earliest recorded uses
of variants of the word transgender appear in the United States in the 1960s among
self-organized communities of predominantly white, middle-class, male-bodied
individuals who persistently expressed feminine comportment, identities, and
dress (but please see the keyword entry ‘‘transgender’’ in this issue for fuller
documentation of this term’s emergence). Such people began describing them-
selves as ‘‘transgenderal,’’ as ‘‘transgenderists,’’ or as practicing ‘‘transgenderism.’’
Their aim in doing so was to resist medical, psychiatric, or sexological labeling
either as ‘‘transvestites,’’ which connoted episodic cross-dressing primarily for
reasons of erotic gratification, or as ‘‘transsexuals,’’ which connoted medicalized
bodily transformations of sex-signifying physical attributes through which a
permanent legal change of social gender could be accomplished. ‘‘Transgender,’’
on the other hand, was meant to convey a nonpathological sense that one could
live in a social gender not typically associated with one’s biological sex or that a
single individual should be able to combine elements of different gender styles
and presentations. Thus, from the beginning, the category ‘‘transgender’’ repre-
sented a resistance to medicalization, to pathologization, and to the many mecha-
nisms whereby the administrative state and its associated medico-legal-psychiatric
institutions sought to contain and delimit the socially disruptive potentials of sex/
gender atypicality, incongruence, and nonnormativity.

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The new sense of transgender as a catchall term for gender variation

entrenched itself by the mid-1990s and had great intellectual reach; it gathered
together, under a specific term, a broad class of phenomena related to historical
shifts in how sex, sexuality, gender, identity, and embodiment are thought to be
conjoined and how—and to what ends—they may be reconfigured. On the other
hand, the term’s very reach allowed it to collapse many forms of difference into a
single category, particularly as that term has been used in public health, HIV
prevention, international philanthropy, NGOs, and human rights discourse; it
often functions reductively to mask and contain differences that need to be dis-
tinctly articulated. One critical aspect of transgender studies is to consider the
work that the term transgender does: tracing the genealogy of ‘‘transgender’’ as a
category; documenting and debating the consequences of its rapid deployment in
a wide range of contexts; and interrogating the ways in which it can function
(sometimes simultaneously) as a pathway of resistance or liberation, as a mech-
anism for surveillance and control, or as a neutrally descriptive technical term in
an analytics of emergent cultural phenomena.
Transgender studies promises to make a significant intellectual and polit-
ical intervention into contemporary knowledge production in much the same
manner that queer theory did twenty years ago. The work of the field is not
confined to identitarian concerns any more than queer theoretical maneuvers
were confined to the study of gay and lesbian identities. And like queer theory,
transgender studies can function in minoritizing as well as universalizing modes.
The central tensions in the field are thus structured by a tripartite focus on per-
spectival knowledge (of anything) gained from living a transgender sort of life;
expert knowledge (by anyone) of transgender lives and related matters; and
knowledge pertaining to the metacontextual conditions (potentially everything)
that inform our contemporary encounter with transgender phenomena. Studying
transgender issues is both worthwhile and substantive in its own right and also of
significant interest for what it can teach about broader conditions of life.
A particularly rich stream of dialogue within transgender studies pertains
to the relationship between transgender and queer and to the variously inter-
secting, parallel, and antithetical manners in which these two terms—which
acquired their current critical connotations at roughly the same historical
moment —are involved with identity politics and subcultural community for-
mations. Another, similarly rich stream of dialogue pertains to the relationship of
transgender to feminist politics and women’s communities, to the extent to which
transgender issues problematize the political efficacy of the category ‘‘woman,’’
or to the question of which transgender-identified people or practices can be
considered a proper subject of feminist activism. Transgender studies likewise

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 STRYKER and CURRAH * Introduction 7

engages with studies of masculinity and men, both disseminating and analyzing a
politically significant array of alternative masculinities.
There are certainly individuals who call themselves ‘‘transgenders’’ (noun),
or who think of themselves as ‘‘transgendered’’ (adjective), or who see their par-
ticular categories or modes of self-expression or self-identification as falling
somewhere under a collective transgender umbrella. Transgender exists, and we
can study it, as we can study any social phenomena, from disciplinary, inter-
disciplinary, and transdisciplinary perspectives. The field thus concerns itself with
the full life content of such people—the accounts they offer of themselves and
their world; their visions of the past and of futurity; their material histories and
concrete social organization; the art they make and the literature they write; their
activist campaigns and political struggles; their health and illnesses; their spiri-
tuality and religious beliefs; their forms of community; their experience of the life
cycle, of interpersonal relationships, of kinship, and of institutions; their erotic
lives, inner lives, domestic lives, and working lives; the way they represent them-
selves and are represented by others.
Transgender studies also examines the relationship of an attributed trans-
gender status to other categories of personal and collective identity. Particularly
in the United States, transgender is often considered part of an imagined LGBTIQ
(lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer) community, and trans-
gender studies consequently attends to the cultural politics of this identitarian
grouping — especially given the complex discursive slippages among notions of
homosexuality (same-sex attraction), intersexuality (biologically mixed sex sta-
tus), and transsexuality (transposition of sexed body and gendered identity). Par-
sing the sometimes fine-grained distinctions between these categories can have
important consequences within such contemporary policy debates as marriage
equality, military service, employment nondiscrimination, public accommodations,
and healthcare access.
Transgender has been correlated, too, often through acts of epistemo-
logical violence, with past and present terms drawn from nonanglophone cul-
tural traditions around the world (mahu, sworn virgin, female husband, bakla,
eunuch, hijra, travesti, berdache, and so on). The perils and potentials of the
‘‘transgender’’ rubric are most evident in such transnational contexts, particularly
those that traverse global North/South and East/West divides. Naming differences
from dominant configurations of modern Eurocentric categories of sex, gender,
sexuality, embodiment, and identity in different cultures or contexts, assigning
meaning or moral weight to such difference, and exploiting that difference
according to the developmental logic of commercial and territorial expansion, of
colonialism and capitalism, has been a central feature of Western societies for half

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a millennium. Attention to ‘‘transgender phenomena’’—to anything that calls

attention to the contingency and variability of sex/gender statuses through
difference from expected forms — can thus be considered an intrinsic aspect of
modern occidental knowledge production, deeply related to pervasive and
persistent forms of political and economic domination, rather than a recent
innovation.
Understanding the dissemination of transgender as a term that originated
among white people within Eurocentric modernity necessarily involves an engage-
ment with the political conditions within and through which that term circulates.
Because transgender can be imagined to include all possible variations from an
often unstated norm, it risks becoming yet another project of colonization—a
kind of Cartesian grid imposed on the globe — for making sense of human
diversity by measuring it within a Eurocentric frame of reference, against a
Eurocentric standard. Even in the highly self-reflexive and well-intentioned act of
trying to establish a critical space for the interrogation of transgender phenomena
worldwide with this journal, we have made errors of judgment and execution that
have inadvertently deepened real and trenchant inequities and injustices in the
geopolitical, linguistic, and racial distribution of privilege and power, which we
truly regret. And yet we nevertheless aver that transgender can function as a rubric
for bringing together, in mutually supportive and politically productive ways,
gender-marginalized people in many parts of the world, who experience oppres-
sion because of their variance from socially privileged expressions of manhood or
womanhood. Transgender can operate both as a practice of decolonization that
opens new prospects for vitally necessary and radically democratic social change
and as a vector for the perpetuation of colonialist practices. We feel that decolo-
nizing the transgender imaginary is of such crucial importance to the future elab-
oration of the field that the second issue of TSQ will focus entirely on this question.
Transgender studies promises new transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary
perspectives while also posing methodological questions for various academic
disciplines. Transgender can, for example, be a useful neologism for interrogating
the past. While it would be anachronistic to label a previous era’s departures from
currently normative expressions of gender as ‘‘transgender’’ in an identitarian
sense, there is another sense in which transgender as a critical term demarcates a
conceptual space within which it becomes possible to (re)name, (dis)articulate,
and (re)assemble the constituent elements of contemporary personhood in a
manner that facilitates a deeply historical analysis of the utter contingency and
fraught conditions of intelligibility of all embodied subjectivity. It can be used to
pose new comparative questions about gender difference over geographic space as
well over as historical time, between languages and cultures, or between one
organization of kinship and another. It can challenge us to develop new models of

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 STRYKER and CURRAH * Introduction 9

what counts as mental health or physical well-being and to understand that social
institutions such as the family can take many forms and encompass many kinds of
members.
Perhaps most importantly, the field encompasses the possibility that
transgender people (self-identified or designated as such by others) can be sub-
jects of knowledge as well as objects of knowledge. That is, they can articulate
critical knowledge from embodied positions that would otherwise be rendered
pathological, marginal, invisible, or unintelligible within dominant and normative
organizations of power/knowledge. As is similarly the case in such fields of intel-
lectual activism as race and ethnicity studies, disability studies, feminist studies, and
other areas of inquiry that seek to dismantle social hierarchies rooted in forms
of bodily difference, the critique of knowledge that operates within transgender
studies has an intricate and inseparable connection to broader movements for
social justice and social transformation.
Finally, transgender does not simply critique present configurations of
power/knowledge; it is engaged with all manner of unexpected becomings, ori-
ented toward a future that, by definition, we can anticipate only imperfectly and
never fully grasp. Transgender studies offers fertile ground for conversations
about what the posthuman might practically entail (as well as what, historically, it
has already been). The field engages with the radically transformative implications
of contemporary and prospective biomedical technologies of the body as well as
with critical questions about the boundaries between human and nonhuman
animals or between nonliving and living materiality. It ponders many of the same
philosophical questions about the embodied nature of consciousness that arise
in the neurocognitive sciences, robotics, and studies of artificial intelligence. As
such, transgender studies is emerging as a vital arena for exploring the evolving
edge of our species-life at a historical moment of rapid technological and envi-
ronmental change that calls into question some of our most fundamental notions
of what human life means and may come (or cease) to be.

The Political Economy of Transgender Knowledge Production

We would like to be transparent about the economics behind the making of TSQ.
It takes a great deal of labor and money to establish a new journal. By launching
TSQ and committing to publishing four issues a year, Duke University Press will
be taking on significant production costs for design, copyediting, proofing,
typesetting/compositing, ad sales, shipping, marketing and advertising, manu-
script tracking, permissions and rights clearances, journal sales, managing edi-
torial and author correspondence, and many other kinds of labor and services.
According to projections from our colleagues at the Press, in the best-case sce-
nario the Press will have about $200,000 in outlays before TSQ breaks even

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around its fifth year. To offset that risk, the press asked us to raise a minimum of
$100,000 to underwrite some of those costs. That is not a negligible sum, but when
one realizes all that is involved in getting a new journal into circulation, it is not an
unreasonable amount of money, either. Spread out over the five-year start-up
period, it represents only about $20,000 a year—in other words, less than you
would pay an editor in the United States working half-time with benefits.
At the time of writing, we have made a lot of progress toward our fun-
draising goals. Our most generous supporter has been the University of Arizona,
which has already contributed about $35,000 from various sources as part of its
unprecedented initiative to become the institutional home of transgender studies
in the academy. We have also received contributions from the departments and
programs of some of our editorial board members as well as from the board mem-
bers themselves, all of whom we gratefully acknowledge in the list of founding
supporters published in this issue (see ‘‘Supporters of TSQ’’). We reached out to
five major foundations with a history of giving to trans causes, but sadly, none of
them funded us. We then turned to crowd funding and launched a Kickstarter
campaign in May 2013. We are aware of some criticisms of crowd-sourced fun-
draising, particularly criticism of it as a technique of neoliberalism, helping shift
costs from service providers to consumers in ways that increase profits and
decrease benefits. We agree with this critique of neoliberal justifications for the
individualization of responsibility in the name economic efficiency, but we find it
more applicable to public and corporatized sectors of the economy than to a
voluntary-participation activity such as our campaign. Nevertheless, we have
heard that crowd-sourced fundraising for TSQ is a mechanism for taking money
from poor, marginalized trans people of color and using it for the benefit of
privileged white academics while ultimately turning it into profit for an elite uni-
versity press. We are also aware of, however, and find persuasive, arguments in favor
of grassroots fundraising as a mechanism for broader-based participation in social
change activism—including knowledge work—that reduces corporate and non-
profit foundation leverage in transformational movements while simultaneously
creating greater accountability to grassroots communities.
Getting the word out through social media, our own contacts, and those of
the journal’s editorial board, we asked potential Kickstarter supporters to make
an investment ‘‘in the next stage in the development of transgender studies’’ by
helping ‘‘create a first-rate platform for publishing peer-reviewed transgender-
related scholarship’’ (TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2013). This crowd-
sourcing campaign generated tremendous excitement about the journal (for most
supporters, it was the first time they had heard of us) as well as a little rancor. By
the end of our thirty-day campaign, we had exceeded our goal of $20,000, raising
$24,752 from 404 individuals. About $3,500 of that came from ten higher-end

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 STRYKER and CURRAH * Introduction 11

donors, some of them quite wealthy, who each gave in the $200–$1500 range.
Nearly half the amount raised came from 86 people who gave between $100 and
$200 each; based on name recognition, we assume that most of these individu-
als are academics, professionals, and members of the coeditors’ families. Con-
tributors at these levels, as well as the $75 level, received premiums in the form of
steeply discounted transgender studies books and DVDs that were available to the
editors. Most donors—230 of them, to be exact —gave $10 or $25 each to have
their names listed on our website or in the first issue of TSQ as founding sup-
porters. We welcome their contributions, gratefully acknowledge them, and vow
to do our best to keep TSQ relevant to this grassroots constituency. Thus far,
including the Kickstarter campaign, we have secured about $60,000 in total
funding for TSQ and have another $40,000 to raise in the next few years. We
appreciate Duke’s confidence in our ability to do so and in launching the journal
before we have every dollar in the bank.
TSQ is not the first journal required to provide start-up funds for its
launch, and in the age of declining library budgets and increasing institutional
subscription prices—especially in the sciences—it will not be the last. In fact, our
commitment to raise funds for the journal not only ensured that it would come
into existence after years of planning, it also ensured that the individual issue
price would be relatively affordable, with annual subscription rates of only $28
for students, $45 for individuals, and a range of $175 to $205 for institutions,
depending on whether the subscription is electronic only, print only, or print plus
electronic. We felt particularly strongly about print accessibility. Many presses are
now moving away from the cumbersome and expensive process of printing
journals, but not everyone who might want to read TSQ will have an institutional
affiliation that gives them access to the e-journal format. Because each issue of
the journal addresses a particular theme, every volume of TSQ will consist of four
(or three, if there is a double issue) book-length works on transgender studies
appearing each year, and we think there will be demand for single-issue purchases
as well as regular subscriptions. A print version will allow us to sell single issues in
independent bookstores as well as through online booksellers. In the final anal-
ysis, print journals simply cost more to produce than those limited to distribution
on digital platforms, but we think in this instance the additional cost is justified.
The logic and language of economics saturate the foregoing paragraphs:
investment, costs and prices, labor, production, marketing, demand, selling—
indeed, we might well have used ‘‘brand’’ when referring to Duke’s prestigious
reputation. During our Kickstarter campaign, a few individuals contacted us to
ask why we had decided not to join the open-access revolution and self-publish
TSQ as a free online-only journal. Why, they wanted to know, must the purity of
critical scholarship, or the works of art the journal will feature, be sullied by

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involvement in the transactions of the (putatively nonprofit) academic market-

place? Why raise money for this ‘‘privilege’’? TSQ is not an athletic shoe or a new
soft drink, after all, but a venue for the transmission of new trans knowledges—
why should its contents not circulate freely to the people who need them most?
Unfortunately, the project of TSQ is not transgender knowledge per se; it is
transgender knowledge production. No matter how idealistic we would like to be
about the work we do as academics and editors, putting ideas into intellectual
circulation cannot be separated from the quotidian activity that goes into making
a journal. Indeed, the very distinction between an ‘‘immaterial’’ world of cultural
and artistic practices and the material, economic world of capital, of buying and
selling, as Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, is itself a product of the bourgeois subject
and its ‘‘double-entry accounting,’’ which, through its ‘‘dissimulation or, more
precisely, euphemization’’ of what is at stake, invents a ‘‘pure, perfect universe of
the artist and the intellectual’’ that masks the economic practices that subtend it
(1986: 242). There are no disinterested, noneconomic forms of exchange (arts,
culture, education) untethered to the economic realm of labor, capital, and the
production of commodities. Even if we had decided to self-publish TSQ, we
would not have been able to avoid the costs of the labor and services required to
produce it. Rather than pay trained workers at the Press to design, print, and
distribute TSQ, we would have to do much of this specialized work ourselves
(as well as the never-ending fundraising to pay for it). And that, for us, was an
untenable proposition that would take us away from our own right livelihood as
scholars.
There is yet another reason we chose not to take the DIY route to publi-
cation. There are innumerable trans-oriented blogs, zines, community forums,
gatherings, or other outlets through which self-produced transgender knowledges
already circulate. We celebrate this flourishing realm of cultural production while
seeking to add to it a different kind of transgender knowledge, one that circulates
with a different kind of legitimation, with different effects of power, within sys-
tems of power that we cannot readily escape simply because we critique them.
Knowledge production is an activity that, again following Bourdieu,
results in the accumulation of a particular form of capital: cultural or symbolic
capital. Until now, transgender studies has appeared as a disjointed series of
ephemeral happenings and artifacts —conferences, edited collections, and special
issues of disciplinary journals—with very little cultural capital. With the launch
of TSQ, we hope to secure transgender studies as an established field of inquiry.
We want the academic job search committees who now look askance at files
from job applicants who work in trans studies to take those applicants more seri-
ously. When independent scholars, graduate students, and untenured academics

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 STRYKER and CURRAH * Introduction 13

publish their cutting-edge original research in TSQ, we want that line on their
curriculum vitae to count for more. We want to help scholars working in the
academy to advance up the tenure and promotion ladder. Because we believe that
theoretical and scholarly work has consequences outside the academy, however
much that work needs to be done according to conditions within the academy, we
want the work published in the journal to help change how and what people think
about transgender issues. We want to do that not only by publishing new content or
more data but by providing more space for new frameworks that help make a
different kind of sense of transgender phenomena. We do this not metaphorically
but literally, by creating the real estate, the page counts and word counts of a peer-
reviewed journal, within which these frameworks can be elaborated to an
unprecedented extent. We want to cultivate a space where critical conversations
can be ongoing, not episodic, where it is not the case that every article needs to
rehash foundational concepts for uninitiated readers. Journals are the terrain on
which contests of ideas are waged, won, and lost, with consequences that can
reverberate both within and outside the academy. We simply need more ground
to stand on.
The kind of cultural capital we seek to build cannot simply be conjured out
of thin air. It is produced through an intricate and often self-reinforcing mesh-
work of social relationships, money, and institutional affiliations. Financial
capital and cultural capital cannot be neatly disentangled, which is why a degree
from Harvard is ‘‘worth more’’ (and costs more) than a degree from most other
institutions. To best wield the power of cultural capital for transgender studies,
TSQ must follow the norms and standards of academic publishing, including
adhering to the peer-review process and listing on its masthead an editorial board
filled with accomplished and well-credentialed scholars. Given the newness and
precariousness of our field, the vulnerabilities often attached to transgender lives,
and the potential for transgender studies to stage an intervention in knowledge-
production that has real-world consequences, we also felt the need for the
imprimatur of a prestigious university press. We are glad that journals from
traditional disciplines and established interdisciplinary fields have accumulated
enough cultural capital to move to the open-access environment. At the present
time, transgender studies does not have that luxury. We are determined to pro-
duce a journal that demands to be taken seriously, because we undertake our work
with the utmost seriousness. We recognize that not everyone will agree with or
accept our decisions. As TSQ moves forward, we sincerely hope that those who
would have done things differently nevertheless will become involved in the
platform we are trying to create and will work toward their own vision of what
this journal, and this field, can become.

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Structure and Content

TSQ’s editorial team is unpaid except for the graduate student worker who serves
as editorial assistant. There are two general coeditors, who are contracted with
Duke University Press to serve (potentially renewable) five-year terms. TSQ has a
large editorial board comprising roughly two dozen scholars across all ranks,
many topical and geographical areas of specialization, and several language
competencies (though most work in the US and Canadian anglophone academy).
While slightly fewer than half of the founding board members are people of color,
a slight majority of the board’s membership falls somewhere on the transgender
spectrum. Our initial selection of the editorial board was designed to address
many different diversity concerns simultaneously, including the need to recruit as
many tenured and tenure-track academic professionals as possible. As a result, the
composition of the board —including the general editors—tends to reproduce
some of the existing structural inequalities that make it easy for white, English-
speaking, masculine-presenting people to be overrepresented within the academy
and for the global North and West to be privileged over the global South and East.
As the journal and the field continue to develop, as a more diverse pool of
transgender studies scholars move into tenure-track professorships, and as TSQ
editors rotate off their service on the board, we trust that the editorial structure
will become even more diverse than it already is.
Each issue of TSQ will be devoted to a special topic or theme. Following
the current key words and concepts issue and the forthcoming issue on decolo-
nizing the transgender imaginary, the next few issues will be devoted to quanti-
tative methods and population-based studies, to arts and cultural production,
and to such other topics as animal studies, higher education, archives, sex clas-
sification, surgery, translation, and sinophone studies. We invite our readers to
submit proposals for future issues. Each issue should have a two- or three-
member editorial team. To ensure continuity of editorial vision while encouraging
new perspectives and approaches, at least one representative from the editorial
board will serve as an additional guest editor. The general coeditors will be
responsible for the overall consistency, quality, and direction of the journal.
Although published by Duke University Press, the editorial office for
TSQ currently runs out of the University of Arizona. In addition to accessing
the journal through Duke’s website, please also visit TSQ’s editorial page at
lgbt.arizona.edu/TSQ-main, where you will find current calls for papers and
enhanced content for selected issues. In addition, we hope to use that space to
host a lively forum about scholarship published in the journal as well as broader
discussions of transgender studies and of trans issues more generally.
The inaugural issue of TSQ, featuring nearly ninety short keyword con-
tributions as well as this extensive introduction, is different from our usual

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 STRYKER and CURRAH * Introduction 15

format. Typically, each issue of TSQ will include a brief foreword by the general
editors, the guest editorial team’s introduction to the issue, several feature articles,
and a few of several recurring sections: book, arts and culture, and new media
reviews; documents and images; opinion pieces; interviews; annotated biblio-
graphies; translations; and fashion. Not every recurring section will appear in
every issue. For this first issue, because the general editors are also serving as the
issue editors, we are combining the forward and the introduction; because there
are so many individual articles, we are offering only a general overview of the
contents rather than a more detailed commentary.
Our goal in launching TSQ with a special double issue on keywords and
concepts is to showcase the breadth and complexity of the field. With contributions
from emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, we hope
that a curated collection of very short pieces will provide evidence of both the field’s
already established depth and maturity and its irreverent youthful vitality. Even so,
it is an impossible task to adequately document the full scope of the field—that will
be work for TSQ to pursue in the years ahead, without hope of completion. We
nevertheless trust that readers will find not only a compelling if somewhat partial
snapshot of where the field seems to us to be right now but will also be inspired by
its very incompleteness to imagine new ways of working within transgender
studies, to see new ways for trans studies to connect to an evolving set of topics,
and to find unexpected resonances with other concerns and fields of study.
When we published our initial call for contributions for ‘‘Postpost-
transsexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies,’’ we
really had no idea what sorts of work we would receive. We could not, however, be
more delighted with the outcome. Some of the submissions —like Vic Muñoz’s
entry ‘‘Tatume,’’ which discusses a native American squash—offer a deep and
resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically.
Muñoz refuses to pick a term and define it; rather, in discussing the qualities of a
squash, he begins to reveal poetically a different relationship between acts of
naming and imaginings of ownership, between lands and the peoples who occupy
them and sustain themselves upon its products. In doing so, the very articulation
of a transgender conceptual vocabulary becomes framed by questions of dis-
placement, diaspora, conquest, and colonization. This is indeed the ground—the
stolen ground—upon which all of our work proceeds and from which, like
Muñoz, we must now cultivate a future that can deliver justice to the violence of
this past. Other authors offered equally poetic, if sometimes more whimsical,
creative riffs on such words and concepts as nature, hips, perfume, sickness, trans-
lation, or the jaw-breaking neologism transxenoestrogenesis.
If we had a template lurking in the backs of our minds for what the first
issue of TSQ might look like, it was Raymond William’s Keywords: AVocabulary of

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 16 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

Culture and Society, which traced the shifting usage over time of a hundred or so
words to show how our very ability to conceptualize social organization and the
cultural field was produced by a history of ideological struggle. Some of the entries
in TSQ definitely seem to draw inspiration from that approach, such as Julian
Carter’s deft exposition of the concept transition or David Valentine’s of identity.
Others, like David Getsy’s take on capacity, reveal not so much a critical history
embedded in certain keywords but rather words with as yet unrealized critical
potentials for the field. Some contributions take existing terms from canonical
thinkers (Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari are current favorites, with Marx and
Freud not far behind) and develop the significance for transgender studies of such
key concepts as the state, biopolitics, normal, capital, line of flight, nomad science,
and revolution. Others offer overviews of well-known methodologies (psycho-
analysis, for example, or phenomenology) and demonstrate their applicability
within transgender studies. Some suggest how trans issues play out in various
fields—media studies, sports studies, sinophone studies, or childhood studies —
and some, like Jasbir Puar’s entry on disability and Heather Love’s on queer, map
the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines. Still
other contributions function as encyclopedia entries on currently relevant topics:
cultural competency, depathologization, surgery, pornography, human rights,
and revisions to the International Classification of Diseases. And given that
transgender studies involves the critical interrogation of emergent social phe-
nomena, it is no wonder that many of the terms we have chosen to publish invoke
identity categories that are only now coming into wider visibility or that have
actually been coined with TSQ in mind: transableist, transbutch, somatomorph,
and x-jendā, to name but a few. In some cases, we doubled up on the keywords,
accepting submissions for both child and childhood, cisgender and cisgenderism,
psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic. In doing so, we intended to signal that one map
of the field could never be enough and that the work these concepts do depends
in part on how and where they circulate. We wish we had time and space enough to
give a shout-out to every entry and every author, but we simply do not, though
we are proud to include them all.
We should close by mentioning the recurring features that round out our
first issue. In our first book review section, Regina Kunzel assesses the raft of recent
anthologies and special journal issues devoted to transgender studies, which offer
further evidence of critical mass the field is now achieving. Doran George reviews
the transgender performance scene in San Francisco for our arts and culture
section. And TSQ interviews Kortney Ryan Ziegler about Trans*H4CK, his hacka-
thon for transgender social justice, for our new media section. Thanks to them all, as
well as to section editors A. Finn Enke, Eliza Steinbock and Tobias Raun, for their
work on their respective sections.

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 STRYKER and CURRAH * Introduction 17

These thanks, of course, are but the beginning of a long and seemingly
ever-lengthening list. We also need to thank Erich Staib, journal acquisitions
editor at Duke, and all his colleagues there, for believing in this project and for
working with us to bring it to fruition: Rob Dilworth, Mike Brondoli, Sue Hall,
Cason Lynley, Jocelyn Dawson, Kim Steinle, Charles Brower, Joel T. Luber,
Cynthia Gurganus, Terri Fizer, Diane Grosse, and Bonnie Perkel. Thanks to Aren
Aizura and Ben Singer for their work as managing editors in the very early stages
of getting this journal off the ground, as well as to Abe Weil, who is providing
editorial assistance now. Laura Alexander, Jenny Carrillo, and Heather Hiscox
of Alexander-Carrillo Consulting in Tucson coordinated our successful Kick-
starter campaign. The staff at the University of Arizona Institute for LGBT Studies
helped in innumerable ways with administering our fundraising efforts and
developing our website: John Polle, Tom Buchanan, Rachel Nielsen, Lisa Logan,
Laura Caywood-Barker, and Cherie McCollum Parks. University of Arizona Pro-
vost Andrew Comrie deserves high praise for his visionary support of transgender
studies, as do Dean J. P. Jones, of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences,
and Gender and Women’s Studies Head of Department Monica J. Casper. We
thank the hundreds of individual and institutional donors, listed elsewhere, who
have contributed to the advent of this journal. We thank the members of our edi-
torial board and our section editors, also listed elsewhere, for their hard volunteer
work. We thank the authors included here as well as those who submitted work we
were unable to publish for one reason or another. We thank the generation of think-
ers and activists and community members who came before us and upon whose
shoulders we stand and our colleagues and students, without whom transgender
studies would not exist. Last but certainly not least, we thank our respective families
for the love and support they have offered each of as we have jointly undertaken the
daunting but rewarding task of launching TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.

Notes
1. While many of us use ‘‘trans studies’’ in casual conversation, we decided not to call this
simply a journal of trans studies, because it either seems too unspecific for general or
formal usage or would entail addressing a wide range of trans- phenomena other than
those involving gender.
2. Portions of the scope and history section of the introduction have been coauthored by
Aren Aizura as well as Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker. These portions are drawn from
the initial journal proposal, drafted when Aizura was managing editor, and have been
reworked so many times that precise attribution is no longer possible. Altered, edited, or
expanded versions of some parts of this text have appeared in ‘‘Transgender Studies 2.0’’
(Stryker and Aizura 2013) as well as in Stryker’s afterword to Howard Chiang’s Trans-
gender China anthology (2013).

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 18 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. ‘‘The Forms of Capital.’’ In Handbook of Theory and Research for the
Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson, 241–58. New York: Greenwood.
fakerapper. Photograph (‘‘Hackers Use Code to Break Gender Barriers,’’ Wall Street Journal
[September 16, 2013]). Instagram. instagram.com/p/eU8TrIKbf0 (accessed October 15,
2013).
Stone, Sandy. 1991. ‘‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.’’ In Bodyguards: The
Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, 280–304.
New York: Routledge.
Stryker, Susan. 2013. Afterword to Transgender China, ed. Howard Chiang, 287–92. New York:
Palgrave.
Stryker, Susan, and Aren Z. Aizura. 2013. ‘‘Transgender Studies 2.0,’’ introduction to The
Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, 1–12. New York:
Routledge.
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. 2013. ‘‘Kickstarter Campaign.’’ www.kickstarter.com/projects
/tsq/tsq-transgender-studies-quarterly (accessed December 17, 2013).

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