Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?

Author(s): Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah and Lisa Jean Moore

Source: Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 3/4, Trans- (Fall - Winter, 2008), pp. 11-22
Published by: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York
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 INTRODUCTION: TRANS-, TRANS, OR TRANSGENDER?

SUSAN STRYKER, PAISLEY CURRAH, AND LISA JEAN MOORE

The title that appears on the cover of this journal is Trans-, not Trans, and
not Transgender. A little hyphen is perhaps too flimsy a thing to carry as
much conceptual freight as we intend for it bear, but we think the hyphen
matters a great deal, precisely because it marks the difference between the
implied nominalism of "trans" and the explicit relationality of "trans-,"
which remains open-ended and resists premature foreclosure by attach
ment to any single suffix.
Our call for papers read: "Trans: -gender, -national, -racial, -genera
tional, -genie, -species. The list could (and does) go on. This special issue
of WSQ invites feminist work that explores categorical crossings, leakag
es, and slips of all sorts, around and through the concept 'trans-'." While
gender certainly?perhaps inevitably?remains a primary analytical cate
gory for the work we sought to publish in this feminist scholarly journal,
our aim in curating this special issue specifically was not to identify, con
solidate, or stabilize a category or class of people, things, or phenomena
that could be denominated "trans," as if certain concrete somethings
could be characterized as "crossers," while everything else could be char
acterized by boundedness and fixity. It seemed especially important to
insist upon this point when addressing transgender phenomena.
Since the early 1990s, a burgeoning body of scholarly work in the
new field of transgender studies has linked insights and analyses drawn
from the experience or study of phenomena that disrupt or unsettle the
conventional boundaries of gender with the central disciplinary concerns
of contemporary humanities and social science research. In seeking to
promote cutting-edge feminist work that builds on existing transgender
oriented scholarship to articulate new generational and analytical perspec
tives, we didn't want to perpetuate a minoritizing or ghettoizing use of
"transgender" to delimit and contain the relationship of "trans-" concep
tual operations to "-gender" statuses and practices in a way that rendered
them the exclusive property of a tiny class of marginalized individuals.

[WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 36: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2008)]

? 2008 by Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, & Lise Jean Moore. All rights reserved.

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12 INTRODUCTION

Precisely because we believe some vital and more generally relevant criti
cal/political questions are compacted within the theoretical articulations
and lived social realities of "transgender" embodiments, subjectivities,
and communities, we felt that the time was ripe for bursting "transgen
der" wide open, and linking the questions of space and movement that
that term implies to other critical crossings of categorical territories.
This issue of WSQ centrally address the challenges presented to tra
ditional feminist scholarship by the transgender sociopolitical movement
of the past two decades, but it aims to resist applications of "trans" as a
gender category that is necessarily distinct from more established catego
ries such as "woman" or "man." Rather than seeing genders as classes or
categories that by definition contain only one kind ofthing (which raises
unavoidable questions about the masked rules and normativities that con
stitute qualifications for categorical membership), we understand genders
as potentially porous and permeable spatial territories (arguable number
ing more than two), each capable of supporting rich and rapidly prolifer
ating ecologies of embodied difference.
Our goal is to take feminist scholarship in expansive new directions
by articulating the interrelatedness and mutual inextricability of various
"trans-" phenomena. Any gender-defined space is not only populated
with diverse forms of gendered embodiment, but striated and cross
hatched by the boundaries of significant forms of difference other than
gender, within all of which gender is necessarily implicated. To suggest a
few examples: do transgender phenomena not show us that "woman"
can function as social space that can be populated, without loss of defini
tional coherence, not only by people born with a typical female anatomy
and reared as girls who identify as women, but also by people reared as
girls who identify as women but who have physical intersex conditions,
or by people who were born with a typical male anatomy but who self
identify as women and take all possible steps to live their lives that way,
or by people born female who express conventionally masculine social
behaviors but who don't think of themselves as or want to be men? Do
transgender phenomena not show us that some who unproblematically
occupy the space of social manhood have vaginas rather than penises, or
that some men can choose to wear dresses without surrendering their
social identities as men? Likewise, does not a working-class woman who
makes her living through manual labor cross boundaries of middle-class
feminine respectability because of the dirt under her nails? Hasn't Hillary

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 STRYKER, CURRAH, & MOORE 13

Clinton been called mannish because she is politically powerful? Didn't

white men denying black men the vote through Jim Crow legislation in
the years before female suffrage assign black men the same citizenship sta
tus as that given to white women? In all of these examples, "transgen
dered" bodies occupy the same gender-spaces as nontransgendered ones,
and transgender characteristics can be attributed, as a form of disciplining,
to bodies that might not subjectively identify as being transgendered.
A fundamental aspect of our editorial vision for this special issue of
WSQ is that neither "-gender" nor any of the other suffixes of "trans-"
can be understood in isolation?that the lines implied by the very con
cept of "trans-" are moving targets, simultaneously composed of multiple
determinants. "Transing," in short, is a practice that takes place within, as
well as across or between, gendered spaces. It is a practice that assembles
gender into contingent structures of association with other attributes of
bodily being, and that allows for their reassembly. Transing can function
as a disciplinary tool when the stigma associated with the lack or loss of
gender status threatens social unintelligibility, coercive normalization, or
even bodily extermination. It can also function as an escape vector, line
of flight, or pathway toward liberation. A fundamental question we would
like to pose is: What kinds of intellectual labor can we begin to perform
through the critical deployment of "trans-" operations and movements?
Those of us schooled in the humanities and social sciences have become
familiar, over the past twenty years or so, with queering things; how
might we likewise begin to critically trans- our world?
In her recent Queer Phenomenology, Sarah Ahmed asks her readers to
pay attention to the spatial dimensions of the term "orientation," remind
ing them that orientation fundamentally pertains to the relationship
between bodies and space, and that many terms related to sexuality?
straight, bent, deviate, perverse, and so on?describe patterns of bodily
movements through, and occupations of, space. In a similar spirit, we
invite our readers to recognize that "trans-" likewise names the body's
orientation in space and time; we ask them to reorient themselves toward
transgender phenomena, and to begin imagining these phenomena
according to different spatio-temporal metaphors. It's common, for
example, to think of the "trans-" in "transgender" as moving horizon
tally between two established gendered spaces, "man" and "woman," or
as a spectrum, or archipeligo, that occupies the space between the two.
(We ourselves began this introduction with precisely these spatial meta

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14 INTRODUCTION

phors.) But what if we think instead of "trans-" along a vertical axis, one
that moves between the concrete biomateriality of individual living bod
ies and the biopohtical realm of aggregate populations that serve as
resource for sovereign power? What if we conceptualize gender not as an
established territory but rather as a set of practices through which a poten
tial biopower is cultivated, harnessed, and transformed, or by means of
which a certain kind of labor or utility extracted? "Trans-" thus becomes
the capillary space of connection and circulation between the macro- and
micro-political registers through which the lives of bodies become
enmeshed in the lives of nations, states, and capital-formations, while
"-gender" becomes one of several set of variable techniques or temporal
practices (such as race or class) through which bodies are made to live.
What counterdominant work might we accomplish by putting
"trans-" in the place that Foucault assigned to sexuality in the "The Right
of Death and Power Over Life" at the end of volume 1 of The History of
Sexuality, making it our name for the space of passing between the "ana
tamo-political" corporal techniques of subjective individualization and
the bio-political management and regulation of populations? What might
be gained, in other words, by regarding "trans-," rather than gender, as
the stable location where current forms of capital and sovereign power
seek to reproduce themselves through our bodies, and where we?if we
can or if we must?might begin to enact and materialize new social
ontologies? How might we begin transing these two perspectives on
transgender, dancing back and forth between the temporality of "trans-"
and the spatiality of "-gender," and the spatiality of "trans-" and the tem
porality of "?gender"? How might we move between the necessary plac
es of identity, where we plant our feet and the simultaneous imperative to
resist those ways in which identities become the vectors through which
we are taken up by projects not of our own making? How might we
begin to link "trans-" to other suffixes that target bodily zones or func
tions other than those addressed by "?gender", and thus begin to articu
late what might be called a general "somatechics," or analytics of
embodied difference?
The movement between territorializing and deterritorializing "trans-"
and its suffixes, we want to suggest, as well as the movements between
temporalizing and spatializing them, is an improvisational, creative, and
essentially poetic practice through which radically new possibilities for
being in the world can start to emerge. As part of the making-real of the

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 STRYKER, CURRAH, & MOORE 15

trans-movements we envision, we have assembled in this special issue of

WSQ work we consider to be "doubly trans-" in some important sense?
work that situates "trans-" in relation to transgender yet moves beyond
the narrow politics of gender identity.

Afsaneh Najmabadi opens this issue with an original, empirically ground

ed analysis of transsexuality within the Islamic Republic of Iran. She
pays particular attention to the ways in which Eurocentric medical dis
courses and identity categories mean differently in Iranian contexts, and
she offers a sophisticated reading of the ways in which state sanction of
sex-reassignment surgeries not only provides material benefits for many
transsexuals, but can also create safer social spaces for nontransgendered
homosexual men and women. Her careful scholarship on this point is a
welcome corrective to the increasingly frequent and rhetorically power
ful deployment in the West of the figure of "the Iranian transsexual" to
demonstrate the "backwardness" of Islam in relation to Eurocentric nar
ratives of political progress and personal liberation. At an historical
moment when the United States seems poised for war with Iran, the
vital transnational and cross-cultural perspective on Iranian transgender
sociocultural formations found in Najmabadi's work helps counter the
veiled Islamophobia which can be found even in "progressive" Euro
American queer and feminist discourses.
If the case of transsexuality in Iran demonstrates that seemingly iden
tical practices of bodily transformation can perform quite different kinds
of work in different national contexts, Elizabeth Loeb's article on bodily
integrity, identity disorders, and the sovereign stakes of corporeal desire
within U.S. law helps show how seemingly dissimilar practices can in fact
function as different instantiations of the same enabling logic of power.
Loeb grapples with the relationship between bodily integrity and sover
eign power from the perspective of "Wannabes," a term self-applied by
some individuals who seek to amputate "healthy" limbs. Loeb notes how
Wannabes increasingly frame their arguments for redefining their own
sense of corporeal integrity by making reference to transsexual practice,
essentially asserting that if it's acceptable for transsexuals to cut off some
body parts, it should be acceptable for them to cut off other parts. She
demonstrates how "Gender Identity Disorder," the disciplinary metric
that legitimates gender reassignment surgeries, has been deployed to jus
tify the creation of "Body Identity Integrity Disorder," a new pathologiz

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16 INTRODUCTION

ing designation through which Wannabes hope to decriminalize and

legitimate the medical practice of self-demand limb amputation. In inves
tigating the current criminalization of this consensual surgery, performed
in circumstances no different from those of elective cosmetic surgeries,
Loeb not only documents the legal construction of Wannabe amputee
desire or practice as an incursion on state sovereignty, but also argues that
"identity disorder" is itself a pervasively deployed strategy of biopolitical
management within neoliberal organizations of sovereign power.
In her meditations on the Antony and the Johnsons's song "The
Cripple and the Starfish," in which the singer equates the act of loving
with the act of cutting off a finger that can "grow back like a starfish,"
Eva Hayward addresses, from an strikingly different angle of approach,
the question of amputation raised by Loeb. Hayward, who uses her own
transsexuality autoethnographically in the articulation of her argument,
disavows the assumption of loss and lack implied by the concept off
"cutting off." She refuses to be haunted by a nostalgia for an imagined
wholeness that has been surgically diminished and, rather, understands
that her surface been refolded and differently spatialized. Hayward suggests
productive links and lines of thinking between transgender discourses and
disability studies in an effort to show how multiple forms of bodily
difference or atypicality can be nonhierarchically related to one another.
She also brings a critical science studies perspective on nonhuman animal
embodiment to the same question, asking what transspecies lessons could
be learned from the regenerative potential of starfish limbs.
Natalie Corinne Hansen similarly takes up the question of transgen
der and transspecies relationality in her excellent close reading of a short
first-person narrative by Ken in Dean Kotula's transgender anthology, The
Phallus Palace. Hansen directs her attention to the reliance of Ken's narra
tive, which works to authenticate his hormonal transition from female to
man, on the concept of gender's biological determination, as well as on a
belief in the human dominance over other animals. Hansen argues that
Ken's transition-narrative depends on assigning limited agency to animals,
while reinforcing binary systems of gender oppression. But her analysis of
Ken's stake in his story, and her critique of reductionist views of human
animal relationships, are not the sole contributions of this essay. Hansen
also asks how one might construct gendered identities across species
boundaries without falling into the trap of biological determinism.
In yet another account of biology that confounds the presumed

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 STRYKER, CURRAH, & MOORE 17

dichotomy of sex difference, Aaron Norton and Ozzie Zehner discuss

"tetragametic chimerism," the creation of organisms with intermingled
cell lines. Noting that "chimeras" are also mythical monsters described in
Western literature as long ago as the eighth century b.c.e. Norton and
Zehner refract this cultural construct through the lens of trans-genomic
science to interrogate the multiple narratives that converge in the lives of
two mothers, both tetragametic chimeras, in order to explore the role of
genetic technologies in the cultural production of motherhood. In so
doing the authors show how sciences of life are also cultural practice.
Their analysis of chimerism is in dialogue with an eclectic range of criti
cal concepts, including Haraway's cyborg, Butler's gender performativi
ty, and Strathern's notions of kinship. Norton and Zehner argue that
chimerism is a trans-phenomena that has the potential to radically alter
our beliefs about embodiment, kinship, and motherhood.
Lucas Crawford's essay on "transgender without organs" offers an
explicitly Deleuzian approach to "trans-" questions of many sorts. At the
level of concrete description, the essay uses Crawford's experiences grow
ing up in small-town Nova Scotia to critique the urban biases of trans
gender theorizing and to demonstrate the geographical specificity of
various techniques and modalities of gender transitioning. At a higher
level of theorization, however, Crawford launches a brilliant account of
the interrelationship between embodiment, geographical location, spatial
movement, and affective experience. Drawing the same distinction
between "affect" (that which moves us) and "feeling" (that which holds
us in place) that Deleuze and Guattari make in A Thousand Plateaus, Craw
ford critically interrogates the most familiar trope of transgender experi
ence, "feeling trapped in the wrong body." In doing so, he links the
practice of materializing a transgender embodiment with critical practices
of deterritorialization that always point toward the horizon of new pos
sibilities, rather than with the sentimentality of "going home."
Like Crawford, Marcia Ochoa examines the relationship between
transgendering and specificity of place, in ways that resonate with the
state- and sovereignty-oriented analytical frameworks of both Najmabadi
and Loeb. Through her punning neologism "loca-lization," Ochoa
explores the complex processes in Venezuela through which transformistas
(individuals assigned male at birth who "present themselves in their
everyday lives as women") are produced as marginal to citizenship and
excluded from the political imaginary. Her essay examines the concepts

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18 INTRODUCTION

of citizenship and civil society not by analyzing the political theory of

participatory democracy, or by collecting empirical data on NGOs, but
rather by foregrounding the exclusion of certain citizens she calls locas.
The loca makes sense only within the complex, mutually constitutive
"processes of modernity, nation and globalization" that assemble uniquely
at any given geospatial location. Her ethnographic research in Venezuela
recounts how locas/transformistas pervert and rearticulate the "modern
project of disciplining nature" via their micropolitical bodily practices. In
doing so, their interventions (re)create the affective, aesthetic, and
structural projects of citizenship.
The excluded bodies of the locas described by Ochoa find their coun
terpart in Clare Sear's concept of the "problem body," which Sears devel
ops as a more generalized form of Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla's
notion of the "deviant body." By juxtaposing freak show displays of gen
der nonconformists in nineteenth-century San Francisco with the regula
tion and production of normatively gendered bodies in public space, Sears
launches a broader discussion of how certain kinds of bodies (such as the
bodies of racialized others, of the "maimed" or "crippled," as well as non
normatively gendered bodies) become targets of certain state-sanctioned
operations?including, but not limited to, the operation of exclusion
from civic life. And as was the case with Ochoa's locas, Sears's problem
bodies can likewise become the site of contestatory practices that chal
lenge the state's organization and control of the territory it occupies.
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes takes the notion of the loca in yet
another direction. In his hands, transloca becomes an "enabling vernacular
critical term that accounts for the intersection of space (geography) and
sexuality in the work and lived experience of queer diasporic artists who
engage in male-to-female drag." The centerpiece of La Fountain-Stokes's
article is a reading (performative in itself) of Jorge Merced's performance
of Ramos Otero's story "Loca de la locura," in El Bolero, as that of a
transloca. For La Fountain-Stokes, "trans-" mediates and conjoins the
translocal and the transgender. In this sense, he contends, "trans-" does
not necessary connote "unstable, or in between, or in the middle of
things, but rather...the core of transformation?change, the power or
ability to mold, reorganize, reconstruct, construct?and of longitude: the
transcontinental, transatlantic, but also transversal."
Shifting the national and political focus of the volume back toward
Western Asia, Rustem Ertug Altinay offers a critical biography of Bulent

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 STRYKER, ?JRRAH, i MOORE 19

Ersoy, a popular performer of Ottoman classical music in present-day

Turkey, who happens to be transsexual. Altinay shows how multiple cul
tural and social institutions construct an identity for Bulent Ersoy that is
suitable for public consumption, weaving between knowledge of her life
prior to transitionmg as well as her current life. Ersoy's public persona
engages with contemporary meanings of being Muslim, and being upper
class, as well as being transsexual. Altinay recounts how, in the process of
her transition, Ersoy's persona progressively challenged codes of mascu
linity through the medium of music. He then contrasts this deployment/
contestation of masculinity with the exaggeratedly Muslim, and exagger
atedly upper-class and feminine, presentation of self that has enabled
Ersoy to survive and thrive under highly disciplinary codes of gendered
behavior and appearance.
Robin Bauer writes of his sociological participation/observation in
BDSM communities in Western Europe and the United States, and inter
views with fifty other members of these communities. Bauer defines
BDSM as a broad range of embodied practices that may or may not
include bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism. Treating these infor
mants as experts on their own phenomenologically experienced, socially
situated, and materially embodied lives, Bauer interrogates their expertise
to establish BDSM as a venue in which individuals transgress social taboos,
including gender strictures, often with erotic effects. He argues that these
communities have a highly attenuated and deeply embodied understand
ing of nonheteronormative gender identities that enable productive trans
formation within the context of safe erotic playgrounds. Such BDSM
experiences have the potential to transform human relationships and
social power in the social worlds beyond the safe spaces of BDSM play.
Hala Kamal's contribution, "Translating Women and Gender: The
Experience of Translating The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cul
tures into Arabic," positions "trans-" as a problem of translation. In this
piece, Kamal examines the politics and processes of translating the word
"gender" from English to Arabic. "Trans-gender" in this contribution's
iteration is not about individual gender transitivity, but rather about the
attempt to migrate the concept of "gender" across linguistic and cultural
barriers. Kamal, a member of the Women and Memory Forum, the group
that translated the encyclopedia, was charged with the task of translating
"gender." The impossibility of the attempt to make "gender" legible in
Arabic, with all the English specificities and connotations valued by the

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2 0 INTRODUCTION

translator?socially constructed and feminist, among others?and finding

or creating a term that would work with Arabic language grammatical
rules was revealed by the author's ultimate choice: a transliteration, al
jender.

Most issues of WSQ have a section that revisits a "feminist classic,"

whether it be poetry or prose, fiction or visual pieces. For the Trans
issue, we present C. L. Cole and Shannon L. C. Cate's meditations on
Adrienne Rich's landmark 1980 essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and
Lesbian Existence." Although Rich's crucial intervention has faded into
the distance in many feminist and queer studies landscapes, Cole and Cate
remind us of the importance of its theoretical operations, such as denatu
ralizing heterosexuality and viewing the lesbian continuum as "a strategic
mechanism for generating politically viable identities and alliances." They
suggest that Rich's thought should not be seen as occupying only one
end of several related binaries: essentialist not constructionist, second
wave rather than next wave, feminist in opposition to queer. Instead, in
their incisive commentary, they show how Rich's critical frameworks
can be transposed to imagine a "transgender continuum on which so
called male-born men and female-born women can find themselves
building political connections with those whose gender is more obvi
ously outside society's narrow 'frame' of the normal."
The call for papers for the Trans- issue garnered a number of respons
es from individuals interested in questions of pedagogy. Rather than
selecting just one author to write a full-length article, we chose a format
that would spark dialogue and debate among a number of individuals,
writing from a range of perspectives. Vic Mu?oz and Ednie Kaeh Garri
son agreed to curate a "textual conversation" on "TransPedagogies." The
questions participants wrangled with are too numerous to completely
inventory here, but to provide some sense of the range and depth, a few
of them are: How does the concept of "gender identity" fail to describe
the dialogical processes through which gender is constituted? How does
trans-disciplinarity in the academy contest the boundaries between
researchers and participants, and how might it be analogized to trans
gendering? How does the presence of "trans-" students in the classroom
change how gender is taught? What should women's colleges do when
they admit female students who subsequently come out as "trans-"?
WSQ regularly includes a section called "Alerts and Provocations,"

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 STRYKER, CURRAH, & MOORE 21

whose purpose is to focus readers' attention on matters of topical interest

or timely political significance. In this issue, Paisley Currah's contribu
tion, "Expecting Bodies: The Pregnant Man and Transgender Exclusion
from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act," highlights the issue of
trans/sexed bodies in public policy contexts. He uses the media sensation
of the "pregnant man" as a tease for readers, and then situates that inci
dent in a larger analysis of legal constructions of "unexpectedly sexed"
bodies. Lie shows how the particular gender logics framing the public
response to the pregnant man also governed the decision by the Demo
cratic leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives to cut "gender
identity" from a bill that would ban workplace discrimination based on
sexual orientation.
Finally, the content we have described above is interspersed with
images, poetry, creative prose, and book reviews, all selected because of
their potential thematic connections to "trans-." We won't attempt to
render those interjections into the thumbnail sketches that define the par
ticular academic form known as the "introduction to the special issue,"
but we do invite readers to approach those selections both as stand-alone
pieces with their own (in-transitive) integrity, and as fragments whose
migrations into this special issue bring new, unanticipated meanings to
"trans-."

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank WSQ's outgoing general editors, Cindi Katz and
Nancy Miller, for the original invitation to curate this special issue;
WSQ's new general editors, Victoria Pitts-Taylor and Talia Schaffer, for
their work shepherding the project to completion; WSQ editorial associ
ates Jess Bier and Stacie McCormick, for their conscientious labor on this
issue; fiction/visual images editor Susan Daitch and poetry editor Kathy
Ossip, for their thoughtfulness in selecting material appropriate to the
issue's theme; the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments on
the articles; and Rayden Sorock, a student at Purchase College, State
University of New York, for his help in coordinating the book reviews,
readers' reports, and other details for the journal.

SUSAN STRYKER is an associate professor of gender studies at Indiana Univer

sity. She is the author or editor of several books, most recently the intro
ductory text Transgender History (Seal Press. 2008), as well as the Emmy

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2 2 INTRODUCTION

Award-winning public television documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot

at Comptons Cafeteria (ITVS/Framelme, 2005).

PAISLEY CURRAH teaches political science at Brooklyn College of The City

University of New York. He is a coeditor, with Richard M. Juang and
Shannon Price Minter, of Transgender Rights (Minnesota University Press,
2006). He is a founding board member of the Transgender Law and Pol
icy Institute. His next book, The United States of Gender: Regulating Trans
gender Identities, is forthcoming from New York University Press.

LISA JEAN MOORE is a professor of sociology and gender studies at Purchase

College. She teaches courses in feminist theory; the sociology of birth
and death; science, technology, and queer theory; and the sociology of
men. Her previous book, Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man's Most Precious
Fluid, is published by NYU Press. She has just completed the book Miss
ing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility (NYU Press) with Monica Casper.

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