Transgender Studies, Transgender Politics

History of Consciousness 80E

knowledge & prepositions

• speaking for• knowing about• speaking over• writing over• writing on

knowledge & prepositions

• knowledge by• written by• knowledge from

problems

• knowledge by can be uncritical• knowledge by can efface (cover over)

differences within categories• knowledge by can lead to uncritical

use of “the” (as in “the” transgender or transsexual experience)

Thinking with

• shifting prepositions here changes the kind of knowledge production we’re working towards.

practices of thinking with

• listen well. pay good attention. make sure you try to hear what someone is saying instead of translating it into something more familiar for you.

• don’t speak over or for others. • know that your experience may

usefully overlap with another person’s, but it also might not.

thinking with care

• don’t assume your experience to be universal or to be the same as that of someone else.

• be respectful of the boundaries others (and we) set.

• And, at the same time, think critically about what we read/talk about! try to think and talk your way into new understandings!

• thinking with care is difficult! try to balance good listening and thoughtful understanding with critical thinking about the readings and our discussions.

• thinking with care means being speculative And critical. and respectful.

inappropriate

• do not ask questions about genitalia/hormones/surgeries.

• never ask a transperson their ‘real’ name –their real name is the one they go by.

inappropriate assumptions

• don’t assume it’s ok to ask someone re their sexual preference

• most importantly: don’t assume someone identifies as male *or* female. connected: pronouns.

good practices

• do you have a pronoun preference?• did you like the reading?• cool bike/jacket/…

class survey –pass to front

• What does “transgender” mean to you?• Why are you taking this class? What do

you hope to learn?• anyone you missed on the syllabus?

cool websites/videos you want to share with me or think would be useful?

• worries, concerns, comments?

changes in “transgender”

• Stryker chronicles how “academic attention to transgender issues has shifted … from the field of abnormal psychology, which imagined transgender phenomena as expressions of mental illness, and from the field of literary criticism, which was fascinated with representations of cross-dressing that it fancied to be merely symbolic, into fields that concern themselves with the day-to-day workings of the material world” (2).

history of the term “transgender”

• Virginia Prince• Leslie Feinberg (umbrella/pangender)• Stryker!

Stryker on “transgender”

• the term calls “attention to the fact that ‘gender,’ as it is lived, embodied, experienced, performed, and encountered, is more complex and varied than can be accounted for by the currently dominant binary sex/gender ideology of Eurocentric modernity” (3).

transgender studies

• For Stryker, transgender studies concerns itself “with anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes visible the normative linkages we generally assume to exist between the biological specificity of the sexually differentiated human body, the social roles and statuses that a particular form of body is expected to occupy, the subjectively experienced relationship between a gendered sense of self and social expectations of gender-role performance, and the cultural mechanisms that work to sustain or thwart specific configurations of gendered personhood” (3).

transgender studies is political

• “The field asks why it should matter, ethically and morally, that people experience and express their gender in fundamentally different ways. It concerns itself with what we –we who have a passionate stake in such things – are going to do, politically, about the injustices and violence that often attend the perception of gender nonnormativity and atypicality, whether in ourselves or others” (3).

transgender studies is CRITICAL

• “Transgender studies enables a critique of the conditions that cause transgender phenomena to stand out in the first place, and that allow gender normativity to disappear into the unalyzed, ambient background” (3).

• For Stryker, “ultimately, it is not just transgender phenomena per se that are of interest, but rather the manner in which these phenomena reveal the operations of systems and institutions that simultaneously produce various possibilities of viable personhood, and eliminate others” (3).

transgender + knowledge!

• Stryker writes: “Transgender phenomena … point the way to a different understanding of how bodies mean, how representation works, and what counts as legitimate knowledge” (9).

transgender knowledge/subjugated

knowledges• Citing Foucault, Stryker argues that “subjugated knowledges” are present within and hidden by (naturalized) systems and institutions.

• Indeed, “subjugated knowledges” are “a whole series of knowledges that have been disqualified as nonconceptual knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated knowledges, naïve knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity” (13).

subjugated knowledges and knowing/thinking with

• our class brings together “subjugated knowledges” –those that Stryker highlights –with critical and speculative practices of thinking with care.

• our goal you ask? to get at good understandings through looking at prose, fiction, And academic articles in order to figure out how to better understand transgender experiences and therefore be better able to change/challenge our worlds.

enrollment stuff

• your name, both preferred and as it might appear in the ucsc forms we’ll be accessing to check enrollment things (apologies!)

• enrolled?• your section/t.a. if you know• your email. written Very Clearly.