by Jacob Lau

About Jacob Lau

Jacob Lau (he/him) is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Director of Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the editor of Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions and author of “His Body of Work, the Work of His Body: The Chronicles of Christopher Lee and Respect after Death” in Amerasia Journal.

Trans

book Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies

A critical genealogy of the keyword trans must start with the question of what appears as trans and why. Where we start defining how trans emerges shapes what is allowed to fall under the so-called umbrella of trans. For instance, if we understand trans to be an identity involving a person’s relationship to legal and medical definitions of gender and/or sex stemming from Europe and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but do not consider how legal and medical institutions are already informed by a much longer history of disciplinary colonial, imperial, racist, ableist, and classist state technologies, then our definition of trans will not be intersectional or critically engaged. This brings to the fore questions of methodology, interdisciplinarity, and field emergence of trans as a site of knowledge as well as gender and sex identities and subjectivities.