Trans
by
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. Since the 1990s, trans as a term has become a contested site of knowledge formation in the field of gender and sexuality studies. In similar ways to queer, the emergence of trans draws from a long tradition of politicized identities, intersectional power formations, and social processes that challenge both the potential and the limitations of political, social, disciplinary, and...
This essay may be found on page 237 of the printed volume.