THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION AND TRANSGRESSION OF GENDER II
If the affinity between transgender studies and gender studies is obvious, we recognize that it is not necessarily easy. Just about everywhere, trans-literacy remains low. Transgender studies is all but absent in most university curricula, even in gender and women’s studies programs. For the most part, institutionalized versions of women’s and gender studies incorporate transgender as a shadowy interloper or as the most radical outlier within a constellation of identity categories (e.g., LGBT). Conversation is limited by a perception that transgender studies only or primarily concerns transgender-identified individuals—a small number of “marked” people whose gender navigations are magically believed to be separate from the cultural practices that constitute gender for everyone else. Such tokenizing invites the suggestion that too much time is spent on too few people; simultaneously it obscures or refuses the possibility that transgender studies is about everyone in so far as it offers insight into how and why we all “do” gender.
—A. Finn Enke, Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (2)
Required Readings
- Enke, Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies, Introduction: “Transfeminist Perspectives” (1-15), “Note on Terms and Concepts” (16-20), Part I “‘This Much Knowledge’: Flexible Epistemologies”: Ch. 1 “Gender/Sovereignty” (23-33), Ch. 2 “‘Do These Earrings Make Me Look Dumb?’ Diversity, Privilege, and Heteronormative Perceptions of Competence within the Academy” (34-44), Ch. 3 “Trans. Panic. Some Thoughts toward a Theory of Feminist Fundamentalism” (45-59), Ch. 4“The Education of Little Cis: Cisgender and the Discipline of Opposing Bodies” (60-77)
Due This Week
Weekly journal entry including main points from readings and observations about language from daily life.
Reading Guidelines and Analysis Assignments
Optional submision: first six pages of draft of term paper