Abstract
In this edited volume, Enke and the contributing authors respond to the long-standing marginalization of trans theory and scholarship within the Academy, seeking to bring transgender studies into deliberate conversation with feminist and gender studies. The collection presents transgender broadly as both a perspective and a practice, functioning in both cases to complicate and ultimately deconstruct binary categorizations including but not limited to gender. In the book’s introduction, Enke renders transgender a verb (trans gender) as often as a noun and, in so doing, holds up transgender as a site of power in terms of its potential politics of “trifold awareness.” This awareness names how gender norms and hierarchies are established and policed, affirms that many people transgress or do not conform to conventional gendered expectations, and insists that this gender flexibility offers tremendous value to society. Transgender is, in this context, an act of “crossing” identity categories related to gender, not merely the marker of those individuals who hold significant cross-gender identification. It is an invitation to other border crossings and consequently holds the potential to open alliances within and across other identity categories. Each of the following 12 chapters takes up a unique application or treatment of this trans politics, highlighting the tensions and possibilities transgender introduces to a wide range of settings, including but not limited to rights discourses, university settings, gender and feminist studies, individual and collective identity, and neoliberal economies.
The chapters examine transgender perspectives in three sections: epistemologies, categorical insufficiencies, and unexpected alliances. In each section, Enke and the contributing authors expose critical tensions in and among taken-for-granted categories of woman, feminist, and transgender (to name just a few) as well as their associated rhetorics and discourses. Enke, for instance, explores the tensions experienced in the classroom related to the often-problematic adoption of cisgender as an identity marker and gendered performance. Of particular relevance to the social work classroom, where cis identity claims are often named as a marker of ally status, Enke questions how these claims may actually restrict and further regulate trans experiences. Julia Serano troubles the categories of woman and femme in a chapter exploring the potential power of reclaiming femininity as a transgender practice, highlighting as well the tensions between misogyny, trans-misogyny, and compulsory femininity. In a subsequent chapter with clear policy and advocacy implications, Dean Spade examines how transgender rights discourse—commonly invoked in hate crimes legislation—falls short of its emancipatory potential, often in fact replicating the structural violence it purports to address. In contrast, Spade calls for a shift in perspective from transgender rights to an articulated strategy of trans resistance that seeks to dismantle systems that structurally harm people who defy gendered expectations.
While the volume is explicitly multi- and transdisciplinary, it is certainly of interest and value to social work practitioners, educators, and scholars interested in trans analysis and troubling some of the categorical truisms evident in feminist social work practice and research. This collection presents trans as a site of transition and negotiation, a practice of engaging with transition and celebrating the flux of boundaries and expectations. From the extremely useful “Note on Terms and Concepts” through the 12 contributed chapters, the text demonstrates that terminology, identity, and theoretical positioning are constantly in transition and that trans analysis offers a perspective through which to complicate taken-for-granted expectations of gender, gendered performance, and gender identities.