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Abstract

In this essay, I discuss the subtle discursive shifts which have made transgenderism in the USA and Europe into simultaneously a mark of the historically specific definitional cleaving of homosexuality from gender variance, a trendy and stylistic shift from gender androgyny within lesbian communities to gender variance within gender-queer communities, a sign of an internal split within feminism between the stabilization of the category of woman and the undermining of the coherence of the category within queer theory. At the same time, I show how transgenderism has been installed within a “global gay” system as part of the hegemony of US taxonomies – the addition of “T” to the acronym “LGBT” allows for the neat division and explanation of a very wide range of translocal phenomena in terms of the US model. So, how are we to understand and explain the impact of transgenderism upon not only traditional gendering but also upon queer communities and even on the ebb and flow of sexual and gender definition globally?

Keywords

Transgender politics transgender films female masculinities global LGBT queer

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Global female masculinities

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