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Abstract
This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, "Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies," revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.

In response to concerns voiced by Judith Butler and Joan Copjec regarding the possible incompatibility of the discourses of Lacanian psychoanalysis and gender studies, this paper argues that gender studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis can hope for a meeting ground precisely around the topic of ``sexual difference.'' Questions about transgender subjectivities afford a point of entry for thinking through the impasses and political purchase of a necessarily contestatory integration of these two domains; however, imagining this integration requires in part an analysis of each discourse's limitations. This paper suggests that one of the limitations of Lacanian psychoanalysis resides in the too easy capitulation of the terms ``feminine'' and ``masculine'' to ``gendered'' readings. Arguing that Jacques Lacan's formulas of sexuation write against the facile collapse of sexual difference into gender identity, the paper considers what it would look like to conceptualize transgender subjectivity as an expression of the logic of sexual difference, ultimately suggesting there may be a way of reading transgenderism as a ``feminine'' phenomenon. The paper responds to two texts also invested in the integration of Lacanian psychoanalytic and queer/feminist concerns: Judith Butler's Antigone's Claim and Tim Dean's Beyond Sexuality. Dean's project to ``de-gender'' desire offers a reply to Butler's concerns about the compulsory heterosexuality of the Oedipal scene; however, both texts, in their preoccupation with scenes Oedipal and object based, occlude to some extent a ``feminine'' perspective and by extension significant ``feminine''/transgender insights concerning sexual difference.