Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis 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.

AbstractThis article explores the promise of an archipelagic analytic for transgender studies through an interpretive investigation of a beauty pageant in the Philippines. Drawing on transgender studies scholarship and the emergent field of archipelagic studies, this article traces how the pageant underwent a series of archipelagic turns when the slate of candidates shifted from representing nations to representing islands, provinces, and regions across the Philippine archipelago. This turn, the author argues, displaced the centrality of the nation and put forward a translocal and translingual focus that centered islandness and island-island relations as the primary categories of embodiment and performance. In the conclusion, this article argues more broadly that transgender studies, with its discontiguous and decentered character, can also be characterized in archipelagic terms. Taken together, this article adds a new heuristic to transgender studies scholarship, while also including transgender in the growing corpus of work in archipelagic American studies that challenges "continental exceptionalism."

Abstract
A larger game is at play with respect to the field of transgender subjectivities in India that goes beyond gender or sexuality, and enters the arena of contested cultures and historical erasures. It can be hypothesized that a contemporary transgender subject in India finds itself caught between the fading voice of precolonial and colonial history on the one hand, and the strong pull of globalization on the other, creating what can perhaps be imagined as a knotted relation of the (transgender) subject with historicity and temporality. A rather confounding gap lies between premodern conceptualizations of gender and sexuality that reside as cultural memory in the subject, carrying its own paleonymic weight, and the increasingly widening signifier transgender in the contemporary. The task of this article is to explore what can be found at this interstice, which promises a clue that is symptomatic of the shifting sands of culture, history, and memory as they play out in India, and how they may point toward a theorization of sexuality that lies away from its histories in the West.

Abstract
This roundtable discussion took place between August 2013 and January 2014 through e-mail. Eventually, two questions were posed, and participants individually e-mailed their responses in. The questions were posed in the hope of making space for a number of scholars, activists, and culture makers to take the pulse of transgender studies' political possibilities and limits and to talk practically about methods for creating change.

The recent visibility of transgender lives demonstrates the dawning of a new period in the potential to include transgender topics in sociology courses. The focus on transgender individuals, communities, and inclusive initiatives are gaining momentum on many public and private college and university campuses, awakening old and new curiosities, igniting student activists and advocates everywhere. Such developments provide an important opportunity for instructors who are motivated to create trans-friendly syllabi, courses, and classrooms. In this article, we briefly explore how transgender people have been used to teach sociological concepts and provide strategies to positively integrate transgender communities into the classroom. Ultimately, we intend this article to show new and more sensitive ways to include transgender experiences into a wide range of sociological courses.

Abstract
This essay is a set of reflections arising out of prolonged conversations in which we compared notes on our respective experiences as activist (Raina) and ethnographer (Aniruddha) working among, and to different extents belonging to, gender/sexually marginalized communities in eastern India. As we shall argue, the attempted universalization of transgender as a transnational "umbrella term" by the development (nongovernmental) sector, the state, and their funders tends to subsume South Asian discourses and practices of gender/sexual variance as merely "local" expressions of transgender identity, without interrogating the conceptual baggage (such as homo-trans and cis-trans binaries) associated with the transgender category. In the Indian context, this process bolsters the long-standing and continuing (post)colonial construction of hierarchies of scale between transnational, regional, and local levels of discourse and praxis, as evidenced in the relation between the hegemonic anglophone discourse of LGBTIQ identities recognized by the state and the development sector, on one hand, and forms of gender/sexual variance that are positioned as relatively regional or local on the other.

Abstract
This article explores the performance practices of Sean Dorsey, modern dance's first out transgender choreographer, in order to consider one embodied strategy for staging transgender histories. Utilizing extant LGBTQ archives, and then collecting oral histories himself, Dorsey develops a trans archival practice founded in collaboration, an ethic of care, and grassroots activism that he extends into live performance. Tracing the arc of Dorsey's practice in generating choreography from the archive, the authors ask how embodied artists move with history and consider his dance performance as a site of historical production.

Abstract
This article discusses the anglophone reception of the life and work of the East German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Particular attention is paid to the translation and marketing of von Mahlsdorf's memoir against the backdrop of Eastern Europe's purported transition to Western capitalist democracy. Using the concept of framing developed first by Erving Goffman and adapted to the study of translation by Albrecht Neubert and Gregory Shreve, and then Mona Baker, the author analyzes the ways in which the presentation of von Mahlsdorf's life in the translated memoir reflects a specific Western framing of queer lives, which is later altered in Doug Wright's award-winning play about von Mahlsdorf following the release of von Mahlsdorf's secret police file and the troubled progress of the so-called transition. The article demonstrates how the careful study of translations can challenge the universalizing of Western conceptual and temporal frames by highlighting the historical and contingent nature of our sexual selves.

Transgender people face unique issues in parentage, custody, and divorce cases. Many transgender people are raising children or wish to do so. This article examines the main legal issues facing transgender people who become parents by giving birth or impregnating a partner, through assisted reproduction, through marriage, by raising a child, or through adoption. In the past, some courts viewed a parent's gender transition as a sufficient reason to terminate parental rights. Today, the law has shifted to provide much more security for transgender parents, though significant bias still remains, particularly in divorce and child custody cases. In addition, many states have not yet fully addressed how to determine the legal parentage of children born through assisted reproduction. I analyze the legal landscape for transgender parents and spouses and offer critical suggestions to ensure that transgender people are able to protect their families and their parental rights.