Graduate Journal of Social Science

Articles

• Revisiting the “Wildcat Strike in the Gender Factory”: Material Effects of Classification

  j. vreer verkerke

  • Abstract

    Taking up a central metaphor of “the wildcat strike in the gender factory” from Dwight Billings and Thomas Urban’s formative 1982 article “The Sociomedical Construction of Transsexualism: An Interpretation and Critique,” I trace how trans* lives are tied in with law and medicine, and how psycho-medical classifications affect material lives of trans* people. I question several core elements of contemporary gatekeeping to trans* healthcare. Next, I describe the material effects that classification discourse and medical practice have on the history and future of gender diversity. I argue that classifications serve among other things as a means to limit and control various genders and bodies. In the last part, I take a closer look on the struggle for liberation from these shackles. While Billings and Urban see the trans* phenomenon as a “wildcat strike in the gender factory,” resisting imposed gender categories, this essay explores how prophetic the authors were.

    Keywords

    transgender, depathologisation, classification, medicine

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  • pp. 10–23

• Transition as Decreation: A Transfeminist Phenomenology of Mixed/Queer Orientation

  Jacob R. Lau

  • Abstract

    This phenomenological autoethnographic account reflects on moments from the first five years of the author’s transition from female-to-male while attending UC Berkeley and Harvard Divinity School. Lau unpacks the affects of racialization and sexualization on his medicalized mixed race trans male body. He meditates extensively on the relationship between loss of his body’s sedimented citational history to visibility and disorientation during transition by engaging with Anne Carson’s concept of decreation, and Sara Ahmed’s work on mixed genealogies and queer orientations. By thinking through transition as decreative rather than purely generative and linear, Lau demonstrates that social and medical transition unearth nonlinear histories of sedimented acts on queer of color bodies. Lau also makes the argument for extending Ahmed’s concept of “seeing slantwise” as a queer orientation pertaining to queer sexualities and mixed race genealogies to Asian American trans identity and experience. More than a singular affect grounded in presentism (understanding the current moment as only what is “eternal” and “real”), seeing slantwise opens up mixed trans bodies to nonlinear ways of organizing and feeling out their embodied histories that does not adhere to cisnormative time.

    Keywords

    phenomenology, Trans of Color critique, Critical Mixed Race Studies, racialized masculinities, cisnormative time

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  • pp. 24–43

• A received notion of masculinity/ Ivory Tower

  Julius Thissen

  • No abstract available.
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  • pp. 44–46

• Past Caring About Passing

  Saoirse Caitlin O’Shea

  • Abstract

    This is an essay concerned with sex, or more specifically my recent experiences of sex, sexual attraction and how they seem to help define me. As a story about sex it is (possibly) salacious and will reveal things about me that some may regard as private, better left unsaid and unsuitable in an academic essay. Except that I am not an academic and this is not an academic essay but a story of someone usually identified as a (transsexual) woman. Except I don’t identify myself as a binary transsexual woman but as a non-binary assigned male at birth (AMAB) person. In writing about my sex life I want to ask a few questions about (my) gender, sexuality, identity and deception.

    Sex, at least for me, can be risky in more ways than one. I’m anally receptive but sexual risk for me is not all about possible exposure to sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), it is also whether a sexual encounter might leave me as a victim of “trans panic”: will the next person who fucks me perhaps beat me senseless before claiming I deceived them and they didn’t know I was AMAB until it was too late? Am I at more risk, and also more deceptive, if a partner thinks I’m a cis-gender woman or a binary transsexual woman? Just where does the line between being “out and proud”, passing and deception lie for me as a non-binary AMAB surviving in a largely binary world?

    In this essay, I thus wish to explore how issues of sex and deception might interact and raise questions for me as a non-binary, AMAB person. In doing so I will attempt to interweave a critical analysis of some media stories of sexual deception with an autoethnographic account of sex. I am not wise enough to have answers to my questions, however, but instead hope that others may do so.

    Keywords

    passing, misidentification, sex by deception, transsexual, non-binary

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  • pp. 48–57

• Cybercocks and Holodicks: Renegotiating the Boundaries of Material Embodiment in Les-bi-trans-queer BDSM Practices

  Robin Bauer

  • Abstract

    In this article, the author considers how les-bi-trans-queer BDSM encounters may facilitate the redrawing and questioning of the boundaries of material bodies, employing the theoretical frameworks of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. Based on the analysis of forty-nine in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews with les-bi-trans-queer BDSM practitioners in the US and Western Europe, conducted and analyzed within an adapted version of the grounded theory framework, bodies emerged as boundary projects in les-bi-trans-queer BDSM practices. Drawing on Barad’s re-conceptualization of performativity as material, BDSM encounters are understood as apparatuses of phenomena that produce situationally determinate boundaries in intimate performative intra-actions of bodies. The meanings, properties and boundaries of the bodies, which enter the BDSM encounter, have not been settled yet, but they are re-drawn and renegotiated in the intra-action. In reference to Haraway’s concept of cyborg embodiment, the “cybercock” is introduced to discuss how strap-on dildos extend the surface of the body and renegotiate its boundaries. The term “holodick” is used for entities that are experienced as part of the body without being material in the usual sense. Both concepts question the boundaries between what is considered animate/inanimate and material/immaterial matter. The sexual and BDSM practices of interview partners therefore make an empirical contribution to the theoretical debate on transgender studies and new materialism.

    Keywords

    transgender, embodiment, BDSM, sexuality, new materialism

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  • pp. 58–82

• A Generous and Troubled Chthulucene: Contemplating Indigenous and Tranimal Relations in (Un)settled Worldings

  Sebastian De Line

  • Abstract

    This article is an analysis of key topics in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kinship in the Chthulucene. By following the game rules of the two string figures, cat’s cradle (non-Indigenous) and na’atl’o’ (Din’eh), the article weighs from Indigenous perspectives the political and ontological implications of such multispecies storytelling. Through its diffractive close reading, this paper puts in conversation Indigenous and non-Indigenous concepts and authors: Deleuzian rhizomatic deterritorialization and Indigenous self-determinacy, paradigmatic All My/Our Relations of Winona LaDuke, Leroy Little Bear, and Gregory Cajete, and the spider pimoa cthulhu. The aim is to recognize the multiplicity of forms of kinships or dependencies and to consider what kind of implications they have on marginalized assemblages.

    While Haraway suggests to call our contemporary planetary condition the Chthulucene, an epoch that requires from us to rethink relationality and co-existence, this paper looks at how the animacy of the world and the relationality of nonhuman and human animals in it create circumstances for “tranimals to emerge.” By giving ethical consideration to our material animacy, tranimacy will serve us as a tool to analyse the entanglement of nonhuman and human animals, trans materiality, and questions relating to agency.

    Keywords

    Chthulucene, Indigeneity, Trans, tranimality, diffraction, animacy, relationality, assemblage

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  • pp. 83–106

• Trans-speaking Voice-lessness: A Fictocritical Essay

  David Azul

  • Abstract

    How to emerge from a condition of not-being-able-to-speak-and-not-being-heard-with-what-one-has-to-say if the nature of one’s voice-lessness cannot be explored on the basis of the worldview in which one has been raised and with the methods of knowledge production in which one has been trained?

    How to imagine ever coming to voice if one is unable to recognize oneself in the sex category to which one has been allocated at birth and if most listeners regard the vocal embodiment of an unambiguously female or male gender as a necessary precondition for paying attention to an utterance as (potentially intelligible, human) speech?

    In this piece, I explore these and related questions via a hybrid mode of text production that I call trans-speaking. It draws on: memories entries in dictionaries and speech-language pathology textbooks; poststructuralist, posthumanist and transgender studies theories; and fictocritical writing practices. In a part imaginative, part theoretical account, a first person narrator revisits some of the scenes from their life; being addressed and spoken about; growing up in and becoming disenchanted with the medico-scientific worldview; working as a voice clinician; receiving and responding to reviewers’ comments on their work; applying for a change of name and gender entry; engaging with medical approaches to gender transitioning. These textual re-enactments that are interwoven with elaborations on key theoretical concepts are designed to invite readers to consider the following suggestion: What is taken for granted in some academic and everyday discourses as the mere givenness of human properties (e.g. a person’s status as a subject, their gender/sex, body, agency) are produced and transformed by an entanglement of discursive-material forces, which operate as constraints on the notion and practice of voice in its material and metaphorical senses?

    Keywords

    Voice, trans embodiments, transgressing disciplinary boundaries, exclusionary practices, material-discursive agency

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  • pp. 107–134

• Dismantling the Transgender Brain

  Eric Llaveria Caselles

  • Abstract

    In this paper, I analyze in detail a neuroscientific research paper that investigates the structural connectome of transmen and transwomen in relation to cismen and ciswomen. Situated within the frame of Feminist Science Studies and from an outsider-within perspective, my analysis meets three objectives. First, it provides an understanding of the research presented in the paper: what is the research question, which methods are they using, which paradigms do they follow? Second, it problematizes the findings of the research paper and the interpretation thereof by focusing on different conceptualizations of sex/gender within neuroscience; the limits of neuroimaging technologies and the privileging of particular lines of interpretations. Finally, it reflects upon the challenges of this exercise by asking about the role of ignorance and learning in interdisciplinary work; the impact of epistemic hierarchies and the political and ethical dimensions of the research paper. My conclusion is that the lack of engagement of the neuroscientists with perspectives from gender studies and with the voices of trans people constitutes a severe neglect of the social and political responsibility of researchers and reinforces the oppression of the trans community.

    Keywords

    neuroscience, transgender, hardwiring paradigm, sex/gender binary, research ethics.

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  • pp. 135–159

• Synthetic Organism

  Joyce Gloria Floyd

  • No abstract available.
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  • pp. 160–162

• “You’re saying that’s a real person … underneath?”: The Horrors of the “Inorganic” in Jaume Collet-Serra’s House of Wax (2005)

  Robin Alex McDonald and Dan Vena

  • Abstract

    Picking up one win and two nominations at the 26th Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Supporting Actress, Worst Picture and Worst Remake, it seems like House of Wax (2005) merits little academic attention. Although critical reception for the film was dismal, noteworthy public attention was given to the casting of Paris Hilton and to her memorable death sequence in which her character is impaled through the head with a pole. Although one can read Hilton’s involvement as a transparently desperate attempt to capitalize on the heiress’s cultural popularity at the time, we argue that the choice to cast Hilton – a celebrity who became well-known for her “plastic” or “fake” aesthetic – further emphasizes the narrative’s preoccupation with material forms and properties. Interpreting the film’s narrative as a classic tale of “good” versus “evil” (in which normative embodiment is coded as “good” and the desire to alter, re-configure, or de-“naturalize” the body as “evil”), this essay considers how House of Wax sheds light on normative fears of the body-as-object. It contends that in positioning desires for corporeal malleability as horrific or perverse, the film channels dominant cultural attitudes toward hyperfemme gender presentations and transgender bodies, both of which are discursively tied to the “inorganic.”

    Keywords

    horror, skin, inorganic, Paris Hilton, trans reading

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  • pp. 163–177