What is at stake in acknowledging transgender studies' Anglophone roots in the global North and West? What kinds of politics might emerge from challenging the assumption that biological sex—or the categories "man" and "woman"—is stable and self-evident across time, space, and culture? This collection asks how trans scholarship can decolonize, rather than reproduce, dominant imaginaries of sexuality and gender.
The issue highlights roadblocks as well as unexpected openings in the global circulation of trans politics and culture. A First Nations scholar recovers lost tribal knowledge of non-Eurocentric gender. A Thai trans filmmaker negotiates culturally incommensurable categories of self. Two contributors consider what is lost as the term transgender replaces local, vernacular categories of difference in India. A study of genderqueer childhood in Peru disrupts colonial ethnographer-informant roles, while another author critiques the colonialist ethnography on the sarimbavy, gender nonconforming categories of Madagascar. Another essay follows the global commodity chain of synthetic hormones to explore the biopolitics of transgender bodies and race. Finally, a roundtable discussion among a transnational panel of activists, culture makers, and scholars offers perspectives on decolonizing the transgender imaginary that range from the celebratory to the cynical.

The journal GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies is where queer theory has defined and transformed itself. On the occasion of the GLQ’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the editors, authors, and readers of the journal commemorate its impact on the field. The issue includes an extended “GLQ Forum” that looks back at specific articles and special issues, examines the significance and impact of each, and includes critiques and considerations of how these key works continue to resonate. A special section highlights and reflects on the contributions of major theorists such as Cathy Cohen, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Susan Stryker.

Contributors: Jafari S. Allen, Marlon M. Bailey, Gabby Benavente, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Andy Campbell, V Varun Chaudhry, Mel Y. Chen, Jih-Fei Cheng, Oliver Coates, Cathy Cohen, Rachel Corbman, Carolyn Dinshaw, Allen Durgin, Elizabeth Freeman, John S. Garrison, Julian Gill-Peterson, Chase Gregory, Sarah Haley, David M. Halperin, Christina B. Hanhardt, Scott Herring, Heather Love, Dana Luciano, Whitney Monaghan, Marcia Ochoa, John Petrus, Elliott H. Powell, Nic John Ramos, Chandan Reddy, Richard T. Rodríguez, Nayan Shah, Stephanie Shelton, C. Riley Snorton, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, L. H. Stallings, Susan Stryker, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Karen Tongson, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Rachel Walerstein, Mary Zaborskis

Using the gut as a starting point, this special issue focuses on the idea of the visceral as a trope for the carnal and bloody logic that organizes life. It brings together scholars working in food studies, American studies, sexuality and queer studies, and critical race theory who are keen not only to understand patterns of bodily production and consumption but also to propose new theoretical scaffoldings for our understanding of the intersection of race, food, the human, and the animal. These essays highlight the moments, texts, and processes that link food, flesh, and the alimentary tract to systems of pleasure—as well as to historical and political systems of inequality. The contributors seek to unearth structures of feeling, sensing, and embodiment that have been obscured either by colonialist historiography or political prejudice.

Queen for a Day connects the logic of Venezuelan modernity with the production of a national femininity. In this ethnography, Marcia Ochoa considers how femininities are produced, performed, and consumed in the mass-media spectacles of international beauty pageants, on the runways of the Miss Venezuela contest, on the well-traveled Caracas avenue where transgender women (transformistas) project themselves into the urban imaginary, and on the bodies of both transformistas and beauty pageant contestants (misses). Placing transformistas and misses in the same analytic frame enables Ochoa to delve deeply into complex questions of media and spectacle, gender and sexuality, race and class, and self-fashioning and identity in Venezuela.

Beauty pageants play an outsized role in Venezuela. The country has won more international beauty contests than any other. The femininity performed by Venezuelan women in high-profile, widely viewed pageants defines a kind of national femininity. Ochoa argues that as transformistas and misses work to achieve the bodies, clothing and makeup styles, and postures and gestures of this national femininity, they come to embody Venezuelan modernity.

Winner of the 2017 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

From Caitlyn Jenner to Laverne Cox, transgender people have rapidly gained public visibility, contesting many basic assumptions about what gender and embodiment mean. The vibrant discipline of Trans Studies explores such challenges in depth, building on the insights of queer and feminist theory to raise provocative questions about the relationships among gender, sexuality, and accepted social norms.   

 

Trans Studies is an interdisciplinary essay collection, bringing together leading experts in this burgeoning field and offering insights about how transgender activism and scholarship might transform scholarship and public policy. Taking an intersectional approach, this theoretically sophisticated book deeply grounded in real-world concerns bridges the gaps between activism and academia by offering examples of cutting-edge activism, research, and pedagogy.