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89 books match the query 'Transgender Studies' and 6 start with c

cover of Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History

Camp TV

Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History

Quinlan Miller

Duke University Press, 2019

Sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s are widely considered conformist in their depictions of gender roles and sexual attitudes. In Camp TV Quinlan Miller offers a new account of the history of American television that explains what campy meant in practical sitcom terms in shows as iconic as The Dick Van Dyke Show as well as in more obscure fare, such as The Ugliest Girl in Town. Situating his analysis within the era's shifts in the television industry and the coalescence of straightness and whiteness that came with the decline of vaudevillian camp, Miller shows how the sitcoms of this era overflowed with important queer representation and gender nonconformity. Whether through regular supporting performances (Ann B. Davis's Schultzy in The Bob Cummings Show), guest appearances by Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly, or scripted dialogue and situations, industry processes of casting and production routinely esteemed a camp aesthetic that renders all gender expression queer. By charting this unexpected history, Miller offers new ways of exploring how supposedly repressive popular media incubated queer, genderqueer, and transgender representations.
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cover of Care without Pathology: How Trans- Health Activists Are Changing Medicine

Care without Pathology

How Trans- Health Activists Are Changing Medicine

Christoph Hanssmann

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Examining trans- healthcare as a key site through which struggles for health and justice take shape

 

Over the past two decades, medical and therapeutic approaches to transgender patients have changed radically, from treating a supposed pathology to offering gender-affirming care. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and Buenos Aires, Care without Pathology moves across the Americas to show how trans- health activists have taken on the project of depathologization.

 

In New York, Christoph Hanssmann examines activist attempts to overturn bans on using public health dollars to fund trans- health care. In Argentina, he traces how trans- activists marshaled medical statistics and personal biographies to reveal state violence directed against trans- people and travestis. Hanssmann also demonstrates the importance of understanding transphobia in the broader context of gendered racism, ableism, and antipoverty, arguing for the rise of a thoroughly coalition-based mass mobilization.

 

Care without Pathology highlights the distributive arguments activists made to access state funding for health care, combating state arguments that funding trans- health care is too specialized, too expensive, and too controversial. Hanssmann situates trans- health as a crucible within which sweeping changes are taking place—with potentially far-reaching effects on the economic and racial barriers to accessing care.

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cover of Cisgender: Disorienting a Category

Cisgender

Disorienting a Category

Perry Zurn

Duke University Press, 2026

In Cisgender, Perry Zurn turns an incisive yet playful eye toward the “norm” against which transgender gets defined. A cisgender person is informally understood as someone who doctors called male or female at birth, became a boy or girl, and finally lived as a man or woman—without fuss. It’s this “without fuss” that anchors the cis/trans binary as it has come to be understood and belies the complex relationship all people have with gender. How did this category arise? And what else might it do? Cisgender is the first book to trace the story of how cis entered contemporary gender lexicons. Utilizing unplumbed archives and fresh interviews, Zurn offers a critical history of the term from the 1990s to the present, deftly defamiliarizing and reimagining cis at the same time. This unique examination of cisgender is a must-read for all readers invested in trans life and the futures of gender.
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cover of Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender

Cistem Failure

Essays on Blackness and Cisgender

Marquis Bey

Duke University Press, 2022

In Cistem Failure Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks, What does it mean to have a gender that “matches” one’s sex---that is, to be cisgender---when decades of feminist theory have destroyed the belief that there is some natural way to be a sex? Moving from the The Powerpuff Girls to the greeting “How ya mama’n’em?” to their own gender identity, Bey finds that cisgender is too flat as a category to hold the myriad ways that people who may or may not have undergone gender-affirmative interventions depart from gender alignment. At the same time, blackness, they contend, strikes at the heart of cisgender’s invariable coding as white: just as transness names a non-cis space, blackness implies a non-cis space. By showing how blackness opens up a way to subvert the hegemonic power of the gender binary, Bey makes a case for an antiracist gender abolition project that rejects cisgender as a regulatory apparatus.
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cover of Climbing

Climbing

Hil Malatino

Duke University Press, 2026

Written by longtime climber Hil Malatino, Climbing explores the why of the sport, asking what pushes him and so many others to drag themselves to the gym and the crag time and again; to restructure their intimate lives around the pursuit of a new goal; and to devote thousands of hours forging their nerves to perform physical and mental feats while dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of feet off the ground. In chapters that explore gender, class, and sizeism in climbing culture, as well as grief, addiction, queer and trans-worldmaking, and the tensions between conservation and recreation, Climbing teases out how the art of navigating across rock can help us learn how to revel in being weird, vulnerable, and radically interdependent animals temporarily gifted the complicated tragicomedy of a body. It is a story of collective obsession and transformation that tracks how holding yourself on the wall helps you learn how to hold onto the ambiguities of life on earth.
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cover of Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom

Closures

Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom

Grace Lavery

Duke University Press, 2024

From The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Arrested Development to BoJack Horseman, the American sitcom revolves around crises that must be resolved by episode’s end, with a new crisis to come next week. In Closures, Grace Lavery reconsiders the genre’s seven-decade history as an endless cycle of crisis and closure that formally and representationally frames heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of both collapse and reconstitution. She shows that even the normiest family-based sitcoms rely on queer characters like Alice (The Brady Bunch) and Steve Urkel (Family Matters) who highlight how the family is perpetually incomplete and unstable. Analyzing the genre’s techniques and devices such as the laugh track and the cringe pan, Lavery also charts the shift to friend-group and workplace sitcoms like Friends and The Office, which she contends reflect a weakening of social ties in ways that place characters in an unending state of becoming. With this capacious yet svelte queer and trans theorization of the sitcom, Lavery demonstrates that the family ties that bind the genre’s normative heterosexuality are far more tenuous than we have been led to believe.
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