susan stryker transgender history summary

By reclaiming a homophobic slur as the name for a movement and, soon after, a field of study, queer activists and scholars indicated the significance of violence and stigma in the experience of gender and sexual outsiders. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, queer emerged as an activist slogan that sought to capture the radical energies of struggles for sexual and gender freedom in the face of the AIDS crisis. Whether and in what context these fields should be seen as distinct is a live question however, queer and transgender are linked in their activist investments, their dissident methodologies, and their critical interrogation of and resistance to gender and sexual norms.Ĭhallenging discrete categories of identity has been central to the work of both queer and transgender studies from the start. Transgender studies also defines itself against identity, offering a challenge to the perceived stability of the two-gender system. In distinction to both gay and lesbian studies and sexuality studies, queer studies defines itself as a critical field that questions stable categories of identity. While queer is associated primarily with nonnormative desires and sexual practices, and transgender is associated primarily with nonnormative gender identifications and embodiments, it is both theoretically and practically difficult to draw a clear line between them. What is the place of queer in transgender studies? The fields of queer studies and transgender studies are linked through shared histories, methods, and commitments to transforming the situation of gender and sexual outsiders.

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.

While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. 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. 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. This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.

Susan stryker transgender history summary