READING COURSE MID – SEMESTER ASSIGNMENT

Submitted to Dr. Eligedi Rajkumar

Submitted by Harsha Roy
PhD English Literature

Literature review in the field of Transgender Studies

‘Gender’ is a word constructed by the society to identify and to culture individuals in a
particular way of life encompassing certain behaviour and attitudes that are considered
acceptable, appropriate, or desirable according to the people of that biological sex. The set of
activities performed by people to fulfil this societal construct is called ‘Gender role’. Gender-
roles are often determined by familial structure, ethnicity, access to rights, and other local
relevant factors and ideas. The LGBT community was formed in the year 1988. Although a
community, it was not until the 1990s that the members of various sections belonging to the
community began to experience equality and started respecting one another. Initially the
community did not include other sexual minorities like pansexual, asexual, intersex, fluids,
polyamorous, transvestitives, and other. Later the LGBT acronym began to be used as an
umbrella term for all sexually marginalized people.
Transgender, an umbrella term used to describe people whose gender identity (internal
feeling of being male, female or non-binary) and/or gender expression (the external
appearance), differs from the gender they were assigned at birth. Some people who identify
as transgender may not wish for the transition, while others may identify with the sex they
were assigned at birth yet express their gender in a way that breaks free of societal norms.
Academic attention to transgender issues has shifted over the decade from the field of
abnormal psychology, which imagined transgender phenomena as expressions of mental
illness, and from the field of literary criticism, which was fascinated with representations of
cross-dressing that it fancied to be merely symbolic, into fields that concern themselves with
the day-to-day workings of the material world. “Transgender” moved from the clinics to the
streets over the course of that decade, and from representation to reality.
What began as a buzzword of the early 1990s has established itself as the term of choice,
that calls attention to the fact that “gender,” as it is lived, embodied, experienced, performed,
and encountered, is more complex and varied than can be accounted for by the currently
dominant binary sex/gender ideology of Eurocentric modernity. By 1992, the tenuous
beginnings of the field were taking shape. The activist group Transgender Nation—whose
formation in 1992 as a focus group of the San Francisco chapter of Queer Nation marks the
emergence of a specifically transgender politics within the broader queer movement of the
early 1990s. The First International Conference on Cross-Dressing, Sex, and Gender, held in
1995 at California State University at Northridge, represented another benchmark in the
development of the transgender studies field. Increasingly, courses in transgender studies
were taught at universities across North America and Europe. By the end of the last century,
transgender studies could make a fair claim to being an established discipline, though one
with relatively scant institutional support.
 The emergence of transgender studies has closely paralleled the rise of queer studies, with
which it has enjoyed a close and sometimes vexed relationship. The queer movement allowed
transgender people to make compelling claims that they, too, had political grievances against
an oppressive heteronormative regime. Transgender studies initially took shape in that
political and intellectual ferment.
Transgender studies is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to the study of gender identity,
gender expression, gender embodiment and various issues of transgender and gender variant
populations. Stephen Whittle in his forward to The Transgender Studies Reader defines trans
identity as “anyone who does not feel comfortable in the gender role they were attributed
with at birth, or who has a gender identity at odds with the labels “man” or “woman” credited
to them by formal authorities.” Transgender phenomena, in short, point the way to a different
understanding of how bodies mean, how representation works, and what counts as legitimate
knowledge.
Judith Butler’s scholarship and particularly her notion of performativity—which she
theorizes throughout Gender Trouble (1990) and in subsequent work—has been foundational
for the field of queer theory, but it also has had significant impact to the field of transgender
studies. Gender, Butler argues, is not the same thing as sex and is not necessarily linked to the
concept of sex. Rather than being an innate expression that follows from being a given sex,
gender is a set of socially constructed roles, aesthetics, emotions, and other attributes that are
imposed on individuals of different sexes in order to have them conform to the expectations
of their society. Butler suggests that certain behaviours, when performed by certain people,
are gender-normative. These are behaviours that align with a person's assigned gender
category according to the regulations of the society they live in. Gender-normative
behaviours are typically socially encouraged, helping to codify the categories of man and
woman and further reinforce the gender binary. Gender non-conformity is a broad term that
refers to any action that falls outside of the permissible or expected attributes of each gender
category. Many people are gender non-conforming to some extent; some much more so than
others. Butler points out that gender non-conformity is socially punished, which is one way
that gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals experience societal oppression. It is people
acting in certain expected ways that makes gender “real.” Men and women acting as expected
makes masculinity and femininity exist. Butler terms this process “performative.” The
performative is not just a performance; it is a performance that makes itself real. Butler
develops her idea of performativity through references to drag performance in both Gender
Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993) elicits strong critiques from scholars in the
developing field of transgender studies.
In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (1998), Jay Prosser focuses on
Butler’s notion of performativity in order to explore queer theory’s blind spot when it comes
to trans embodiment: “As Butler exemplifies, queer theory has written of transitions as
discursive but it has not explored the bodiliness of gendered crossings” (Prosser 1998: 6).
External performance isn’t one that is the only thing accomplished through the concept of
being transgender for there is more at stake in order to truly be what they want. Again, the
“performance” aspect falls back unto the idea of heterosexual melancholia. In short, Prosser
suggests that Butler and queer theory alongside her find the idea of transition theoretically
useful, but only in valorising “the subject who crosses the lines of gender, not those of sex”
(Prosser 1998: 6).
Viviane K. Namaste refers to this very same idea as “the erasure of transsexual and
transgendered people” in the subtitle to her book, Invisible Lives (2000). Invisible Lives is the
first scholarly study of transgendered people—cross-dressers, drag queens and transsexuals—
and their everyday lives. For Namaste, Butler and other scholars miss the “context” of drag
performances and how through theorizing trans experience through drag, we miss not only
the “variety of reasons why people might choose to cross‐dress in a club” but also the fact
that trans identities exist off the stage. Namaste also critiques the hierarchy that is often
established— both implicitly and explicitly—by some feminist and queer theorists and
theories where transgender is a privileged site of queerness over and against transsexuals'
lives, bodies, specificity, and subjectivity. In Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and
Transgendered People, Namaste writes, "While the term 'transgender' has entered into public
discourse within certain Anglo-American academic and activist contexts, its use is challenged
by transsexuals."
In their books, both Prosser and Namaste seek to make a fuller range of trans experience
visible. Prosser theorizes transsexual embodiment, which he then applies to autobiographical
accounts, some of which had not previously been read as transgender narratives. In Sex
Change/Social Change, Namaste focuses on the everyday lives of trans people and shows
how they are made invisible not only by theoretical discourses, but also by societal
institutions. Namaste writes, "Yes, we can state that we are not men and not women when all
is well in the world. But would someone please tell me how to get an apartment when one is
neither a man nor a woman? Where does one find a physician to treat neither men nor
women? And an employer? My point is that this transgendered discourse is utopic, and one
profoundly informed by privilege: it assumes that one already has a job, housing, and access
to health care."
The Transgender Studies Reader illustrates how trans people were problematized by
science and society, and how trans people have responded by using the same intellectual tools
that have oppressed them to place the “Other” in the problematized position. It is intended to
provide a convenient introduction to the fi eld as it has developed over the past decade, an
overview of some of the earlier work that informed this scholarship, and a jumping-off point
for more sophisticated analyses in the next generation of inquiry. With The Transgender
Studies Reader, co-editors Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle successfully encapsulate the
evolutionary discourse of what (in the past decade) has been labelled “transgender studies.”
What makes The Transgender Studies Reader invaluable to the field is the ability of its
contributors to show how we have arrived at this moment, how individuals and ideas
responded to and built upon one another.
Stryker coedited The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (2013) with Aren Z. Aizura; launching
the journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (2014–present) with Paisley Currah; and
organizing, together with her colleagues at the University of Arizona, one of the first
conferences in the field, Trans*Studies (2016). In the introduction to The Transgender
Studies Reader 2, Stryker and Aizura explain the relationship between the two readers, with
the second “intended to complement, rather than compete with, volume one.” The first
volume serves “as an account of field formation,” containing essays from a wide historical
range “that laid important foundations for transgender studies.” By contrast, the second
volume sketches out “new directions in the field” by including almost exclusively “new work
that has appeared in print since 2005.” (Stryker and Aizura 2013: 3–4)
Another pivotal text in this field is the Transgender History. Stryker begins Transgender
History (2008) with a glossary of key terms, defining terms that most people are familiar with
—sex, gender, gender role, sexuality—alongside less broadly familiar terms—transgender,
genderqueer, gender neutral pronouns, cisgender, cissexual (Stryker 2008: 7–23). For all of
these terms, however, Stryker seeks “to complicate how we understand them,” creating more
capacious senses of what the familiar terms may mean, which makes space for the less
familiar terms to fit inside these conceptions.
Among the names in both of these texts, Leslie Feinberg and Kate Bornstein merit
consideration for their literary and theoretical contributions in addition to their work in
helping to shape the field of transgender studies. A transgender activist across the 1980s,
Feinberg released the widely popular semi‐autobiographical narrative, Stone Butch
Blues (1993), which has been analyzed within much trans scholarship. Following that
success, Feinberg contributed non‐fictional, theoretical texts—Transgender Warriors:
Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (1996) and Transgender Liberation:
Beyond Pink or Blue (1998)—that were thinking about how to consolidate the movement and
what its revolutionary potential might be.
In roughly the same time period, Bornstein released Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and
the Rest of Us (1994), an autobiographical and experimentally written text, which defined
trans experience with a wide purview. Bornstein cleverly incorporates cultural criticism,
dramatic writing, and autobiography to make her point that gender (which she distinguishes
from sex) is a cultural rather than a natural phenomenon. She suggests that “the culture may
not simply be creating roles for naturally-gendered people, the culture may in fact be creating
the gendered people.” Seeing queer theatre as a place in which xgender ambiguity and
fluidity can and should be explored, she includes in the book her play, Hidden: A Gender.
Bornstein uses the term “gender defenders” to describe those who work hard to maintain the
current rigid system of gender, and she claims that her “people” (i.e., the transgendered) are
just beginning to challenge the system and to demand acceptance and understanding.
Bornstein's witty style, personal approach, and frankness open doors to questioning gender
assumptions and boundaries.
Fifteen years after that, in the light of a consolidated field, Bornstein collaborated with S.
Bear Bergman, a trans man of a younger generation, on Gender Outlaws: The Next
Generation (2010), an anthology featuring short pieces in various formats. Roughly fifty
trans thinkers, some of whom also feature in Stryker’s volumes, reflect on their own trans
experiences. The existence of this volume is a tribute to the import of Bornstein’s initial book
and her continuing work, which has most recently included a revised edition of Gender
Outlaw (2016).

WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY
 Bornstein, Kate. 1994. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New
York: Routledge.
 Bornstein, Kate and S. Bear Bergman. 2010. Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation.
Berkeley: Seal Press.
 Butler, Judith. 2006. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd
edition. New York: Routledge.
 Feinberg, Leslie. 1993. Stone Butch Blues. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand. Feinberg, Leslie.
1996. Transgender Warriors. Boston: Beacon Press.
 Feinberg, Leslie. 1998. Transgender Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue. Boston:
Beacon Press.
 Namaste, Viviane. 2000. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and
Transgendered People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 Stryker, Susan. 2006. “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender
Studies.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle,
1–17. New York: Routledge.
 Stryker, Susan. 2008. Transgender History. Berkeley: Seal Press.
 Stryker, Susan and Aren Z. Aizura. 2013. “Introduction: Transgender Studies 2.0.” In
The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura, 1–12. New
York: Routledge.
 Stryker, Susan, and Paisley Currah. 2014. “Introduction.” TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly 1 (1–2): 1–18. doi:10.1215/23289252–2398540.
 Salamon, Gayle. 2010. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality.
New York: Columbia University Press.
 Serano, Julia. 2007. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the
Scapegoating of Femininity. Berkeley: Seal Press.