Im/possibilities of refusing and choosing gender

Abstract

Looking from a critical race perspective at Wittig’s lesbian, in this article, I draw two conclusions. First, I suggest that it is actually trans exclusionary lesbians' own transphobia that makes them cis-gendered. And second, it becomes clear that the politicisation of choosing and refusing gender needs to acknowledge racism’s shaping role in the construction of gender. My approach not only intervenes in transphobic feminisms that are obsessed with simplistic understandings of sexual violence, but also questions rigid cis/trans binaries and rejects accounts of trans/gender that ignore the role of racialisation for the emergence of gender. The main question that I address is: how to conceptualise the complex im/possibilities of refusing and choosing in relation to gender? It is my aim to connect seemingly disparate knowledge productions on genderqueer, trans and other ‘impossible’ genders and sexualities. I am particularly interested in a phenomenon that can be described as ‘lesbian haunting’: the ambivalences one will find in tracing lesbian theory in relation to transing gender. With this, it is my attempt to rethink lesbian, queer and trans feminist approaches on violence, and to investigate the role of sexual violence within broader concepts of violence. More specifically, in order to understand both ‘gender’ and ‘transing gender’ as always already racialised, my approach builds on theories that identify ‘ungendering’ as an effect of normative racial violence (e.g. Spillers, 1987; Lewis, 2017; Snorton, 2017).

They would have transitioned me: third conditional TERF grammar of trans childhood

“…9. While I understand that this framing of transition might be misunderstood as de-legitimating, I am following trans scholars who argue instead that one will never have a full account of transness (or gendering of any kind) without grappling with gender as an embodied series of attachments to the meanings it carries in particular moments (Snorton, 2009;Plemons, 2017;Tudor, 2017Tudor, , 2019Aizura, 2018;Chu, 2018). Acknowledging that trans, cis and nonbinary identifications are historically contingent is not to render them meaningless; it is to situate them as meaningful.…”

‘Where might we go if we dare’: moving beyond the ‘thick, suffocating fog of whiteness’ in feminism

“…And that actually the minute you bring in imperialism, there's a kind of richness to the historical imagination and the inhabiting of simultaneity that allows you then to kind of be otherwise: outside of those categories. They make the argument then that trans* offers lesbian feminism an opportunity to imagine itself other, undoing those histories that are not just about gender but also of heteronormativity and imperialism (Tudor, 2019). Starting from that familiar feeling of discomfort or excess, as you say .…”

Decolonizing Trans/Gender Studies?

“…While the latter openly attacks feminists and queer people (and within this lesbians), some lesbians and feminists eagerly use the same strategy to attack trans people, queer and trans theory, and-a sign that the fight is epistemological-poststructuralism. Moreover, as I argue, we are witnessing an overlap between transphobic positions and misogyny, racism, and migratism, a simplistic focus on sexual violence, and a rewriting of feminism as a single-issue-project (Tudor 2019). Let me be clear in outlining the tensions and paradoxes here: we are dealing with anti-gender attacks that target gender studies and feminists, and at the same time we are confronted with transphobic attacks that target gender studies and trans people in the name of feminism.…”

“…Using a simplistic understanding of sexual violence to legitimize feminist transphobia is not a new phenomenon (for a more detailed discussion, see Tudor 2019). The strategy of accusing trans people of sexual violence echoes a discourse that externalizes sexual violence as taking place somewhere else, outside the West, or that is ascribed to migrants, Black and Brown persons, or Muslims-all of whom are constructed as the eternal migrants who can never belong in the Western nation-state (see Haritaworn 2012;El-Tayeb 2012;Tudor 2018).…”