Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?

Berman, Jessica

doi:10.1353/mod.2017.0019

Cited by 17 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…She writes that “the journey metaphor of transition” can help us rethink categories of confinement, traveling, and home (Bond, 2018), and that the experience of gender dysphoria can be “productively extended” (p. 76) to “open up new debates around belonging and orientation” (Bond, 2018: 72). Consider also the article “Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?,” where Jessica Berman (2017) reads Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando as a “trans text” to refine our understanding of “transnational categories of belonging” (p. 218). Rather than seeking to concretize the abstraction trans through analyses of the social determinations that have historically organized transgender lives, these scholars have deployed the term trans to ground and clarify an array of scholarly concerns within international politics.…”

Section: The Mystification Of Trans Life In International Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Abstractions in International Relations: on the mystification of trans, queer, and subaltern life in critical knowledge production

Stoffel

Birkvad

2023

European Journal of International Relations

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This paper identifies a common process of mystification within academic knowledge production today: the treatment of subordinated groups as mere metaphors or rhetorical figures for academic theorizing. We witness it when academics ask what trans might teach us about transnationality, when we are invited to reflect on what might be queer about modern warfare, or when nation-states are described as subaltern. Trans, queer, and subaltern populations are routinely fetishized within scholarship on the “traditional” International Relations concerns of statecraft, migration, security, and so on. This tendency serves a mystifying function by disabling scholars from examining the social relations that shape and organize their lives and histories. This paper proceeds in three parts. First, to understand the origins and logics of this self-mystifying process, this paper returns, via Stuart Hall, to Karl Marx’s methodological writings on abstraction. It contributes to the formalization of his methodology for contemporary IR scholarship by drawing a distinction between the fetishization of abstraction and the concretization of abstraction. Second, the paper explores how abstracted subject positions have been fetishized within three fields of international studies: trans studies, queer theory, and subaltern studies. Third, after elaborating a critique of this mystifying move, the paper outlines alternative approaches that instead seek to concretize the abstractions queer, trans, and subaltern by attending to their specific historical and social determinations. These strategies of demystification, we argue, carry forward a founding commitment of critical theory that is all too often abandoned within scholarly knowledge production today.

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Section: The Mystification Of Trans Life In International Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Abstractions in International Relations: on the mystification of trans, queer, and subaltern life in critical knowledge production

Stoffel

Birkvad

2023

European Journal of International Relations

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“…(Lim 2007), and Jessica Berman's 'Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?' ( Berman 2017 ) investigate the overlaps between the term's deployment as a critical category or heuristic tool rather than social descriptor. Lim's essay anticipates Berman's assertion about 'the potential value of deploying "trans" as…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema

Williams¹

2020

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This exciting and original volume offers the first comprehensive critical study of the recent profusion of European films and television addressing sexual migration and seeking to capture the lives and experiences of LGBTIQ+ migrants and refugees.Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema argues that embodied cinematic representations of the queer migrant, even if at times highly ambivalent and contentious, constitute an urgent new repertoire of queer subjectivities and socialities that serve to undermine the patrolled borders of gender and sexuality, nationhood and citizenship, and refigure or queer fixed notions and universals of identity like 'Europe' and national belonging based on the model of the family. At stake ethically and politically is the elaboration of a 'transborder' consciousness and aesthetics that counters the homonationalist, xenophobic and homo/trans-phobic representation of the 'migrant to Europe' figure rooted in the toxic binaries of othering (the good vs bad migrant, host vs guest, indigenous vs foreigner).Bringing together 15 contributors working in different national film traditions and embracing multiple theoretical perspectives, this powerful and timely collection will be of major interest to both specialists and students in film and media studies, gender and queer studies, migration/mobility studies, cultural studies, and aesthetics.

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“…Its exceptional property is, rather, a comprehensive one due to the processes of globalization. The sources of transnationalization of cultural space should be sought in the transgressive phenomena of avant-garde art practices of the early 20th century, which at that time did not have such a large-scale character, although they were conceived by the avant-garde as worldwide, universal practices (Berman, 2017;Grossman, 2020). Transgression manifested itself in avant-garde art through violation of all possible boundaries, a decisive rejection of any manifestation of isolationideas, languages, cultures etc.…”

Section: Research Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%