Trans* Identities and Politics: Repertoires of Action, Political Cleavages, and Emerging Coalitions

Abstract

The current political landscape provides collective actors with new strategies to articulate individual interests, hardships, identities, critiques, and solutions, engage with social mobilisation’s conflictual demands, and move towards sustainable practices of collective actions. This article will focus on theoretical challenges surrounding the political action and organization of feminist and trans* identities in order to provide situated knowledge about the dynamics of the transfeminist activism in the Madrilenian geopolitical context. Throughout LGBT*Q+ activists’ integrated forms of doing politics along different axes of oppression (e.g., class, migration, racialisation, disability, ethnicity, gender diversity), new visibility regimes are trying to expand the repertoires of action by nurturing emerging coalitions and agencies among a variety of hybrid political subjects. This article thus argues that trans* politics, through nonbinary activism and a new intersectional feminist praxis, may expand the political subject of feminism and our understanding of identity politics and embodied action.

Trans* Politics: Current Challenges and Contestations Regarding Bodies, Recognition, and Trans* Organising

“…For the ongoing debates on normative political theory, and the respective value of recognition, redistribution and representation for imagining a future with less inequalities, the political dynamics on trans* rights have much to offer. In contrast to more common understandings that locate trans* rights within political discourses of recognition, Platero (2020), Saeidzadeh and Strid (2020) and Elpes (2020) show the limits of such an understanding and a way out. The story of trans* rights in the Netherlands in particular highlights once more how political dynamics are not just about dynamics between political actors or between discourses that are explicitly and conventionally political.…”

“…Three elements are crucial: understanding recognition as status-based instead of identity-based, understanding interests as based on shared oppressions, and valuing political and coalitional strategies within and between social justice projects. Also Gustavo Santos Elpes zooms in on potential coalitions on trans* politics and sees a high potential for trans* politics to 'expand the political subject of feminism and our understanding of identity politics and embodied action' (Elpes, 2020). His reflections centre on the role of embodiment (see above), and also include attention for resonances and coalitions between trans* politics and the disability movement in Madrid, in which notions of self-care and caregiving are central.…”

“…Contestations around trans* issues continue developing, between state and non-state actors, between transgender people and medical professionals, but also among and between social movements. Mobilisation around trans* issues has created unexpected alliances, for instance with disability activists (Elpes, 2020). It also has fuelled tensions within feminist and LGBTI movements, and has given rise to strong contestations, revolving around questions such as "who is a woman," and "who is entitled to speak on behalf of women" (see Hines, 2019;Jeffreys, 1997;Pearce, Erikainen, & Vincent, 2020; see also Saeidzadeh & Strid, 2020).…”

Resistance as a Foundational Commons: Intersectionality, Transfeminism, and the Future of Critical Feminisms

“…Applying a “both/and/neither” framework celebrates all aspects of a feminist's existence without the aggressive gatekeeping that has become akin to a violating strip search of physical bodies and autonomous identities. It turns away from forcing a member of our group (feminism) to be made an “object of other's self-conception” in order to gain entry into a space where the very directive is to dismantle oppressive gender systems (Santos Elpes, 2020, p. 308).…”

“…Transfeminism introduces a different vantage point towards integrating intersectionality and shedding the exclusionary skin of feminisms past. According to Santos Elpes (2020), transfeminism is also “a political effort to incorporate intersectional feminist epistemologies into a project of undoing ontological narratives of the self” (p. 305). Santos Elpes (2020) emphasized that transfeminism is a framework in which agency and autonomy of the self is not an object to be scrutinized through the view of “other's self-conception” but a strong point within a “shared culture of resistance” (pp.…”