Wrong Body

Abstract

This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. 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. 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. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. 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. Abjection ROBERT PHI LLI PSAbjection refers to the vague sense of horror that permeates the boundary between the self and the other. In a broader sense, the term refers to the process by which identificatory regimes exclude subjects that they render unintelligible or beyond classification. As such, the abjection of others serves to maintain or reinforce boundaries that are threatened.This term can be used to think of the instability of gendered and/or sexed bodies -especially those occupied by transgender individuals -which are at the center of academic debates surrounding queer, feminist, and trans subjectivity. Drawing on a psychoanalytic reading of subjective identity as a defensive construction and on the French literary obsession with monsters, psychoanalyst and linguist Julia Kristeva develops the term abjection in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982).

Governing Legal Embodiment: On the Limits of Self-Declaration

“…This was borne out in interviews. But as opposition to this trope becomes more common among scholars and activists (Schofield 2010;Bettcher 2014;Engdahl 2014), evidence that critiques of the 'wrong body' narrative may be permeating through trans communities was offered by the minority of interviewees. When asked to explain his own personal understanding of trans embodiment, Mark (Transman, 38) responded:…”

Teaching Undergraduates About LGBTQ Identities, Families, and Intersectionality

“…Historically, transgender issues have been largely absent from the curricula of most courses in the social and behavioral sciences (Case, Stewart, & Tittsworth, ). When they are included, transgender identity often still is conceptualized in terms of the gender binary (i.e., people “transition” from male to female, or from female to male), surgery and hormones are treated as necessary steps in this “transition,” and the narrative of being born in the “wrong body” is still dominant (Engdahl, ). This narrow focus precludes acknowledgment and understanding of the full range of gender identities that exist under the umbrella of “trans” (e.g., individuals who identify as gender queer, agender, gender fluid, and other nonbinary gender identities; Richards et al, ).…”

Dea Shannon, Beyond the Binary: Thinking about Sex and Gender. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2016 (ISBN: 978-1554812837)

“…A reader familiar with the diversity of trans experiences might worry that Dea's language in the introduction of chapter 8 oversimplifies the range of trans identities and experiences. For instance, trans scholars have worked to undermine the pervasiveness of the "wrong body narrative," when such a narrative is taken to be the singular experience of all trans people (see Bettcher 2014;Engdahl 2014). Dea seems to invoke this "wrong body" model of trans experience, at least in the beginning of the chapter when she writes that trans people "develop gender identities that are misaligned with their gender assignment at birth" and that trans people are those for whom their "gender identity does not match their phenotypic sex" (99).…”