Mirror Scene: Transgender Aesthetics in The Matrix and Boys Don’t Cry

What is trans cinema, and how do we know? Drawing on methods from the emergent field of trans studies, this chapter takes up the classic trope of the mirror scene as technique for expanding the archive of purportedly “transgender” cinema. Redeployed as a beside strategy, the mirror scene reveals contemporaneous films Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and The Matrix (1999) as mirror images of one another—a historical meeting place reflecting inverse explorations of transgender representation at the turn of the millennium. Reconsidering Boys Don’t Cry’s legacy in light of The Matrix’s trans authorship and aesthetics, the chapter works dually across these film’s bodies to illustrate how competing trans* imaginaries were developing within the late twentieth-century’s popular cinematic frame.

After Sexology

Is sexology over? What does one do with its history, at once a seemingly remote relic and a persistent logic of biopolitics today? “Sexology and Its Afterlives” begins from the premise that the history of sexology lives in the infrastructures of the present. Locating the afterlives of sexology in material and aesthetic form, this introduction to the special issue engages the largely unmarked detritus of a disaggregated sexological project, whose components have found renewed life in the biopolitical apparatus. The contributors to this issue identify not only familiar sites of sexological persistence (the sex-segregated public toilet) but also less immediately obvious ones (the Moynihan report, redlining, the army base) as executing the unfinished business of the sexological project. This breadth of sexological diffusion makes its analysis a necessarily interdisciplinary prospect, and the contributors call on disability studies, trans studies, Black studies, women-of-color feminism, visual culture, and the history of sexuality, generating emergent concepts, including crip-of-color critique (Kim), binary-abolitionist praxis (Stryker), a “trans-mad” aesthetic (Crawford), and a shift toward expressivity as a framework (Musser). Across the issue, newly imagined sites of collective politics come into view as a payoff for working through the stalled-out imaginaries of sexological binarisms.

From Marginality to Possibility: Doing Transgender Studies in Japanese Studies

Area studies has been described as having lost its significance and legitimacy in the 21st century globalised world. However, research has shown that the strengths of area studies—empirical research and context-sensitive knowledge—remain relevant not only in helping us to understand our contemporary world, but also in challenging the hegemony of theories and concepts developed in Euro-American contexts that have come to dominate both academic and general writing. In this paper, I draw on my research on the transgender community in Japan—an area of study that is relegated to the margins of both Japanese studies and trans studies—to show how the tools of area studies play an important role in expanding the conceptual boundaries of trans studies, and how the lens of transgender can expand or complicate existing knowledge on the culture and society of Japan. I highlight how Japanese transgender identities and cultures are shaped not only by global processes, but also legal, medical, cultural and social conditions specific to Japan. I argue against the assumed universal applicability of Eurocentric conceptualisations of gender/sexual non-conformity, and in doing so I call attention to the ways in which the fields of transgender studies and Japanese studies can enrich each other. More than ever in these precarious times, we need to emphasise the strengths and overcome the weaknesses of our field(s), so that we may be better equipped to turn marginality into possibility.

What Happened to the Insurrection?

This article revisits Susan Stryker's 2006 introduction to The Transgender Studies Reader to show how her overview of Foucault's “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” in this field-inaugurating text mutes the radical potential of Foucault's genealogical approach to history. Through a close reading of Foucault's original presentation of this concept in his 1976 lecture, the fuller sense of his “antiscience” genealogy becomes clear. The article concludes by proposing a way scholars might redeploy Foucault's insurrectionary method within the field of trans* studies today.

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy

This exciting new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary state of the field. The editors’ introduction and forty-five essays cover feminist critical engagements with philosophy and adjacent scholarly fields, as well as feminist approaches to current debates and crises across the world. Authors cover topics ranging from the ways in which feminist philosophy attends to other systems of oppression, and the gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions embedded in philosophical concepts, to feminist perspectives on prominent subfields of philosophy. The first section contains chapters that explore feminist philosophical engagement with mainstream and marginalized histories and traditions, while the second section parses feminist philosophy’s contributions to with numerous philosophical subfields, for example metaphysics and bioethics. A third section explores what feminist philosophy can illuminate about crucial moral and political issues of identity, gender, the body, autonomy, prisons, among numerous others. The Handbook concludes with the field’s engagement with other theories and movements, including trans studies, queer theory, critical race, theory, postcolonial theory, and decolonial theory. The volume provides a rigorous but accessible resource for students and scholars who are interested in feminist philosophy, and how feminist philosophers situate their work in relation to the philosophical mainstream and other disciplines. Above all it aims to showcase the rich diversity of subject matter, approach, and method among feminist philosophers.

Feminist Philosophical Engagements with Trans Studies

In this chapter Bettcher examines feminist philosophical engagements with transgender studies. In the first section, she discusses the emergence of trans studies as well as the recent development of trans philosophy within the discipline. The latter makes the question of feminist philosophical engagement more complex. To what extent does the feminist philosophy engage with trans philosophy? To what extent does it merely philosophize about trans phenomena? In the second section, Bettcher considers an approach that adds trans to a longer list of excluded identities, focusing specifically on analytic work designed to answer the question “What is a woman?” Drawing on Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality, Bettcher raises worries about this sort of approach in both its traditional and ameliorative variations. In the final section, Bettcher considers intersectional approaches to trans oppression/resistance as well as impediments to their pursuit including oppositional starting points, unhelpful models of trans oppression/resistance, and, finally, complexities that arise when considering the intersections of trans and sexist oppressions.