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.

“More and More Fond of Reading”: Everything You Wanted to Know about Transgender Studies but Were Afraid to Ask Clara Reeve

Clara Reeve’s (1729–1807) Gothic novel The Old English Baron is a node for contemplating two discursive exclusions. The novel, due to its own ambiguous status as a gendered “body”, has proven a difficult text for discourse on the Female Gothic to recognise. Subjected to a temperamental dialectic of reclamation and disavowal, The Old English Baron can be made to speak to the (often) subordinate position of Transgender Studies within the field of Queer Studies, another relationship predicated on the partial exclusion of undesirable elements. I treat the unlikely transness of Reeve’s body of text as an invitation to attempt a trans reading of the bodies within the text. Parallel to this, I develop an attachment genealogy of Queer and Transgender Studies that reconsiders essentialism―the kind both practiced by Female Gothic studies and also central to the logic of Reeve’s plot―as a fantasy that helps us distinguish where a trans reading can depart from a queer one, suggesting that the latter is methodologically limited by its own bad feelings towards the former.

Living in the Skin of a Theory

This essay argues for an imaginative reading practice in which the “trans” and the “study” of transgender studies are shown as coconstitutive. Arguing that the problem of incommensurability leads transgender studies to spend more time on the signifier trans than on the study of transgender studies, this essay uses the intuitive, ambivalent, and nuanced methodology of Toni Cade Bambara's Salt Eaters to open up space for a trans study that is more capacious, yet still tethered to the experience of living in one's skin as not only content but also form. Ultimately, this essay wonders how transgender studies can learn to live in the skin of a theory, in all its contradiction and strange negotiations, using the same imagination we use to make sense of our own embodied selves.

Hiraethi Jan Morris

Within transgender studies, Jan Morris casts a problematic shadow, with Aren Aizura identifying how “Morris's entire literary and historical oeuvre . . . [is] a tacit articulation of a British colonial ideology.” Yet this position appears to be based on Morris's works between the 1950s and 1970s, up to and including her memoir Conundrum, and represents arguably only the first of three periods in Morris's writing. This essay argues that two subsequent periods diversify our understanding of Morris as a complex, transcultural figure: her broadly leftist, anticolonial writing on Wales and the Welsh language (1980s–90s), and then in the twenty-first century when Morris increasingly appears to question the colonial, nationalist, and cisheteropatriarchal ideologies that have shaped her previous writing. This essay concludes that Morris's body of work provides valuable evidence as to the complex interplay of Welsh, British, and European conceptions of gender that characterize her attitude and writing on transgender identity.

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.

Categories that bind: Transgender, crossdressing, and transnational sexualities in Tokyo

This article investigates “ toransujendā” (transgender), “ josō” (male-to-female crossdressing), and “ otoko no ko” (boy/male daughter) as categories that bind through ethnographic research in Tokyo’s contemporary josō gyōkai (scene and business circles). Building on queer and transgender scholarship, I ask what these categories mean, what they do, and how they figure in trans people’s everyday lives and the institutionalization of seidōitsuseishōgai (Japanese translation of Gender Identity Disorder). I argue that categories are imbued with asymmetrical power relations and operate affectively, emerging from contact between bodies and practices. Ultimately, they are important sites for questioning categories of “gender” and “sexuality” in transnational sexuality and transgender studies.

Assessing Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Asylum Claims: Towards a Transgender Studies Framework for Particular Social Group and Persecution

In this article, I focus on gender identity and gender expression as grounds for international protection. After clarifying issues of terminology and theoretical framework, namely Transgender Studies, I criticize the current framework for determining membership in a Particular Social Group (PSG) for the purposes of the Refugee Convention, drawing on Berg and Millbank's work on the concept of self-identification and gender non-conformity as a means to assess transgender asylum claims (2013). I problematize the issues arising in the assessment of well-founded fear of persecution and the form it may take in transgender and gender non-conforming asylum claims. Drawing connections between sexuality and gender identity/expression claims, I attempt to provide a humanizing and depathologized framework for assessing the credibility of transgender and gender non-conforming applicants. Finally, by critiquing the work of Hathaway and Pobjoy and drawing from current human rights norms, I reflect on how to make good law with transgender cases without reproducing medicalized notions of gender identity or placing all the burden of proof on the applicants. In so doing, this article attempts to achieve a balance between theoretical and practical challenges that arise in the Refugee Status Determination (RSD) process involving transgender and gender non-conforming applicants. This article serves as an attempt to critically review the existing scholarship within the framework of transgender studies and offers insights for a refined framework of refugee status determination based on an inclusive reading of Particular Social Group and persecution drawing on the reading of crucial case law from anglophone countries.

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.

“Feeling-Seeing” in Transparent

This article explores how Jill Soloway uses mirror imagery in the series Transparent to facilitate their version of the female gaze, particularly the tenet of feeling-seeing. By doing so, this article aims to assist ongoing efforts in both transgender studies and media studies research to stretch beyond the in/visibility debate surrounding transgender representation in popular media. It proposes that Soloway’s creative process designates open, imaginative space for audiences (both cisgender and transgender alike) to witness how gender comes to matter for Maura, both in the sense of materializing in bodily form and in a manner of meaning, and how gender also comes to re-matter for her, but perhaps also for audiences watching her transformation.