Transgender Studies
Transgender studies is the interdisciplinary field that examines the lives, histories, and theoretical questions raised by people whose gender differs from that assigned at birth.
Definition
An interdisciplinary field of inquiry centered on transgender, transsexual, and gender-nonconforming people and on the theoretical and historical questions their existence raises about gender, the body, and classification.
Scope
This area covers the emergence of transgender studies as a field distinct from, though related to, gay, lesbian, and queer studies. It treats its founding texts and debates, the history of gender-variant lives and activism, questions of trans embodiment and identity, and the critique of cisnormativity. It presents these descriptively and even-handedly, including internal disagreements within the field.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How have gender-variant lives been lived, named, and regulated across history?
- What is the relationship between transgender studies and feminist and queer theory?
- How should trans people's own accounts of embodiment and identity inform theory?
- What is cisnormativity, and how does it operate?
Key theories
- The posttranssexual manifesto
- Stone's foundational call for transsexual people to speak for themselves rather than be spoken about by medicine and by feminist critics, widely regarded as inaugurating transgender studies as a field.
- Transgender as an analytic
- The framing, developed in Stryker and Whittle's reader, of transgender phenomena as a distinct object of study that challenges assumptions shared by both mainstream and queer accounts of gender.
History
Transgender studies coalesced as a field in the 1990s, with Stone's 'The Empire Strikes Back' (1991) and Stryker's work as key catalysts. The publication of The Transgender Studies Reader (2006) and the founding of the journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (2014) institutionalized the field, which draws on history, sociology, literary studies, and feminist and queer theory.
Debates
- Trans studies and queer theory
- Whether transgender studies is a subset of queer theory or a distinct field, with some scholars arguing that queer theory's emphasis on fluidity can sideline trans people's accounts of embodied identity and the reality of transition.
Key figures
- Susan Stryker
- Sandy Stone
- Jay Prosser
- Stephen Whittle
Related topics
Seminal works
- stone1991
- strykerwhittle2006
- stryker2017
Frequently asked questions
- Is transgender studies the same as queer theory?
- They are closely related and overlapping, but many scholars treat transgender studies as a distinct field that centers trans people's experiences and questions that queer theory does not fully address.