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Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research pp 93–107Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Queer and Feminist Approaches to Transgender Media Studies

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Part of the book series: Comparative Feminist Studies ((CFS))

Abstract

Since 2014 there has been a significant increase in the visibility of transgender people in national discourse. This chapter first maps the intersections of queer, feminist, and transgender studies in order to contextualize this current moment of transgender visibility before reviewing the attendant surge in media and communication studies scholarship conducted in this area. The chapter makes two recommendations for future research: The first concerns the application of an intersectional theoretical framework to understand the multiple oppressions transgender people are subject to; the second advocates for a queer methodology in order to scrutinize how transgender people themselves engage with media and how these representations impact their everyday lives. The chapter concludes by interrogating the ethics of academic knowledge production and questions of community accountability.

Parts of this chapter are drawn from the introduction of the author’s forthcoming monograph, Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State (working title) with the University of Nebraska Press.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    On the other hand, “cisgender” refers to those whose gender identity matches their biological sex. Biologist Dana Leland Defosse is widely credited as the first person to put the neologism “cisgender” into public circulation in the mid-1990s. Many find the introduction of the term “cisgender” useful because it consciously marks gender identities that usually go unnoticed and are considered normal, i.e., the unstated assumption of non-transgender status contained in the words “man” or “woman.”

  2. 2.

    Not coincidentally, queer (in its contemporary iterations) and transgender both emerged in 1990s activist and academic contexts. Moreover, transgender and queer are both products of Western theorizing that tend to leave unaccounted and/or override other non-Western and non-binary understandings of gender and sexual desire and practice. As Tom Boellstorff (2006) notes, the tendency to project Euro-American theoretical frameworks of race, gender, and sexuality onto other non-Western contexts presents persistent barriers to theorizing queer/ness, particularly in a global context.

  3. 3.

    Brandon Teena identified as a trans man who was brutally raped and then killed by two of his girlfriend’s acquaintances in Humboldt, Nebraska, in 1993.

  4. 4.

    Dead-naming describes the practice of referring to trans people by their birth names and not chosen names.

  5. 5.

    See for example, Roderick Ferguson (2004), who defines queer of color analysis as an “interrogat[ion] of social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices. Queer of color analysis is a heterogeneous enterprise made up of women of color feminism, materialist analysis, poststructuralist theory, and queer critique” (149 n1.).

  6. 6.

    For notable exceptions see Julia R. Johnson (2013) as well as Lünenborg and Fürsich (2014).

  7. 7.

    As Lugones and Spelman (1983) aptly point out feminist and queer scholars should not only be concerned about the male monopoly over accounts of women’s lives but also the hierarchical privileging of some women’s voices over others, particularly as white middle-class women in the United States “have in the main developed ‘feminist theory’” (575).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, USA

    Mia Fischer

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  1. Mia Fischer
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Correspondence to Mia Fischer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA

    Dustin Harp

  2. Bob Schieffer College of Communication, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA

    Jaime Loke

  3. School of Communications, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Ingrid Bachmann

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Fischer, M. (2018). Queer and Feminist Approaches to Transgender Media Studies. In: Harp, D., Loke, J., Bachmann, I. (eds) Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research. Comparative Feminist Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90838-0_7

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