Abstract
Sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten (1910) and anthropologist Esther Newton’s Mother Camp (1972) exemplify a rich tradition of scholarly thought and analysis on gender variance in the twentieth century.1 Nonetheless, it was only in the last two decades that an explosion of academic interest in transgender topics became ever more pronounced. In the 1970s and 1980s, social, political, cultural, and intellectual trends paved the way for some transgender people to increasingly distance themselves from the women’s movement and the gay and lesbian movement.2 The emergence of queer studies as an umbrella field in the decade following these developments cultivated the growth and maturation of transgender studies.3 Already in her seminal Gender Trouble (1990), philosopher Judith Butler used drag as a preeminent example to theorize the cultural performativity of gender, thereby reorienting women’s studies beyond traditional concerns of feminist epistemology.4 In Female Masculinity (1998), cultural theorist Judith Halberstam recentered women’s relationship to masculinity, revealing a long-neglected undercurrent of Anglo-American literature and film.5 Seven years later, the publication of In a Queer Time and Place (2005) enriched her problematization of the heteronormative alignment of sex and gender through the lens of subcultural practice.6
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Notes
Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross Dress, trans. Michael A. Lombardi-Nash (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991);
Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 29–65.
Susan Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 2 (2004): 212–215.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005).
Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993);
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993);
Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Routledge, 1994);
Bernice Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995);
Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996);
Zachary Nataf, Lesbians Talk Transgender (London: Scarlet Press, 1996);
Patrick Califia, Sex Changes: Transgender Politics (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997);
Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interest: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1997);
Riki Anne Wilchins, Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender (Ann Arbor: Firebrand Books, 1997);
Kat Bornstein, My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely (New York: Routledge, 1998);
Don Kulick, Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998);
Viviane Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000);
Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002);
Henry Rubin, Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003); and
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). Note that this list can only be selective rat her than exhaustive. I have left out, for instance,
Leslie Martin Lothstein, Female-to-Male Transsexualism: Historical, Clinical and Theoretical Issues (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); and
John Phillips, Transgender On Screen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Valentine, Imagining Transgender; Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008);
Patricia Gherovici’s Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (New York: Routledge, 2010);
Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010);
Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin, The Lives of Transgender People (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
See also Sally Hines, Trans Forming Gender: Transgender Practices of Identity and Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007);
Lori B. Girshick, Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2008); and
Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2010). 9.
Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel, eds., PoMoSexuals (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997).
Gilbert Herdt, ed., Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York: Zone Books, 1996);
Joan Nestle, Riki Wilchins, and Clare Howell, eds., Genderqueer (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2002).
Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds., The Transgender Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006). See also
Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Prince Minter, eds., Transgender Rights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006);
Mattilda, ed., Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006).
Laurie J. Shrage, ed., You’ve Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). For a more recent edited volume, see
Sally Hine and Tam Sanger, eds., Transgender Identities: Towards a Social Analysis of Gender (New York: Routledge, 2010).
See, for example, George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of a Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994). For the broader historiographical implications, see
David Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Vernon Rosario, ed., Science and Homosexualities (New York: Routledge, 1997);
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Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic Books, 2006); and Valentine, Imagining Transgender, 46.
On the history of American Psychiatric Association’s decision to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), see Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). For a more recent reappraisal, see
Howard Chiang, “Effecting Science, Affecting Medicine: Homosexuality, the Kinsey Reported, and the Contested Boundaries of Psychopathology in the United States, 1948–1965,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 44, no. 4 (2008): 300–318. On the feminist “sex wars,” see, for example,
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Valentine, Imagining Transgender, 53–57. See also aaa Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin”; and Susan Stryker, “Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity,” Radical History Review 100 (2008): 144–157.
Walter Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986);
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Will Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991);
Sue Ellen-Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds., Two-Spirit People: Native American Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997);
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Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia Wieringa, eds., Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999);
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Martin Manalansan and Arnaldo Cruz-Malave, eds., Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York: New York University Press, 2002);
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See, for example, Charlotte Furth, “Androgynous Males and Deficient Females: Biology and Gender Boundaries in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century China,” Late Imperial China 9, no. 2 (1988): 1–31;
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Helen Leung, Undercurrents: Queer Cultures and Postcolonial Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 65–84;
Eleanor Cheung, “GID in Hong Kong: A Critical Overview of Medical Treatments for Transsexual Patients,” in As Normal as Possible: Negotiating Sexuality in Mainland China and Hong Kong, ed. Yau Ching (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 75–86.
See, for example, Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A., rev. ed. (New York: Meridian, 1992 [1976]); and Feinberg, Transgender Warriors. The most famous example of this reclamation politics between lesbians and trans men is probably Brandon Teena. See
Jacob Hale, “Consuming the Living, Dis(re)membering the Dead in the Butch/FTM Borderlands,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 4 (1998): 311–328;
and Judith Halberstam, “The Brandon Teena Archive,” in Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, ed. Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 159–169. For an overview of the border wars between butch lesbians and FTMs, see Valentine, Imagining Transgender, 151–153.
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Joshua Goldstein, “Mei Lanfang and the Nationalization of Peking Opera, 1912–1930,” positions: east asia cultures critique 7, no. 2 (1999): 377–420; Li, Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera;
Joshua Goldstein, Drama King: Players and Publics in the Re-Creation of Peking Opera, 1870–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007);
Wenqing Kang, Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900–1950 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 115–144; John Zhou, “Crossdressed Nation: Mei Lanfang and the Clothing of Modern Chinese Men,” in Embodied Modernities, ed. Heinrich and Martin, 79–97;
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Dennis Altman, “Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities,” Social Text 48 (1996): 77–94;
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Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (New York: Routledge, 2001);
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Chiang, H. (2012). Imagining Transgender China. In: Chiang, H. (eds) Transgender China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137082503_1
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