Theories of Gender and Transgender

CONTENTS:
1. Testosterone is not the only Game in Town: The Transgender
Woman Athlete
2. Queer Language Lessons: The Confusion over ‘My Pronouns’
3. Legal Fictions: Changing Sex by Changing Gender
4. More than a Feeling: Rock Stars, Heroines and Transwomen
5. To Compete, or not to Compete, that is the Question: Which is
Nobler for Transwomen Athletes?
6. The Power of Words
7. Feminism, Conceptual Engineering, and Trans Identity

This chapter explores the ways that sacred, physically impaired, and transgender embodiment(s) are all structured by reference to notions of wholeness, perfection, and cure. Focussing on the character of Blanchandin·e in the fourteenth-century French narrative, Tristan de Nanteuil, the analysis considers how disability, cure, and gender transformation are employed to modify a body according to the exigencies of the surrounding hagiographic narrative. Blanchandin·e’s physical form is repeatedly altered in response to the needs of their son, St Gilles. The chapter traces the shared efffects and afffects of the social formation – and disassembly – of trans-ness, sanctity, and physical impairment through the related, connected, and leaky bodies of Blanchandin·e and St Gilles.

This summer intensive will explore ancient and modern constructions of gender and how that impacts an understanding of sacred texts, not only in questions of translation and gender performance but in the pressing need for safe inclusive spaces. Trans and intersex people have been violently victimized, ostracized, and demonized by oppressive readings of sacred texts. Understanding ancient physiology demonstrates that our “scientific” or “natural” conceptions of gender change; they are not fixed but shaped by culture and society. We are currently at the cusp of a broader cultural/social paradigm shift as scientists are more clearly and publicly making known that a focus on two sexes cannot be supported biologically, further supporting the work that gender theorists such as Judith Butler have pioneered. While many welcome the possibilities that are on the horizon, others are using religion as a cudgel to continue to promote the concept of gender binaries. The first week of the course will be setting the historical, cultural, and literary context for the course which will center on Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian sources. The second week will be student-led with presentations based on the individual research interests of the students, resulting in a variety of collective resources on gender and religion (not limited to Jewish and Christian traditions).

This roundtable considers trans theory’s status as a site of thinking racialization, empire, political economy, and materiality in the current historical, institutional, and political moment. We ask, what does it mean to think trans in a time of crisis?, and what is the place of critique in a crisis?, acknowledging that global crises are not insulated from trans, and trans is not insulated from the world. This roundtable looks to materialist formations to think trans now, including a new materialism premised on thinking about trans embodiment outside of trans as subject position, the materialism of objects and commodities, and a historical materialism shaped by queer of color critique.

Features Aren Aizura, Treva Ellison, Jules Gill-Peterson,  Toby Beauchamp, and Eliza Steinbock.

This chapter moves to discuss how creating a trauma informed yoga space requires knowledge and understanding of the “everydayness” of this systemic oppression. I will underscore the ways that somatic therapy can effectively address many trans-specific psychological and physical difficulties—difficulties that are often ignored or left untreated from medical doctors and in mainstream health care. Yoga can only truly be a healing tool for transgender populations if the larger yoga community actively addresses the centering of privileged identities and the covert exclusion of marginalized people. I discuss a new vision for trauma-informed practice, one which offers practical solutions for challenging transphobia in studios and teaching.

Two Israeli documentary series about the local trans* community released in 2017: Girl Talk (Ori Saly) and Spectrums (Afek Testa-Launer and Zohar Melinek-Ezra). While Girl Talk premiered at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, aired on the cable documentary channel 8, and was very well received by television critics, the web series Spectrums received minimal media attention, was only featured on Facebook, and mostly shared within the trans* community. Girl Talk’s popularity derived from its camp content and the disclosure trope, but also the easy-to-watch editing style. While Girl Talk’s parallel editing works on creating spatial and temporal continuity celebrating longevity, Spectrums breaks it into pieces, destabilizing and disorienting spectatorship by heavily relying on Instagram aesthetics and jump-cuts. Aligning excessive editing with testimonies of deviant temporalities, the series offers breaking time in form as well as content and in celebration as well as mourning over broken bodies. Spectrums utilizes the fragility of cinematic time to present trans* temporalities conjuring the celebratory resistance of queer time with the broken and split crip time, as well as the delayed trans time.