Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910071
Lou Rich
Abstract: Nonbinary presentations, behaviors, and spaces have been observed transculturally throughout history. Whilst historical manifestations differ from our modern notions of nonbinary, this article examines instances of nonbinary transgressions that may have been previously consigned to homoerotic histories. This article deploys such a nonbinary lens to discuss instances that relate to the body, gender presentations, social roles, and language, for the purpose of problematizing both notions of trans-gender history and binary assumptions of gender as untransmutable and immutable.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910085
Claudia Sofía Garriga-López
Sex and State Are Action Verbs Claudia Sofía Garriga-López (bio) Paisley Currah’s Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity, New York: New York University Press, 2022 In the face of the present moment’s relentless culture-war legislation against transgender people, Sex Is as Sex Does is a gift to educators who want to teach transgender studies from a political science perspective. This book is accessible and clearly written in a way that makes it especially suitable for undergraduate students as well as people outside of academia who want to deepen their understanding of transgender politics. Paisley Currah’s experiences as both an advocate for transgender rights and a social theorist guide readers to look at big-picture questions about the social construction of sex in and through governance practices, without losing sight of the immediate material needs of trans people for political reforms. Currah moves through a series of legal cases, administrative rules, and legislation to demonstrate what sex categorizations do across a wide range of government agencies and institutions. In doing so, he demonstrates the plasticity of sex as a tool of governance, as one of many categories used to distribute resources and exert control over populations. Sex classifications and the requirements for sex reclassification are a function of government, even or especially within agencies that purportedly have nothing to do with sex. Currah points out that institutions that surveil, confer benefits, or incarcerate have different sets of interest when it comes to sex designation. He helps us make sense of the contradictory and uneven distribution of sex reclassification policies by pointing out the different work that sex classification does in a driver’s licence, on a marriage certificate, in prison, and so on. Through this narrow yet versatile focus on the regulations surrounding sex reclassification, Currah theorizes state formations. Sex is as sex does, but also, government is as government does. States are not inherently coherent, unified, or rational; they are an amalgamation of practices that often contradict one another. [End Page 255] This book can be thought of as a transfeminist theory of state. Transfeminism offers us a path through which to move beyond the gender essentialism and biological determinism that has plagued feminisms since the sex/gender divide was made a central principle through which to refute women’s subordination. Currah’s state-based political analysis compliments transgender scholarship’s deconstruction of sex as a stable biological category in the fields of medicine and gender studies. Currah sustains that despite their limitations, it is many times necessary to employ talking points about the correct medical and scientific understanding of sex or the need for sex reclassification, even as he proposes that a more just approach would be to do away with sex classification altogether. Currah traces how sex categorization was fo
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910083
Joy Ellison
Abstract: This paper expands historical and theoretical engagements with Leslie Feinberg’s life by analyzing the nonbinary and disability politics of hir screened-in photography series. Through a consent-based method called “making” photographs, Feinberg challenged the conventions of photographic representation of disabled and transgender people. The screened-in series provides a nonbinary political/relational model of gender, sexuality, race, and disability.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910082
Minnie Bruce Pratt
The Old Days, from S/HE Minnie Bruce Pratt The Old Days Standing in the pit of the auditorium, you are someone I don’t know yet, handsome in silky shirt and tie, hair clipped close almost as skin on your fine-boned head. You read a story about bar raids in the 50s, a dawn scene on the street between a butch just released from jail and the woman who has waited for her and now smooths her shirt, mourns the indelible bloodstains that will never wash out. As you read, I am the woman who touches the shirt, startled to be so translated to a place I think I’ve never been. Yet later I remember that when I got to the trailer she had already showered and changed out of her overalls. The plaid shirt, her favorite shirt he had slashed with his knife, was a heap on the bathroom floor. I thought then he had raped her because she was a lesbian. But he had raped her because she was a butch, her cropped hair, her walk, three o’clock in the afternoon, taking out the garbage to the dumpster behind the 7-11, finishing up her shift. I smoothed her shirt over my knees, I pinned the frayed plaid together. I hand-sewed with exquisite care until the colors matched again, trying to keep us together. In the dim light of the auditorium, you see me standing in your past. Your message on my phone machine the next morning says, “So glad to see a femme from the old days.” I write to correct you, to explain about my lesbian-feminist political coming-out. In return, your letter says, of me listening in the auditorium, “While I was reading, it was as if you were moving emotionally with me in the symmetry of a slow dance.” I don’t understand what you mean, me who begins to wander off in my own direction halfway through every dance with a lover, my attention and my confidence failing. I reply, dubiously, hopefully, “I have so much trouble following—perhaps [End Page 227] I haven’t had a skillful enough partner?” When we dance at the Phase, you have a pocketful of quarters and arrange for three slow Anita Bakers in a row. I am nervous and tentative for the first song and a half, you murmur endearments and instructions. Then suddenly I lean back in your arms, look into your eyes, and begin to move as if the dance is air I am flying into, or water I am finning through, finally moving in my element. When we sit to drink Calistogas and lime with friends, you say, “I never thought I’d dance again with a femme lover in a bar like this, like the ones I came out into.” Behind us the jukebox glows like a neon dream, and dykes at the green baize table are clunking their pool cues. I tell you about my first bar, in North Carolina, almost ten years after the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City, an uprising of lesbian and gay liberation that I had not yet heard of. At that bar we parked around the corner so the police wouldn’t photograph our license plates. We had to sign a roster at the door because it was a “private club.” Rumor was that the lists got handed over to the police. My friends taug
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910092
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Another Way to Fly, from Terry Dactyl Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (bio) The first time I met Sid she was on the dance floor in a silver and gold tube dress pulled over her head except it wasn’t just a dress because the fabric went on and on and somehow she knew the exact spot on the dance floor where the light would shine right on her or that’s how it felt when she was writhing inside this tube of fabric, pulling it up and down, a hand out and a hand in, and then her face exposed in harsh white makeup and black lipstick with long glittering eyelashes and then she rolled onto the floor, she was crawling or more like bending but also she was completely still in the bouncing lights and all this was somehow happening on a crowded dance floor at the Limelight while I was sipping my cocktail and I didn’t know what I was seeing I mean it felt like this went on forever, how many songs, it was like there wasn’t even music anymore just my body inside the fabric peeking out and then suddenly she pulled the dress up around her neck like a huge elegant collar, and underneath she was wearing a gold bodysuit with a silver metallic skirt that flared out, with ballet slippers also painted gold and she walked right up to me and said what did you think. And I had no idea how she even saw me but I must have mumbled something because then she took my hand and said let’s go upstairs, honey, and I thought we were going to the balcony but we went up the stairs in the back, and at the top she kissed the door person on both cheeks and then we went inside. And there was a whole other dance floor there, the club inside a club that I’d heard about, and she guided me over to the bar and said: I can’t believe she’s gone. And then she said it again: I can’t believe she’s gone. [End Page 279] And then she looked up at me and started laughing hysterically—oh honey, she said, I totally thought, I totally thought. And then she just stopped right there. I didn’t know if she thought I was someone else, or if she thought—I really just didn’t know. She said what are you drinking, honey, but she didn’t wait for my answer she just ordered two vodka sours with grenadine, I loved the color and after I took one sip I knew this would be my drink from then on. She poured some coke out on a coaster and then handed me a straw, and I made sure just to snort half but she motioned her hand like you take the rest, and when I was done she handed me a big flat round pill and I swallowed it with the vodka sour. I was a little worried because I was already a bit coked up and alcohol messes with ecstasy too, but I definitely knew not to turn down free drugs, I mean wasn’t this what was supposed to happen in New York? Sid, she said. Sid Sidereal. Terry, I said. Terry Dactyl. And she touched my back, and said: Where are your wings? It was the way she touched me. Like she was drawing my wings on. I could feel them right then. One by one, the others came upstairs, and took their magic pills—I didn’t know an
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