Pub Date : 2023-06-29DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2023.2227003
Amika Starr
{"title":"Carr, Bryan J., and Carstarphen, Meta G. (Editors). Gendered Defenders: Marvel’s Heroines in Transmedia Spaces","authors":"Amika Starr","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2023.2227003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2023.2227003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46144070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-26DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2023.2218818
Melissa Stone
Abstract This article provides a technical-rhetorical perspective regarding the impact of historical menstrual health technologies through a material feminist approach. My Baradian diffractive analysis builds on previous work from material feminist scholars as well as feminist technical-rhetorical scholars to explain how menstruation and the innovation of menstrual health technologies are often predicated on efficiency bias. Ultimately, I trouble well-worn dichotomies to disrupt bodily efficiency logics and problematize deterministic ideas about menstruation.
{"title":"Diffractive Menstruation: Toward a Technical-Rhetorical Perspective of Menstrual Health Technologies","authors":"Melissa Stone","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2023.2218818","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2023.2218818","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article provides a technical-rhetorical perspective regarding the impact of historical menstrual health technologies through a material feminist approach. My Baradian diffractive analysis builds on previous work from material feminist scholars as well as feminist technical-rhetorical scholars to explain how menstruation and the innovation of menstrual health technologies are often predicated on efficiency bias. Ultimately, I trouble well-worn dichotomies to disrupt bodily efficiency logics and problematize deterministic ideas about menstruation.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44314419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-22DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2023.2222365
M. Tomlinson
Abstract Menstrual activists have long adopted an intersectional approach in their work to reduce period poverty, eradicate menstrual stigma, and educate audiences about health and sustainability. By forcing offline activities to cease, COVID-19 created unprecedented barriers for menstrual activists, including the closure of offline spaces and social distancing. Lockdown, however, provided a unique opportunity to assess the effectiveness of digital activism and created valuable knowledge that will have a long-term impact on the aims and practices of menstrual activists. Interviews conducted with 32 menstrual activists across Great Britain demonstrate that although digital technologies help to raise awareness among more privileged audiences, they are less effective for conducting intersectional activism that supports communities who are disadvantaged by factors such as race, class, or disability. Furthermore, as activists often focus on the material needs of menstruating women and people, relying solely on digital communication considerably reduces the effectiveness of their work.
{"title":"“Periods Don’t Stop for Pandemics”: The Implications of COVID-19 for Online and Offline Menstrual Activism in Great Britain","authors":"M. Tomlinson","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2023.2222365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2023.2222365","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Menstrual activists have long adopted an intersectional approach in their work to reduce period poverty, eradicate menstrual stigma, and educate audiences about health and sustainability. By forcing offline activities to cease, COVID-19 created unprecedented barriers for menstrual activists, including the closure of offline spaces and social distancing. Lockdown, however, provided a unique opportunity to assess the effectiveness of digital activism and created valuable knowledge that will have a long-term impact on the aims and practices of menstrual activists. Interviews conducted with 32 menstrual activists across Great Britain demonstrate that although digital technologies help to raise awareness among more privileged audiences, they are less effective for conducting intersectional activism that supports communities who are disadvantaged by factors such as race, class, or disability. Furthermore, as activists often focus on the material needs of menstruating women and people, relying solely on digital communication considerably reduces the effectiveness of their work.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48940217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2023.2188622
Brenton J. Malin
Abstract This article explores the Twitter response to reports of abusive behavior by U.S.-based singer-songwriter Ryan Adams. Using a combination of quantitative data analysis techniques and close textual and contextual analysis, I analyze an archive of more than 130,000 tweets taken from the week prior to the initial reporting of Adams’s behavior in February 2019 and continuing until March 2021. On one hand, this archive of tweets illustrates the general value of Twitter as a component of “networked feminism,” in the sense that these tweets generally call attention to and criticize Adams’s inappropriate behavior. However, the overall response to Adams’s allegations also demonstrates both the limitations of Twitter for addressing MeToo-related stories and the problems of the frame of “toxic masculinity” in approaching these issues. Stressing the “toxicity” of these behaviors can serve to reinforce a normative, hegemonic understanding of “healthy” masculinity that masks the institutional forms of oppression that allow hegemonic masculinity to function.
{"title":"“I Never Liked Him”: Ryan Adams and the Toxification of Masculinity in the Post-MeToo Digital Era","authors":"Brenton J. Malin","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2023.2188622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2023.2188622","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the Twitter response to reports of abusive behavior by U.S.-based singer-songwriter Ryan Adams. Using a combination of quantitative data analysis techniques and close textual and contextual analysis, I analyze an archive of more than 130,000 tweets taken from the week prior to the initial reporting of Adams’s behavior in February 2019 and continuing until March 2021. On one hand, this archive of tweets illustrates the general value of Twitter as a component of “networked feminism,” in the sense that these tweets generally call attention to and criticize Adams’s inappropriate behavior. However, the overall response to Adams’s allegations also demonstrates both the limitations of Twitter for addressing MeToo-related stories and the problems of the frame of “toxic masculinity” in approaching these issues. Stressing the “toxicity” of these behaviors can serve to reinforce a normative, hegemonic understanding of “healthy” masculinity that masks the institutional forms of oppression that allow hegemonic masculinity to function.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49053449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2023.2193547
Morgan DiCesare, E. Cram
Memories of 1970s feminisms often conjure negative feelings associated with “the difficult decades” wherein “radical/separatist lesbian-feminists articulated their identities in ways that eschewed coalitions in search of greater ideological purity” (Stryker 91; Samek 233). Narratives of the “difficult” 1970s and 1980s often focus on the rise of identarian consolidation wherein the broad imagination and praxis of feminist communities and politics became synonymous with trans-exclusive radical feminists (or TERFs). Narratives of the so-called incommensurability of feminist and trans identities and politics continue to hold sway as TERFs and gender criticals (GCs) continue to predominate public discussions of trans experience. When recollecting the historical structures and articulations of trans antagonism within feminist communities and their relevance to our contemporary political climate, we might remember the reactionary fissures in addition to visions of trans inclusion and solidarities. As trans historian Susan Stryker emphasizes, “[T]here was nothing monolithic about second wave feminist attitudes toward trans issues. The feminist second wave simultaneously espoused some of the most reactionary attitudes toward trans people to be found anywhere while also offering a vision of transgender inclusion in progressive feminist movements for social change” (109). Particularly in this moment wherein TERFs and GCs openly espouse political linkages with fascist politics through their denouncements of “gender ideology” that also deny trans people’s place in the past, we are moved to remember historical moments of transfeminist possibility. By transfeminist possibility we mean the felt potentiality of relationships that affirm trans people’s lived experiences and allow for even temporarily changed social worlds. Transfeminist possibility, especially its articulations with 1970s feminisms, matters in the face of contemporary arguments that, on one hand, either naturalize exclusionary feminist imaginations or, on the other hand, act as if feminist history was never coformed through the labor and struggles of trans and queer people. Rather than continue the focus on lesbian feminist violence against trans people, we revisit two moments of transfeminist solidarity across difference and focus on the transfeminist potentiality of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera’s Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries’ (STAR) community organizing in addition to Beth Elliott’s experiences at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference. Our reflection builds from trans historian
{"title":"Transfeminist Possibilities and Remembering the 1970s","authors":"Morgan DiCesare, E. Cram","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2023.2193547","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2023.2193547","url":null,"abstract":"Memories of 1970s feminisms often conjure negative feelings associated with “the difficult decades” wherein “radical/separatist lesbian-feminists articulated their identities in ways that eschewed coalitions in search of greater ideological purity” (Stryker 91; Samek 233). Narratives of the “difficult” 1970s and 1980s often focus on the rise of identarian consolidation wherein the broad imagination and praxis of feminist communities and politics became synonymous with trans-exclusive radical feminists (or TERFs). Narratives of the so-called incommensurability of feminist and trans identities and politics continue to hold sway as TERFs and gender criticals (GCs) continue to predominate public discussions of trans experience. When recollecting the historical structures and articulations of trans antagonism within feminist communities and their relevance to our contemporary political climate, we might remember the reactionary fissures in addition to visions of trans inclusion and solidarities. As trans historian Susan Stryker emphasizes, “[T]here was nothing monolithic about second wave feminist attitudes toward trans issues. The feminist second wave simultaneously espoused some of the most reactionary attitudes toward trans people to be found anywhere while also offering a vision of transgender inclusion in progressive feminist movements for social change” (109). Particularly in this moment wherein TERFs and GCs openly espouse political linkages with fascist politics through their denouncements of “gender ideology” that also deny trans people’s place in the past, we are moved to remember historical moments of transfeminist possibility. By transfeminist possibility we mean the felt potentiality of relationships that affirm trans people’s lived experiences and allow for even temporarily changed social worlds. Transfeminist possibility, especially its articulations with 1970s feminisms, matters in the face of contemporary arguments that, on one hand, either naturalize exclusionary feminist imaginations or, on the other hand, act as if feminist history was never coformed through the labor and struggles of trans and queer people. Rather than continue the focus on lesbian feminist violence against trans people, we revisit two moments of transfeminist solidarity across difference and focus on the transfeminist potentiality of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera’s Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries’ (STAR) community organizing in addition to Beth Elliott’s experiences at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference. Our reflection builds from trans historian","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44883090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2023.2193550
V. Hsu
In 2022, amid escalating verbal and physical attacks on transgender people, conservative news magazine The Post Millennial shared the story of Julie Jaman, who was banned from the Port Townsend YMCA after reporting a trans woman for using the locker room. Jaman recalls “hear[ing] a male voice” while showering after her regular swim (Nightingale, 2022). That voice belonged to Clementine Adams, a trans woman who was chaperoning girls from the day camp. The story circulated through conservative media, resulting in a petition to “Let Julie Swim.” A local news site, the Port Townsend Free Press, declared, “Mountain View Pool No Longer Safe for Many Women and Girls” (Scaratino, 2022). As with most anti-trans dog whistles, many accounts of Jaman’s story suggest that Adams’s mere presence is inherently harmful. This is to say: transphobic rhetoric locates the threat of trans people not in any action but in our very bodies. Throughout conservative coverage of Jaman’s story, Adams does not interact with the girls in the locker room, but the idea of her gender-nonconforming body appears as reason enough for Jaman’s outrage. The YMCA clarified that Adams was fulfilling her job as an employee and escorting the youth under her supervision (Grey, 2022). However, The Post Millennial still conjures a sense of menace by describing Jaman “hidden behind thin, sheer shower curtains,” as if trying to escape some monster. From this hiding place, Jaman asked, “Do you have a penis?”—a question that repeats throughout conservative reports. A U.K.-based newspaper, The Spectator, devoted an entire article to speculating about Adams’s genitalia and arguing for mandatory genital checks (Mull, 2022). The imagined phallus—one that no one in this locker room actually saw—conspires with gender essentialism to render Adams’s body as an inherent violation of the “women’s” space. This brief article explores the trans and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) body as what Adela Licona (2018) calls a non/image: a “visual and affective rhetorical claim without (the need for) an actual referent” (p. 169). I use TGNC here specifically to emphasize nonconformity. Anti-trans rhetorics frequently invoke the gender-transgressive body as a sign of moral perversion. In this case, Adams’s mere presence—regardless of her actions or corporeality—justifies anti-trans hostility. In what follows, I provide a brief exploration of the “monstrous” TGNC body as a non/image, which renders all trans people as inherent aberrations regardless of what shape or actions our bodies take. The contradictions that shape the non/image demonstrate the impossibility of
{"title":"The Impossible Trans Body: Non/Images of Gender in Regimes of Whiteness","authors":"V. Hsu","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2023.2193550","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2023.2193550","url":null,"abstract":"In 2022, amid escalating verbal and physical attacks on transgender people, conservative news magazine The Post Millennial shared the story of Julie Jaman, who was banned from the Port Townsend YMCA after reporting a trans woman for using the locker room. Jaman recalls “hear[ing] a male voice” while showering after her regular swim (Nightingale, 2022). That voice belonged to Clementine Adams, a trans woman who was chaperoning girls from the day camp. The story circulated through conservative media, resulting in a petition to “Let Julie Swim.” A local news site, the Port Townsend Free Press, declared, “Mountain View Pool No Longer Safe for Many Women and Girls” (Scaratino, 2022). As with most anti-trans dog whistles, many accounts of Jaman’s story suggest that Adams’s mere presence is inherently harmful. This is to say: transphobic rhetoric locates the threat of trans people not in any action but in our very bodies. Throughout conservative coverage of Jaman’s story, Adams does not interact with the girls in the locker room, but the idea of her gender-nonconforming body appears as reason enough for Jaman’s outrage. The YMCA clarified that Adams was fulfilling her job as an employee and escorting the youth under her supervision (Grey, 2022). However, The Post Millennial still conjures a sense of menace by describing Jaman “hidden behind thin, sheer shower curtains,” as if trying to escape some monster. From this hiding place, Jaman asked, “Do you have a penis?”—a question that repeats throughout conservative reports. A U.K.-based newspaper, The Spectator, devoted an entire article to speculating about Adams’s genitalia and arguing for mandatory genital checks (Mull, 2022). The imagined phallus—one that no one in this locker room actually saw—conspires with gender essentialism to render Adams’s body as an inherent violation of the “women’s” space. This brief article explores the trans and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) body as what Adela Licona (2018) calls a non/image: a “visual and affective rhetorical claim without (the need for) an actual referent” (p. 169). I use TGNC here specifically to emphasize nonconformity. Anti-trans rhetorics frequently invoke the gender-transgressive body as a sign of moral perversion. In this case, Adams’s mere presence—regardless of her actions or corporeality—justifies anti-trans hostility. In what follows, I provide a brief exploration of the “monstrous” TGNC body as a non/image, which renders all trans people as inherent aberrations regardless of what shape or actions our bodies take. The contradictions that shape the non/image demonstrate the impossibility of","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41564429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2023.2193535
Lore/tta LeMaster
When I obtained my bachelor’s in women’s studies in the early aughts, trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) was not yet named as such, though its ideological origins certainly animated my requisite training in what has come to be variously termed women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Despite its early 1990s emergence, works in transgender studies were not yet included in my requisite training as a major in women’s studies at the time. The proper object of study was, well, “women”; and the ways “male feminists” supported “women.” In this ontoepistemic context, “transgender” emerged as the butt of a joke, a pedagogical foil, or poised as an existential threat to the category of “woman” itself—the question of “transition” conceptualized as mutilation or confusion at best, a postmodern perversion of scientific achievement at worst. As a genderqueer person with trans yearnings, laboring in feminist struggle necessarily required concurrent unlearning.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2023.2193545
Thomas J. Billard
I was conducting fieldwork for my forthcoming book at the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) in Washington, DC, when the infamous rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) article was published in PLOS One by Brown University public health scholar Lisa Littman in August 2018 (Billard, 2024). The gist of the article was that transgender identity is a “social contagion” spread among emotionally vulnerable youth who declare trans identities in order to be special or (conversely) to be trendy, or as a cry for help, but who are not actually trans. The article was quickly and near-universally declared illegitimate by members of the scholarly community on both theoretical and methodological grounds (see, e.g., Ashley, 2020; Bauer, Lawson, & Metzger, 2022; Coalition for the Advancement and Application of Psychological Science, 2021; Restar, 2020). But much like the 1998 Andrew Wakefield et al. study that set off a misinformed panic about the connection between measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines and autism—which persists still today—the widespread discrediting of the research’s claims did nothing to prevent the study from being taken up by zealots as “proof” that “transgender ideology” (Faye, 2022) is a dangerous force that must be stopped. Within days of the study’s initial publication, it was being shared in disparate corners of the anti-trans Internet on both sides of the Atlantic—from neofascist YouTubers in the United States to British women’s networks in the ostensible parent support community Mumsnet (Kesslen, 2022; Lewis, 2019). From there, the “debate” over ROGD spread to the mass media and to state and national political parties, where it continues to inform how opponents of transgender rights justify everything from outlawing the provision of transgender health care to opposing the United Kingdom’s Gender Recognition Act (Billard, 2022; Johnson, 2022; Pearce, Erikainen, & Vincent, 2020b). The weaponization of recognized misinformation to oppose transgender rights that we see in the case of ROGD is not unique. In fact, it is typical. During the two years I was at NCTE, I observed situation after situation in which misinformation about transgender issues was mobilized for the sole purpose of justifying opposition to the rights— and often the very existence—of trans people. In the intervening years, I have witnessed it countless times. Misinformation—or, more specifically, disinformation—about trans topics has become the defining feature of public discourse on transgender rights. What the ROGD case illustrates particularly well, however, is the complex dynamics
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2023.2193543
Qui D. Alexander
When people think of abolition, there is usually an immediate association with police and prisons. Sociopolitical associations with abolition have changed over time, from the historical struggle to abolish slavery to contemporary political movements for the abolition of the prison-industrial complex. While today the word abolition triggers many different reactions within the current political imagination, what is often overlooked is abolition’s connection to gender-critical movements. One might assume this connection is about the “abolition of gender,” something gender-critical feminists both fear and use as rationalization for discrimination (Bassi & LaFleur, 2022). While it could be argued that the abolition of gender is part of a larger political project that resists and refuses the violence of the gender binary, the purpose of this article is to draw attention to the ways in which the logics of trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) (Hines, 2020; Pearce, Erikainen, & Vincent, 2020) and the logics of the prison-industrial complex overlap. Simply put: TERF logics are carceral logics. In this article, I argue that abolitionist praxis can be used as a framework to identify and deconstruct the entanglement of TERF and carceral logics. This article explores the ways in which TERF logics and carceral logics overlap; how both carcerality and TERF logics rely on white supremacist constructions of personhood; and how Black trans life embodies the pedagogical potential to both resist and refuse the larger project of carcerality on which gender-critical movements rely (Graff, Kapur, & Walters, 2019). Carceral logics are the ideas, beliefs, and practices teaching us that punishment is the only way to deal with societal harm. The United States has built entire institutions around this particular ideology of punishment, which are meant to (and which are presented as the only resource to) protect society from violence. Without attempting to address the root causes of violence, police and prisons as systems of punishment have become acceptable institutional mechanisms used to maintain social control. TERF logics operate in similar ways, creating systems of gender that are based on punitive ways of being. Gender as a social category is one that has historically been policed (Spade, 2015; Stanley & Smith, 2015; Sudbury, 2009). Carcerality as a cultural norm is used to manage gender variance, or rather the discursive construction of gender difference in criminalized terms. As police and prisons are presented as the only appropriate tool to address
{"title":"TERF Logics Are Carceral Logics: Toward the Abolition of Gender-Critical Movements or Black Trans Life as Pedagogical Praxis","authors":"Qui D. Alexander","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2023.2193543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2023.2193543","url":null,"abstract":"When people think of abolition, there is usually an immediate association with police and prisons. Sociopolitical associations with abolition have changed over time, from the historical struggle to abolish slavery to contemporary political movements for the abolition of the prison-industrial complex. While today the word abolition triggers many different reactions within the current political imagination, what is often overlooked is abolition’s connection to gender-critical movements. One might assume this connection is about the “abolition of gender,” something gender-critical feminists both fear and use as rationalization for discrimination (Bassi & LaFleur, 2022). While it could be argued that the abolition of gender is part of a larger political project that resists and refuses the violence of the gender binary, the purpose of this article is to draw attention to the ways in which the logics of trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) (Hines, 2020; Pearce, Erikainen, & Vincent, 2020) and the logics of the prison-industrial complex overlap. Simply put: TERF logics are carceral logics. In this article, I argue that abolitionist praxis can be used as a framework to identify and deconstruct the entanglement of TERF and carceral logics. This article explores the ways in which TERF logics and carceral logics overlap; how both carcerality and TERF logics rely on white supremacist constructions of personhood; and how Black trans life embodies the pedagogical potential to both resist and refuse the larger project of carcerality on which gender-critical movements rely (Graff, Kapur, & Walters, 2019). Carceral logics are the ideas, beliefs, and practices teaching us that punishment is the only way to deal with societal harm. The United States has built entire institutions around this particular ideology of punishment, which are meant to (and which are presented as the only resource to) protect society from violence. Without attempting to address the root causes of violence, police and prisons as systems of punishment have become acceptable institutional mechanisms used to maintain social control. TERF logics operate in similar ways, creating systems of gender that are based on punitive ways of being. Gender as a social category is one that has historically been policed (Spade, 2015; Stanley & Smith, 2015; Sudbury, 2009). Carcerality as a cultural norm is used to manage gender variance, or rather the discursive construction of gender difference in criminalized terms. As police and prisons are presented as the only appropriate tool to address","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44383733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2023.2193549
A. N. Mack
Building a sustained resistance to the combined processes of gender/sex essentialism, heteronormativity, capitalist exploitation, white supremacy
建立对性别本质主义、异性恋规范、资本主义剥削、白人至上主义的持续抵抗
{"title":"Erotics of Epidemicity: Captivity and Refusal in Mediations of Black Trans Life and Death","authors":"A. N. Mack","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2023.2193549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2023.2193549","url":null,"abstract":"Building a sustained resistance to the combined processes of gender/sex essentialism, heteronormativity, capitalist exploitation, white supremacy","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43930028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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