Trans Life and the Critique of Political Economy

Abstract Thirty years have passed since Leslie Feinberg published hir pamphlet Transgender Liberation, a “Marxist view of when and why transgender oppression arose.” Since then, considerations of trans studies in relationship to the critique of political economy have developed unevenly, but a variety of recent scholarship enables routes for interrogating processes of gendering in relationship to labor, global economic development, and routinized immiseration. This short article surveys some of this work in order to mark how it might orient future trans scholarship. A renewed attention to Marxist critique can provide tools for charting the flourishing of trans life and the forces that work to dispossess it.