The days of wearing your heart on your sleeve are done; embrace the time of wearing your sleeve on your heart.
The days of wearing your heart on your sleeve are done; embrace the time of wearing your sleeve on your heart.
Thank you so much for uploading this, I am incredibly appreciative <3
Working at the (state-owned media) CBC is fine and raises no questions, but working for the (state-owned media) RT naturally casts a propagandistic shadow. Care to comment?
Supporting rebellion in the DRC and wanting the people of the DRC to achieve a revolutionary success is not even remotely in the same category as supporting US-backed militias from Rwanda doing mass murder and the displacement and death of the millions of people whose emancipation Cuba believed in. People aren’t chess pieces in some grand strategy game. Revolution comes from the masses and is to free the masses. Revolution doesn’t come from imperial militias doing murder and everyone starving and dying because the whole place is being ravaged for its mines. And there’s nothing revolutionary about dismissing the deaths of the very people you supposedly believe should have a revolution as inconsequential because Rwanda has “valid reasons” for fucking killing them all.
Supporting American-instigated forever wars because an exploited people aren’t revolutionary is certainly an interesting stance.
My comment was not in defense of China (though bringing up the Khmer Rouge as if that has any bearing on current Chinese foreign policy is wild), my comment is on the material benefit to the US for M23 to be attacking the DRC, which seems a rather important piece of information for understanding how a militia that is armed by the US and Israel and is attacking people to the US’s benefit might be worth criticizing.
But then you made it immediately clear that you believe in collective punishment, as if the millions of people of the DRC should continue to be ravaged by US imperialism because of some nebulous connection that they have as an entire people to the Rwandan genocide, which, frankly, is a troubling viewpoint to take.
May you expand on what reasons would validate taking weapons from the US and Israel and arming militias to attack a neighbouring nation where 7 million people are displaced and twenty years of war and have famine have resulted in millions of deaths?
And do these valid reasons take into consideration that China became the largest stakeholder in the DRC’s mineral mines about a decade ago, which coincides with the rise of said militias using US and Israeli supplied weaponry to murder people there? Or is it somehow coincidence that at a time when China is dominating the EV and green energy market (which relies heavily on imports from the DRC) and the US is openly asserting that they will crush Chinese EV and green energy markets, that US and Israeli supplied militias are just so happening to target the mining operations in the DRC?
Just a funny little quirk that is worth commenting on: my very argument that people are often unable to self-identify because the larger mainstream has decided that their personal identifiers are “offensive” has been demonstrated by the website’s slur-filter.
Transgender, in its conception, was a coalitional term designed as an umbrella for all sorts of people who transgressed against cisheteronormative gender roles. This included transsexual people, but it also included crossdressers, drag queens/kings, stone butches, fairies, dykes, aggressives, removeds, and a whole slew of other identities (many of which would, in our current terminology, be considered “cis”).
It was only in the late nineties and into the early aughts that the term transgender started being viewed as synonymous with transsexual. This has led to a lot of interesting (though often inflammatory) shifts in the language used in queer communities. In the anglosphere, the language of institutionalized queer organizing gained prominence, and street-level identifiers fell by the wayside. There were lots of reasons for this: some identities were considered too niche, or too difficult to parse for cishetero audiences. For some, the terms that were symbols of self-realization in some communities were often considered slurs in others (and this is especially true of identifiers used by racialized and otherwise marginalized communities, as able-bodied, educated, wealthy white queer people became a focus for deciding which language was acceptable and which was “offensive”).
With the prominence of the coalitional term “transgender,” which offered an opportunity to bridge the gap between a lot of different marginalized groups under a cohesive banner, transsexual came into a specific sort of cross-fire. On the one hand, you had a new wave of self-identified transgender people making arguments that transsexual as a term was “binary” and “reinforcing gender norms,” which you may recognize as a parallel to arguments that “bisexual” as a term “reinforces the binary.” (This is also a bit of a rehashing of the old lesbian movement’s arguments that androgyny is the “correct” way to do lesbian feminism, and that femininity “reinforces the patriarchy.” Turns out political movements are often doomed to recycle the same tired and divisive rhetoric).
On the other hand, you had transsexual people who did struggle with accepting or understanding the larger coalitional movement, for a variety of reasons. For instance, there are transsexual people who were resistant to the idea that they could be “lumped in” with crossdressers, or queens, because (especially at the time) many people who were openly transsexual lived “straight” lives, and couldn’t agree with the fact of their manhood or womanhood being conflated with queer sexual practices. There were transsexual people who considered themselves to have a medical issue unrelated to queer activism, or who desired to live lives of stealth. There were transsexual people who saw their very identity as transsexual get villainized by other queer activists as “reinforcing the binary,” as though some identities could be inherently radical/more radical than others. There were transsexual people who were having their very specific transsexual needs sidelined under wider discussions of transgender activism and transgender rights.
These were all very real and interlaced conflicts of language, the type that will come up in any coalitional organizing, by the way. Coalitions are great for getting people swinging together, but they can easily end up replicating systems of hierarchy and invisibilize the differing needs of the members within that coalition (check out Viviane K. Namaste’s Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People and Julia Serano’s Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive).
This is all to say that there has been a very deep interplay of competing ideas of what it even means to be transsexual and transgender, that there is no consensus and that there can be no consensus because any consensus would at its heart replicate the very systems of assignment of identity and gender role that transgender activism erupted to combat. There is a very real effort by the bourgeois institutions of queer theory to create a containing and hegemonic ideal of queer identity that can be easily captured and consumed in the commodity market, and this has coloured the way that queer identity is understood and discussed at large. There is no “correct” term for anyone to use, and you simply cannot judge a person based on what words they use to relate to their personal experiences. Language is always in motion, and while often that motion is being directed by the institutions of power, those on the margins will always carve their own linguistic space, and it is incumbent on us to allow people the opportunity to self-describe.
Judith Butlerian Jihad
Tá fáilte romhat! Hope you find something in there that you enjoy, or that resonates. Whipping Girl is one that I bought after reading because after so many years of Stoller’s sex/gender distinction permeating queer theory to the point that it’s often uncritically presented as fact, it was so amazing to read Serrano’s theory of intrinsic inclinations (which she fleshed out further in subsequent writings) which jives much more with my own experiences and works better to apply across different experiences and cultural manifestations of gender
I’ve noticed a couple people mentioning a desire to getting into more reading. I have some recommendations (and am always open to discussing books) that focus primarily on trans/intersex and queergender theory. I also think feministgender theory (absent specifically queer lenses) is an important backbone to queer gender theory, as early feminist writers describing the gender-class distinction paved the way for understanding queerness’s place in the gender-class distinction, but this list would be way too long then. Hit me up if you want some recommendations though. Some of these ethnographs rather than theory, or historical, or a bit more personal.
Julia Serrano - Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, which can be followed up with Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, and Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back, and Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism
Emi Koyama - The Transfeminist Manifesto and Transfeminism: A Collection
Leslie Feinberg - Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink Or Blue, and Lavender and Red, and Transgender Warriors: Making History From Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (a great read and interesting for its time, but be wary of accepting Feinberg’s premise that contemporary concepts of identity can be broadly applied to cultural contexts across space and time)
Kate Bornstein - Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us and Gender Outlaws: the Next Generation
Riki Wilchins - Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender
Susan Stryker - My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage (which is a fantastic essay) and Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution
Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (editors) - The Transgender Studies Reader and The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (this one is edited with Aren Aizura rather than Whittle)
Viviane K. Namaste - Invisible Lives : The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People and Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Institutions, and Imperialism
Esther Newton - Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America and Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas and Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town
And this one isn’t so much a classic as it is essential reading for trans studies for Marxists:
Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke (editors) - Transgender Marxism (I also recommend Gleeson’s essay Transition and Abolition: Notes on Marxism and Trans Politics)
Jay Prosser - Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality
Joanne Meyerowitz - How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States
Angela Pattatuchi Aragón - Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional, and Queer Perspectives
Rita Santos - Beyond Gender Binaries: The History of Trans, Intersex, and Third-Gender Individuals
Marjorie Garber - Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety
Larry Nuttbrock (ed.) - Transgender Sex Work and Society
Andrea Abi-Karam, Kay Gabriel - We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (this is poems, more than theory, but so worth it)
Mark Thompson, Dorothy Allison, Guy Baldwin, Joseph W. Bean, Michael Bronski, Pat Califia, Jack Fritscher, Geoff Mains, Gayle Rubin – Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice
Hil Malatino - Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad
Merrick Daniel Pilling - Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice
Morty Diamond, Julia Serano, Shawna Virago, Sassafras Lowrey, Silas Howard, Cooper Lee Bombardier – Trans/Love: Radical Sex, Love & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary
Hilary Malatino - Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience
Alice Domurat Dreger - Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex
Anne Fausto-Sterling - Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men and Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World and Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
Catherine Harper - Intersex
Morgan Holmes - Critical Intersex
Nikoletta Pikramenou - Intersex Rights: Living Between Sexes
Julia Epstein, Kristina Straub - Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity
David A. Rubin - Intersex Matters: Biomedical Embodiment, Gender Regulation, and Transnational Activism
Georgiann Davis - Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis
Katrina Karkazis - Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience
Brandy L. Simula, J.E. Sumerau, Andrea Miller (editors) - Expanding the Rainbow: Exploring the Relationships of Bi+, Polyamorous, Kinky, Ace, Intersex, and Trans People
Elizabeth Reis - Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex
Hida Vilori, Maria Nieto - The Spectrum of Sex: The Science of Male, Female, and Intersex
Stefan Horlacher (eds.) - Transgender and Intersex: Theoretical, Practical, and Artistic Perspectives
Hilary Manette Klein - The Problematics of Heterosexuality: Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and Mother Nature
Holly Lewis - The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection
Gayle S. Rubin – Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader
Sara Ahmed - Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
Judith Butler - Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of “Sex” and Undoing Gender
Andrew Parker, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - Performativity and Performance
Also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - Epistemology of the Closet and Tendencies
Carla Freccero, Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - Queer/Early/Modern
Monique Wittig - The Straight Mind And Other Essays
Mary McAuliffe (editor) - Sapphists and Sexologists: Histories of Sexualities
Chrysanthi Nigianni, Merl Storr - Deleuze and Queer Theory
Suzanne J. Kessler, Wendy McKenna – Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach
Thomas Walter Laqueur - Making Sex, Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, Kay Whitlock - Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States
Dean Spade - Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law
Eric A. Stanley - Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
Jasbir Puar - Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
Adnan Hossain - Beyond Emasculation: Pleasure and Power in the Making of hijra in Bangladesh and Badhai: Hijra-Khwaja Sira-Trans Performance Across Borders in South Asia (with Claire Pamment)
Xianyong Bai, Hans Tao-Ming Huang- Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan
Denise Tse-Shang Tang - Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life
Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, William F. Schroeder, Hongwei Bao (editors) - Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures
Eli Coleman, Chou Wah-Shan – Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies
Howard Chiang (eds.) - Transgender China
Hongwei Bao - Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism
Francisca Yuenki Lai - Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires
Don Kulick – Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes
Gloria Anzaldua - Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Eunjung Kim - Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea
Hwasook Nam - Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea
Fintan Walsh - Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation
Páraic Kerrigan - LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland
Patrick R. Mullen - The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History
Gul Ozyegin (ed.) - Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures
Stephen O. Murray, Will Roscoe (editors) - Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature
Saed Atshan - Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique
Sarah Schulman - Israel/Palestine and the Queer International
Stephen O. Murray, Will Roscoe (editors) - Boy-wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities
Will Roscoe - Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America
Thank you for sharing, I enjoyed that
The West doesn’t even have “not being arrested on sight” if you’re racialized. Black trans women get arrested on sight for presumptive involvement in sex work so much that they say they got picked up for “walking while trans.”
“In one American study, the largest-ever survey of transgender and gender non-conforming people, 41 percent of Black trans women reported having been arrested or jailed because of their gender identity” - Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives
It’s even worse if you’re found with condoms on your person, that becomes “evidence” that you are engaged in sex work. So trans sexuality is inherently criminalized, as of course no one would choose to have sex with trans people if it wasn’t some sort of illegal transaction.
Truly the amount that economically secure, educated white queers are disconnected from the realities of further marginalized queer people domestically is astounding, and the fact that this disconnect allows them to position whatever colonial monstrosity they call home as being more “progressive” than the victims of imperialism that they castigate as being queerphobic is endlessly frustrating. But of course, having a vector of oppression such as queerness is seen to render them as pure victim, as completely divorced from the way they personally participate in and benefit from imperialism. As if queerness can wash away the blood that stains our hands.
Endlessly tired of imperial core queer “solidarity” being based around nebulous demands for “human rights” that, to no one’s surprise, often results in siding with the state against its enemies because they’re just so backwards while people in the core are languishing in jail/detention centres and those queers abroad that are supposedly in need of saving get delivered aid missiles and IMF austerity.
I love to recommend books, and so here is a smattering of books about Ireland from a variety of subjects and perspectives (largely focused on feminism as per my area of study).
Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales, Alwyn and Brinley Rees
Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, Anthony Bradley, Maryann Gialanella Valiulis
LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland, Páraic Kerrigan
Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women, Bronwen Walter
Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice, Claire McGettrick, Katherine O’Donnell, Maeve O’Rourke, James M. Smith, Mari Steed
The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History, Patrick R. Mullen
Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland, Clara Fischer, Áine Mahon
Women and the Irish Nation: Gender, Culture, and Irish Identity 1890–1914, D. A. J. MacPherson
Positioning Gender and Race in (Post)colonial Plantation Space: Connecting Ireland and the Caribbean, Eve Walsh Stoddard
Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation, Fintan Walsh
Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation, Geraldine Moane
Dedication and Leadership: Learning from the Communists, Hyde Douglas
The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, and Power, Jennifer M. Jeffers
Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction: Gender, Desire and Power, Linden Peach
Literature, Partition, and Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Joe Cleary
Weaving Transnational Solidarity, Katherine O’Donnell
Palgrave Advances in Irish History, Katherine O’Donnell, Mary McAuliffe, Leeann Lane
Sapphists and Sexologists: Histories of Sexualities, Mary McAuliffe (not specifically Irish, but by an Irish author and it does explore lesbian desire in colonial Ireland)
Trad Nation: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Irish Traditional Music, Tes Slominski
The James Connolly Reader, Shaun Harkin, James Connolly, Mike Davis (a great collection of Connolly’s works including a few that are out of print or hard to find elsewhere, like Labour in Irish History though I think that’s not so hard to get anymore with eBooks)
Revolutionary Works, Seamus Costello
A Literary History of Ireland, Hyde Douglas
Myths and Folklore of Ireland, Jeremiah Curtin
Early Irish Literature, Myles Dillon (also The Cycles of Kings and Irish Sagas)
Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society and Literature, Peter Beresford Ellis
A Brief History of the Celts, Peter Beresford Ellis (also The Druids and Celtic Myths and Legends and A Dictionary of Irish Mythology)
Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, Thomas Crofton Croker
If you’re looking for someone who is doing some really interesting scholarship on Irish indigeneity, coalition building with colonized Indigenous people globally, and preserving/resurrecting obscure and regional Irish-language terms and idioms, I recommend Manchán Magan.
Ali Kadri’s The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction explores exactly such an economic model. He expands on the theory of waste as the primary commodity of neoliberal capital order in China’s Path to Development: Against Neoliberalism and also its function as the driving force of imperial wars of encroachment in Imperialism With Reference to Syria and Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment.
I cannot recommend his work enough in understanding the way that imperialism under neoliberalism uses the production of waste as its primary mode of accumulation. War and destruction are often seen as the consequences of accumulation by resource theft, but Kadri posits that the waste itself is the commodity and resource theft is a secondary (although still desired and lucrative) goal in war. By de-reproducing labour, that is to say, by collapsing the labour time and resources necessary in reproducing labour to a single moment of liquidation, the entire value of that commodified labour is extracted at one go.
Destruction is not a byproduct of war, destruction is the product of war, and the accumulation of wealth through waste production is an explosive industry with massive profits–and without the drawback of any value being clawed back by labour in their need to reproduce their class. It is the ultimate end of commodified “thingification” (objectification) of labour.
The Zionist entity has been doing biological warfare since its inception, check out Benny Morris and Benjamin Z. Kedar’s Cast Thy Bread: Israeli Biological Warfare During the 1948 War. The article pieces together documents on Operation Cast Thy Bread, which poisoned wells across Palestine and Egypt and caused a typhoid epidemic. Ben-Gurion even ordered the poisoning of wells in Cairo as a pre-emptive strike.
Egyptian Prime Minister Nuqrashi Pasha told the UN Mediator for Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, at their meeting on 29 May, shortly after the Egyptian capture of the two Arab Platoon operatives outside Gaza contaminating ‘the water supply of the Egyptian army’ with ‘vials of cholera and dysentery germs’: ‘The Egyptian Government held the Jewish authorities responsible for this since this sort of thing had to be planned inasmuch as it was not possible to buy germs for such purposes in retail shops. Scientists and high officials had to be involved… [in] such well-planned acts.’
It’s no coincidence that Imane Khelif is from decolonized Algeria. The current state of the global gender hegemony is a direct result of colonial gender enforcement.
Bourgeois gender ideology rose to prominence during their early consolidation of power through the transatlantic slave trade and the colonization of the new world. Womanhood as a class category was built in direct opposition to the existence of racialized women: from its inception, bourgeois “womanhood” specifically excluded women of colour.
The bourgeois gender roles didn’t hold for slaves: Black women were expected to toil in “masculinized” field labour alongside the men, and Black men were also used for domestic, “feminized” labour. Womanhood–and manhood, to a lesser extent–was specifically a condition of white European femininity, which needed to protected from the perceived evils of miscegenation. Slaves were dehumanized, literally objectified, and thus ineligible for gendering.
With the abolition of formal chattel slavery, fears of miscegenation became rampant in bourgeois society, and so the status of “womanhood” as a state of white fragility that required protection from the Black Other was cemented. At the same time, feminized labour was still being done by former slaves and now racialized immigrants, mostly men as women were largely excluded from many wage labour activities, which kept the lines between “manhood” and “womanhood” blurry (as perceived by the bourgeois ideology).
The racialized Other was simultaneously feminized, never able to truly attain the dominant position of “man,” which was a bourgeois (and thus white) class position, and dehumanized, projected to be a dangerous object of violence, an “animal.” Racialized women, who due to immiseration and systemic denial of opportunities, continued to labour in ways unfit for (white, bourgeois) “womanhood,” were not granted entry into the role of “woman.” While white womanhood was a position of fragility, a potential victim of the perceived dangers of miscegenation, racialized women were excluded from womanhood (and, through objectification, humanity) itself, the overwhelming victims of gender-based and sexual violence, which became a tool leveraged by white men to control, dominate, and punish those who strayed from their perceived “place.”
The one-two punch of white (woman) fragility, and white (man) domination, are essential kernels of bourgeois/colonial gender ideology, and are methods still in use to enforce colonial/imperial roles on the world at large.
The trans person in question here had his name and gender markers changed in Britain (where it is legal) before Brexit, which is why the court has upheld his right to have that recognized in his home country of Romania.