SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2007
Transmodernities/Translocalities: Panel Discussion
12:30 p.m. – 3 p.m. Polycentric sessions, San Francisco Art Institute,
Lecture hall and classrooms
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Recent academic scholarship in transgender theory
(as evidenced by the publication of The Transgender Studies Reader in
2006) has been groundbreaking in its efforts to map the difficult terrain
any trans-identified person must negotiate in order to secure legal,
linguistic, cultural, biomedical, and political recognition and justice.
However, attempts to apprehend locally-situated sites of non-western
trans-subjectivity frequently tend to seek out moments of individual
agency, to interpret gender transgression (especially female-to-male
cross-dressing) as a symbolic passage from the world of powerlessness
into the world of power (and, in so doing, to claim these sites as somehow
indicative of a singular "global trans-community"). Further,
the language of transgender, cross-dressing, and passing is complicated
by a kind of eurocentric queer desire for meaning and fellowship that
fails to consider the multiple ways that disparate cultures read and
interpret differently gendered subjects. Thus, if we read trans-experience
through the limited lens of enlightenment discourse—a discourse
that posits the liberated subject as a coherent subject—we risk
collapsing the historically situated trans-body into a universal. Ironically,
much of contemporary trans-discourse (itself produced in the west) seems
to recuperate this notion of a unified, self-governing subject. Postmodern
articulations aside (i.e. notions of the shifting-self as multiple,
unmoored, ambiguous), trans-discourse tends to narrate the trans-journey
as a move from gender fluidity to trans-identity (whether butch, camp,
transgender, transsexual, MTF, FTM, cross-dresser, lady boy, berdache,
or katoey); in other words, trans as noun, rather than verb. This grammatical
and, thus, linguistic modification implies a certain amount of coherence
(structured by autonomous intent) that frequently obscures the multiple
and, often, conflicting reasons people migrate across borders (national,
cultural, gender, or otherwise). In essence, gender as sign (whether
"Man," "Woman," or "Trans") acquires a
kind of static, rather than kinetic, energy; it stops moving, adheres,
and announces itself as a all-embracing category.
My aim in this research endeavor is to critically
rethink the liminal space (always already temporally unstable) where
transnational transgender bodies reside and trace how normative categories
of analysis (sex, race, gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, etc.)
vary depending upon the historical trajectories of site-specific locales.
I imagine this project as a comparative study that incorporates two
to three case studies (using Iran as my point of departure), and which
will foreground filmic representations of the trans-body/journey as
primary source material for analysis. I will draw heavily from transnational
feminism, queer/transgender theory, postcolonial theory, critical cultural
geography, border theory, queer phenomenology, performance studies,
and globalization studies.
Questions include: How do we read and understand
queer bodies/practices in transnational contexts? In what ways does
normative racial bias shape queer theory, such that LGBT subjects living
outside the parameters of continental jurisprudence and realist configurations
of the nation-state (both geographically and discursively) are repeatedly
theorized by a neocolonial politics of sexuality? How has the discourse
of LGBT rights been co-opted by neo-conservatives in the drive to solidify
U.S hegemony throughout the world and in what ways have LGBT subjects
been unwittingly mobilized to this end? How might we deploy non-ocular
based methodologies/epistemologies ( i.e. archives of sense/feeling
that privilege sound, taste, touch, movement) throughout our work in
ways that disrupt center/periphery models of research and encourage
us to reconnect with the body/text in a non-reductive way?
Participant's Bio:
Sara Perryman is an undergraduate in the Department
of Gender & Women’s Studies and the Department of Peace &
Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research
interests (to be pursued further in graduate school beginning in Fall
2008) include transnational feminism, queer/transgender theory, postcolonial
theory, critical cultural geography, border theory, queer phenomenology/affect,
performance studies, and globalization studies. Currently, she lives
in Berkeley and spends her quickly diminishing free time making homemade
pies and playing the banjo.