| Title | : | Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0520292693 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780520292697 |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 184 |
| Publication | : | Published January 24, 2018 |
Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability Reviews
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This book is not for novices. I hate-read the first half of this book and absolutely loved the second half. Why did I continue after the first few chapters gave me pause? Curiosity, mostly. A few years ago, Halberstam got into a very public fight with younger trans activists over a word that is currently considered offensive and I was sure that the debate would be answered in this book. It was, and I found some of the answers here to be compelling but not necessarily... well... helpful when it comes to how we all work out what the intersections of gender and sexuality mean today.
There's plenty in this book that may give the reader pause especially when it comes to transgender activism in the age of Trump. Halberstam has a patented forcefully playful approach when it comes to analyzing feminism and gender theory and has used that register ever since I first encountered his work when I took one of his seminars in 2003. And if that... well... breezy and flippant approach gets extended to issues that are very much up for debate in the public arena, it's clear that what Halberstam offers here is not necessarily the kind of trans theory that is going to help activists or people who are seeking to work our whether or not they are trans. This book is also not so helpful when it comes to bridging the divide between academic theorizations and the kinds of ideas that work on the ground. And I suppose that it's appropriate that this book resists manichean divides as much as it does, but I'm not sure that it's going to make the kind of important academic interventions that it aspires to make given that fact.
So yeah, I have some ambivalence about what Halberstam offers in the overall arc of this book, especially given its unapologetic trans-masculinist perspective and the persistent use of the asterisk throughout. With that in mind, the last half of this book offers stunning moments of brilliance and cogent ideas that will help me in my own thinking. -
The cover says a “quick and quirky account of gender variability,” but that’s pretty misleading. Aside from one page-ish anecdotes about the author’s own experiences, most of it is thickly researched, clinical, and often cyclical. I read the same few phrases quite a bunch and, despite the fact that I’d hoped to learn a good bit more about Transgenderism, it turns out that I knew most of it just from being a decent human being and listening to my transgender friends.
And also, Halberstam really promotes the concept of “Trans*” (with the asterisk) and I mean REALLY promotes it. Like, did Jack make it up? I wasn’t familiar with it before, but the author was trying to push it like it was gospel truth.
I dunno. There are probably better accounts and books that don’t just quote movies.
I do appreciate it widening my scope of film I probably wouldn’t have been able to find without direct mentions. So thanks. -
Don't waste your time on this garbage. This book is pretentious, disrespectful to neurodivergent people, and discounts agender people altogether. Read Stryker or Spade or Puar or Gossett or literally anyone else if you're interested in trans theory that relates to the lived experiences of trans people both historically and currently.
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3.5/5.
While this is not necessarily a quick or quirky guide for most readers (myself included), there are some really excellent passages sprinkled throughout. However, readers unfamiliar with theory may struggle with some of the academic prose that undergirds a few of the arguments. I have mixed feelings about this book, because I hold a lot of Halberstam’s work in high regard, and I think I wanted a little bit ore out of this one. Still, there is some really good stuff in here, like Halberstam’s breakdown of the debates between gender theories rooted in materiality vs. performativity towards the end of chapter 5. -
This was... interesting, especially Halberstam's reading of the 2016 Boys Don't Cry controversy. However, it didn't tell me much I didn't already know, and it... hmm. Halberstam openly owns the trans-masc bias of the book, and justifies it on the grounds of most trans theory being by trans women, but... I'm not sure that's the best choice for what this book proclaims itself to be. This book is not the Little Book of Transmasculininty, according to its cover, and yet at times it seems to be trying to do that AND be a generalist trans work.
I also find it interesting, from the outside, how you find trans women thinkers noting that trans men dominate the conversation, and then trans men saying the same of trans women (and then enbies saying the same of both, and around we go). Some of this has got to be cyclic - if public and scholarly attention goes in cycles, trying to correct imbalance, you'd get a cycle of 'there's not enough attention to X' / 'there's SO much attention to X and not enough to Y!' -
To be honest, I only read half-way through this book. It reads like a doctoral thesis and I spent a lot of time looking up definitions of words. With a sub-title like "Quick and Quirky", I found this book to be neither. I appreciate the scholarly approach to the subject, but this book was not particularly accessible for me.
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definitely neither quick nor quirky, as the text is firmly rooted in queer, critical theory. expected something more accessible, particularly coming from halberstam. twas an interesting perspective, though. important for the discourse and that...
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Although this book isn't for beginners, I believe it can benefit beginners by immediately introducing them to different facets of trans theory and history. Because the author often assumes more knowledge on the part of readers than beginners will have, the resulting readerly vertigo can be a positive thing because it requires greater openness.
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Pretty good overview of trans* politics, particularly because a lot of neat literature is used and therefore referred to. The empasis on de-centering of white middle-class narratives (Chapter 2) was particularly great because it provided a pretty long reading list.
There's also interesting stuff on the tensions that flare inter-generationally (Chapter 4, 5), due to youthful amnesia/not-being-born vs. cultural inertia of the old. Halberstam clearly doesn't want to go all out on younger activist critics, but there's bits and pieces throughout about how we need to pay attention to new regulatory regimes that replace the old ones, the need to display greater subtlety in judgement, pick fights appropriately, etc., which can easily read as criticism. This should be read as part of Halberstam's point about the perils of the shift from trans elders inducting kids into the community over time to well-meaning but over-protective and over-enthusiastic parents taking over (Chapter 3).
The last chapter on trans* feminism (Chapter 6) is probably the weakest. There's a lot of Butler talk, which I can't really stand. Halberstam's weak version of politics is on display - for example, while describing an episode of the tv show Transparent where the trans woman protagonist Moira attends the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, Halberstand admits there's "a fantastic sequence in which various characters discuss the pros and cons of this policy in a compact and compelling way" (112). But this is followed by Moira leaving and having sex with another trans woman. For Halberstam, so taken with aesthetic play and alternative politics and approaches, this scene is revelatory: "By making lemonade out of lemons, Transparent offers an ecstatic response to the seemingly unwavering standoff between female-born women and trans* women" (113). This strikes me as more evasion of real tensions than a new beginning, but this kind of shift (also found in
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity) is apparently popular with queer theorists ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Which is not to say that there aren't great lines:Indeed, the haptic offers a great aesthetic frame for trans* representation in general. As explained by theorist Laura Marks in her book Touch, the haptic is a sensory mode of perception that engages a model of knowing and perception that is not oriented toward mastery, not deployed simply at the level of the visual. The haptic both names the way the mind grasps for meanings that elude it while still holding on to the partial knowledge available. It violates the opposition between subject and object and demands that the viewer/namer/authority feel implicated in the act of looking, naming, and judging. For Marks, the haptic is “a visual erotics that offers its object to the viewer but only on condition that its unknowability remain intact, and that the viewer, in coming closer, give up his or her own mastery.” As this quote indicates, hapticality organizes meaning, knowing, and seeing in ways that exceed rational, sense-making enterprises and instead force the viewer to examine their own relations to truth and authenticity. This is a perfect frame for the trans* body, which, in the end, does not seek to be seen and known but rather wishes to throw the organization of all bodies into doubt. (90)
This is beautiful, ethically profound, and makes me want to read the book mentioned. Whether this can sustain a politics, especially for the marginalized, however, is far from clear.
The conclusion tries to use lego-analogy to bring in architectural talk about living bodies, instead of talk that (for example) treats the body as "home." I mean, ok. -
Feminism is the belief that all people deserve equal opportunities, regardless of gender identity. For decades, this has been observed as the fight for women’s rights. However, more recently, transgender people have been a part of the conversation about gender-based inequality. Some individuals have an issue with trans* people being a part of the conversation for gender equality because many of them aren’t women, but others recognize that trans* individuals face discrimination based on their gender identity. Within the feminist movement, trans* individuals of differing identities belong in different aspects of the movement. Similar to intersecting identities such as race and disability status, transwomen can offer a diverse perspective in the feminist fight. Trans* individuals belong in many different aspects of feminism because all people should be a part of the fight for equality.
Feminism fights against gender-based inequality (Wade and Ferree 2019). According to Lundrigan, (2019) Transgender Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) is a term that is problematic because it is used to dehumanize, but it is essentially used to describe feminists who believe trans* people don’t belong in feminist fights (Lundrigan 2019). That doesn’t make sense though because trans* people face discrimination based entirely on their gender identity. Lundrigan (2019) noted that gender can be sectioned into three categories: biological, social, or internal identity. Due to the fact that trans* women at the very least experience the internal and social identities as women, she pointed out examples of gender-based discrimination trans* people face. They face legal discrimination in the form of bathroom bans, unprotected housing, employment, and health care all on the basis of their gender identity. Women are at an increased risk of sexual and gendered violence. Trans* women are no exception to that statistic. In fact, trans* women face even higher rates of sexual and domestic violence (Halberstam 2018:18). The author, Halberstam (2018) brought up the important action that had taken place in May 2013: “transgender” was removed from the DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and replaced by the term “gender dysphoria”. Up until 2013, America viewed trans* people as a mental disorder rather than a gender identity. That is an example of gendered discrimination that is specific to a trans identity (Halberstam 2018:19). Due to the reality that they are confronted with discrimination based on their gender identities, they should be allowed in the social aspect of the fight for gender equality.
Although trans* people should be included in the feminist fight, different trans* identities may influence where they best fit within the movement. Halberstam revealed a woman who was discussing modern-day women in society and she referred to “lesbian women altering themselves into transmen” as negative and confusing (Halberstam 2018:117). She seemed to hold the view that women want to be men so they can have the same rights as men and thought they should instead help fight for equality. She saw transmen as oppressed women who gave up and therefore were traitors of the feminist movement. Although this is untrue, it does raise the question: where do transmen belong in feminism? In this day and age, the most commonly known aspect of feminism is the fight for reproductive freedom. Personally, I believe that transwomen and other women who are not impacted by such policies should take a back seat on this specific topic of feminist discussion. The reason I believe this is because I think that those who are and have been impacted by the lack of reproductive liberties should be the main voices of this fight. That could include transmen. Not because they are women, but because they are directly impacted by aspects such as access to safe contraception and abortions. This does not mean that transwomen cannot be feminists and speak up about such issues, but it more means that they should help amplify the voices of those who are impacted and be allies. All people should be feminists, which includes women, men, and all other gender identities. Wade and Ferree (2019) pointed out that feminism is the fight for gender equality. It is not a women-only space. Feminist politics involves eliminating the gendered hierarchy within society. It is a fight for autonomy and choice. With the support of allies fighting alongside and amplifying the voices of feminists, social change can be promoted more quickly (Wade and Ferree 2019).
Not only does experience and credibility matter in where people are placed in certain categories of feminism, but feminism must encompass the intersecting identities of oppressed genders in order to make strides towards true equality. In chapter 2 of Trans*, Halberstam (2018) showed the privilege within the trans* community. They said that those who were white and upper class were seen as “deserving while abandoning other trans* bodies and trans experiences to vulnerability and criminalization.” (Halberstam 2018:34). People within marginalized identities tend to overlook their privileges. The authors of the book, Gender, identified privilege as “ unearned social and economic advantage based on our location in a social hierarchy; others do not.” (Wade and Ferree 2019:94). Although someone may be a part of a minority group, they need to be mindful of ways that they may be privileged. Wade and Ferree (2019) pointed out that within feminism, the recognition of the intersectionality of identities and experiences is vital. That includes the struggles of racism, sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, etc. within the feminist community (Wade and Ferree 2019). Trans* women face unique struggles and experiences that cis women do not such as gender dysphoria and transphobia (Lundrigan 2019). Similar to the importance of white able-bodied individuals not speaking over disabled women of color, it is important that cis women do not speak over trans* women in those discussions. Trans* people may people belong to intersecting oppressed groups facing sexism, transphobia, and other forms of discrimination (Nagoshi and Brzuzy 2010). Because of their unique experiences with gender, trans* people can add a diverse perspective to feminism (Johnson 2005).
Feminism must include those with trans* identities because they face gender-based discrimination. Although some feminists struggle with grappling the concept of trans* people’s place within the feminist fight, it is clear that they belong in the movement. Similar to cis women, transwomen are at an increased risk of sexual and domestic abuse. They also face discrimination on the basis of gender that cis women don’t face such as transphobia. Within the fight for reproductive rights, transmen and other people who are impacted by those freedoms should be the leaders in that specific aspect of feminism. Trans women and cis women face different struggles. With that in mind, feminists need to make sure they are creating room for those with less privilege due to intersecting identities to have a voice due to the reality that they are often drowned out by the most privileged in their underprivileged group. It is important to include trans* people within the conversations about feminism because they can add diverse experiences necessary within the fight for equality.
REFERENCES
Halberstam, J. (2018). Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Johnson, Katherine. 2005. “From Gender to Transgender: Thirty Years of Feminist Debates.” Social Alternatives 24(2):36–39.
Lundrigan, Kat. 2019. “Exploring Gender: Identification, Oppression, and Rights.” Canadian Social Work 20(2):109–19.
Nagoshi, Julie L., and Stephan/ie Brzuzy. 2010. “Transgender Theory: Embodying Research and Practice.” Affilia: Journal of Women & Social Work 25(4):431–43.
Wade, Lisa, and Myra Marx Ferree 2019. Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. 2nd ed. Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton et Company. -
Halberstam looks how language and labels are used by the trans community and how language informs identity. It is a fascinating study of trans* theory.
"Trans* pays attention to the ebb and flow of regulation and innovation, governance, and experimentation. In addition to placing shifts and changes in trans identities firmly within a matrix of gender and sexuality identities and practices, Trans* will argue that new visibility for any given community has advantages and disadvantages, liabilities and potentialities." 18
"Lucas Crawford, for example, writes beautifully about architectures of stone and flesh that determine, imprint, and shape the selves that move through them." 24
"The act of mapping a category onto subjects who may not have recognized the practices, lifestyles, notions of body and self, and so forth that it references, " she (Maria Elena Martinez) writes, "aligns itself with a genealogy of power-one that imposes, distorts, or forecloses certain desires, identifications, and experiences." 25
"If "queer: in the 1990s and 2000s was the marker of a politics of sex and gender that exceeded identity and gestured toward a critique of state power and assimilationist goals, we could say the term "trans" marks a politics based on a general instability of identity and oriented toward social transformation, not political accommodation." 50
"Children, in other words, are dense figures of social anxiety and aspiration both. For this reason, the way that discourses on gender and sexuality circulate through them gives us much information about how normalization works." 55
"Children of all backgrounds, in other words, are supposed to internalize models of gender and reproduce them in forms that match up with their cultural, racial, and classed locations and in relation to manners, gender-appropriate likes and dislikes, conventional interactions within a heterosexual matrix, and even their own hopes and fears about the future." 60
"But the weird set of experiences that we call childhood stands outside adult logics of time and space. The time of the child, then, like the time of the queer, is always already over and still to come. As Kathryn Bond Stockton puts it, "the child is precisely who we are not and, in fact, never were. It is the act of the adults looking back." Childhood, for Stockton, is ghostly: it haunts adulthood, eludes children, and becomes a misty presence and a palpable absence all at once." 61
"Transgender bodies, indeed, represented a condition of radical instability against which other gendered bodies appeared legible, knowable, and natural." 96
"The bathroom as I claimed then, is a technology of gender, a mode of sorting, producing, and sustaining gender norms in a public sphere where those same norms were rapidly disintegrating." 133
"As Stefano Harney and Fred Moten propose in their brilliant book The Undercommons, the way to address persistent problems of racism, sexism, and homophobia is to see that discrimination does not only impact the people toward whom it is directed, it affects everyone." 135 -
Overall a very nice book that introduce the many paths you can travel down when doing trans* studies. The fact that each chapter is introduced by personal musings helps shift the discourse away from theory only and into real life.
Still, this is an academic book based a lot on feminist and queer theory. It's dense. It's not always easy to read, and I personnally felt like some concepts were introduced without being explain, leaving the reader to do research into the definitions on their own, despite the concept in question being immediately relevant to the text.
I could have given it four stars, maybe, if this particular edition wasn't riddled with typos. I'm a non-native speaker and found at least 5 spelling/grammar mistakes on a first reading. Disappointing for an otherwise quality academic work. -
Reads like a syllabus--or perhaps like an annotated bibliography. But thorough and thoughtful and good. Halberstam does do a bit of handwringing about the youth, but is transparent and self-aware about it. Some of the generational things Halberstam points to felt personal in the text. I take hir point about the fact that different cultures, signifiers, ownerships, and meanings obtained throughout the Black queer community that can at some times be orthogonal to the symbolic terrain of much of white queer existence. But can't I hold that awareness and the feeling that RuPaul has done some things that are actually problematic (as opposed to just being a POC doomed to be misunderstood 100% of the time in a white supremacist society) at the same time? I also found the section about the Reed protests to be surreal, since that is my alma mater and the goings on of that protest group have been a non-trivial part of my social discourse for a while now--it's a source of ENORMOUS contention among the college's alumni network as well as among the communities currently on campus. But it always felt, clearly inaccurately, like weirdness happening in your own home, so it was--as I said--surreal to have picked up this volume and find Halberstam delving into the details of it in the back 2 chapters. I appreciated hir take on the issue, but it brought all the discussion points of the book together in an effective, compelling, deeply personal bow at the end.
On a last note, I really appreciated the gloss of Sarah Haley's work in Chapter 3:
"Sarah Haley, for example, in a stunning account of state violence directed at young Black women at the start of the twentieth century in the United States, discovers that [begin quote from Haley] 'imprisoned black women were labelled queer in the years immediately preceding the word being used to describe homosexual desire and homosexuals.' This leads her [Haley] to the startling insight that [begin second quote from Haley] 'the imprisoned black female subject was, in some ways, vestibular to queerness.'"
Halberstam continues further down the page:
"The fact that current definitions and uses of the term 'queer' proceed without a clear sense of the centrality of bodies of color to the production of its meaning suggests that one function of sex/gender classifications is the occlusion of the operation of white supremacy within seemingly natural systems of meaning."
This one short snippit, all found on pg 51, stayed with me for a long time. As someone who studies a different area of society (drug use) that is also DEEPLY rooted in racial and racist discourses in the U.S., these two ideas together--Haley's foundational observation and Halberstam's statement of the impact of that observation--offer so much in terms of thinking through how whiteness as a social phenomenon impacts lived experiences in the problem space of drug use in so many ways beyond the obvious. The obvious, I dare say, was expertly covered by the likes of Michelle Alexander, Carl Hart, and others. The "beyond"--the ways in which racist linguistic innovation around drug use has been naturalized/neutralized in ways that obscure that history--is something that remains to be thoroughly addressed in the literature, as far as I am aware at least*. And now it's all I can think about.
*edit: Actually, the deliberate alteration of the spelling of marijuana, formally "marihuana," to mimic Spanish phonetics and make it seem "foreign" and "scary" has been discussed by numerous scholars. But there's so much more to unearth there, I think. -
To me, Trans* feels like a primer to a Gender 201 course: touching on media to make the argument that trans identity is different and more complicated than what is presented in current mass media narratives, but never diving into any specifics. It reads more like an outline of an anthology rather than a book in of itself. Of course, it is impossible to argue against Halberstam's premise, and the examples he cites (Halberstam has explicitly said he is pronoun-indifferent) are all relevant to his premise. Halberstam outlines the current liberal construction of transgenderism as an identity-based politic best addressed by surface changes to institutions like bathrooms and then complicates it by re- introducing older transgender scholarship with more radical roots. It is important to note that new understandings of transgenderism are linked to white, thin, androgynous, upper-middle class Gen Z bodies while these older discourses come from groups with much less institutional privilege. In the terms of the very limited scope of his goal, Halberstam is successful. It cannot be denied that transgenderism is more complicated than the current construction. Still, it is a pity he wasn't at least a little more ambitious, applying current counter-narratives to the current Zeitgeist or getting more specific about (de)constructions of gender. I am definitely biased, but I do wish he had at least touched on nonbinary identity. Implying a radical rejection of gender ideology, nonbinary identity often just serves to create a palatable "third gender" of the androgynous female; even as more and more speak out against this definition, mass-media continues to focus on the bodies of people like Asia Dillon over those who are less normatively gendered. This would have been an excellent and very current example of the tension between liberal and radical politics that discourses around trans bodies serve as a vehicle for; as it stands, Halberstam doesn't even mention the word nonbinary. I think of this book-- and much of Halberstam's writing-- as a good source to develop a reading/viewing list of trans media. I walked away from this book primarily curious about the book Testo Junkie and the art piece Ken. To be destroyed. Still, I can't help but be disappointed that Halberstam, who is known for his attempts to bridge high and low media, refuses to acknowledge the current creations and ideas of gender that proliferate amongst the youngest of us all over the internet. In his attempts to bridge the gap between generations of trans people, Halberstam, unfortunately, pits them against each other by refusing much of millennial and gen z radicalism. I hoped for more.
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Me no talkee as good as J. Jack Halberstam.
So even though this book is quick and quirky, it is very academic. I dropped out of academia, by which I mean I got a practical B.S. degree in computers and writing and then went my merry way, with only a glimpse of what life would mean if I went on within the system. So I don't speak academia, but I waded through anyway, a couple of page a night. I think I got the gist of it, and did enjoy reading it, but it is not for the weak of heart or brain.
I did like the ideas in it, and it was a great counterpoint to the novel I was reading simultaneously but more quickly -- Gabriel Squailia's Viscera - which actually *houses* (note what I did there) (oh you might not have read the book -- (or either book) -- but Trans* concludes with the argument that trans* bodies remind all of us that all our bodies are always under construction - and postulating that could lead us to be more open to invention - not just physically and architecturally but in how we organize socially -- and to me, also in how we create and invent art, that reflection of ourselves. And Squailia's Viscera shows trans bodies, architecture, and culture as continually and violently changing and reinventing themselves.
I don't know if I'm doing full justice to the ideas contained herein, and am not qualified to read the book academically or review it, but even though I sort of regretted putting this one first in my current Trans reading list, it was actually most likely the one most pertinent to me personally, being a gender-fluid person born as female who has lived as a woman all my life but now get to in my 60s, explore my masculine -- or dual -- nature, timidly but with some joy that I even get to do that. It also served to illumine Squalia's book which I enjoyed so much, and now, looking back over it, I'm starting to consider Viscera a masterpiece, containing as it does, so much of a mirror image of Halberstam's postulated theories.
So I am glad I read it first, even though I felt like I lacked some of the context to understand the academic language, I felt like I got the gist of the arguments, and it turned out to be a good companion in my personal journey.
Note on names : the book just has Jack Halberstam but Goodreads says "J. Jack Halberstam". -
Ok, but who thought it would be a good idea to name it "Quick and Quirky"? It's an academic text through and through.
Regardless of its density though, this book has been an incredible read; easily one of the most compelling series of arguments which has unfortunately garnered our "Sports Dad of Queer Theory" an absolute pile of disregard from readers who can't put up with his established-academic-and-he-knows-it tone.
Whether you agree or disagree with him though, I strongly recommend reading this title while paying specific attention to the divide and connections between the old trans* theory guard and the new youth/social-media folks growing up under entirely different circumstances with precious little (and heavily white-washed and censored if any) knowledge of queer history.
Also, be warned of typos... Apparently when you hit a certain level of academic success, you don't get points deducted for presentation. -
Not quick.
Not quirky.
Not particularly good.
There were some good points. The long discussion of "Boys Don't Cry," for instance, was quite interesting.
Mostly, though, this read like a thesis paper and suffered from "ivory tower" problems. Plenty of ideas that maybe sound brilliant in the abstract but are ridiculous on the ground, plenty of words that sound smart when strung together but don't really say much of anything worth saying, and plenty of assertions made without evidence or argument to back them up.
And, yeah, just not quick or quirky. So that was disappointing.
Didn't like much of this, and I'd hoped to. I was excited when I picked it up at the bookstore. Alas. -
An easy to read and interesting book which really illustrates how fast trans theory is changing. It was published in 2018, a year in which I also heard online than the term 'trans*' with the apostrophe has dropped out of favour, and 'trans' (plain) is now preferred. Halberstam's analyses are logical, thoughtful, and balanced, but sometimes seem to miss the point of the other side's arguments and can fall into a trap of accepting generational difference too easily. For an author who puts a lot of emphasis on his focus on ideas not people, he is very quick to focus on people's ages when they have ideas or campaigning positions he finds challenging.
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This gave me so much to think about—like that trans kids growing up now with accepting parents/schools/environments and language to explain themselves will have such a different experience than older generations who paved the way for them to have that, and that that will be a hard generation gap to bridge.
And how society polices itself through making some bodies legible-cis bodies, that is, and by default, making trans bodies illegible, particularly trans woc, with legal and political and real-life consequences. -
I love Jack Halberstam's definition of trans* as a systemic and broad category, as opposed to transgender. While the term transgender has been a helpful term for many to understand themselves better, it is also notoriously known to collapse a wide umbrella of gender variant experiences into a single word—reeking of binary, colonial, and pathologizing discourse. Leading queer theory scholar, Jack Halberstam articulates the wide range of trans* experiences while also highlighting the danger of neoliberal identity politics. I will be coming back to this one regularly for my research.
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This book just felt so archaic. From its use of the trans asterisk, to spending half a chapter explaining a Life of Brian joke, to the constant complaints about young people being oversensitive.
And while I'm fine with a book having a transmasculine bias, especially as Halberstam does acknowledge this, I was disturbed when I realised that multiple times Halberstam writes "trans men" as two words and "transwomen" as one word. If he combined both terms I'd just think "oh, he's old and out of touch" but treating them differently is very... what the hell??? -
It was a dense book for me. Even though it was short, I struggled to find a rhythm with reading this. Overall I appreciated the idea and direction of the book. I just wish the author could have found a less academic/dry way of exploring the nature of being trans*. Anyway, less labels, less definition, more being. Some people need those things and some ppl don’t but everyone should get more comfortable in the unknowing of being.
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a lot of the references went over my head because im a 21st century gal but it was still great insight into different aspects of the trans experience and good fodder for conversation in class. i think he totally misrepresented trans people from gen z, just based on discourse from trans people i’ve seen online, which was especially frustrating in chapter 4, but i understand his pov. the sporadic, yet forceful emphasis on intersectionality is definitely a big reason why i liked this so much.
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Compré el libro porque quería conocer los argumentos de "la existencia de tantos géneros como personas", "género fluido" etc etc.
Como era de esperar no me convence lo más mínimo. Muy alejado de mi planteamiento teórico sobre la cuestión. Aunque me ha servido para reafirmarme y contraargumentar estas posturas. -
I think Halberstam is fast becoming my favourite philosopher I have read this year. As with their last book, this one blew my mind and challenged all my assumptions and preconceptions. I left with understanding but also a beautiful lack of understanding, and the understanding that this is precisely the point sometimes.
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i loved this book, it dips into all aspects of trans like identity, body, politics, and much more. it's most ideal if you are looking to educate yourself on trans and queer specific theories. theories is the keyword here.
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Read this for class and I found it interesting. Not sure about the title though lol. It definitely made me think about how older media involving queer people is treated. I really liked the inclusion of movies within the work. The Lego movie is kinda the best movie ever when you think about it!
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Not really an introductory text? The writing is densely rooted in critical theory and often addresses on-going debates within the trans community and in queer scholarship without much background.
