Queer/Trans K’s

Links

Anthro

To ‘transgender’ is to go beyond humanness- focus on speciesism misses the point. Transness is already non- and anti-human.

Kier 11

Bailey Kier PhD Professor of American Studies, University of Maryland, “Interdependent ecological transsex:

Notes on re/production, “transgender” fish, and the management of populations, species, and resources College Park, MD, USA Published online: 31 Jan 2011. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory Volume 20, Issue 3, 2010 Special Issue: The Transbiological Body

Transgender is a category associated mostly with post- industrialized nations of the West, but which is also meaningful in other parts of the world. It is mostly used to describe individuals who do not fit neatly into normative notions of human re/production in which the category of sex has an¶ imagined clear, distinctive, and essential male and female. Transgender relies upon an understanding of gender that is dependent and distinguished, yet closely associated with the category of imagined essential sex. Gender is largely thought of as a constructed human category, a cultural universal displaying diversity across cultures, while sex is considered an essential universal of ‘‘Nature,’’ although much scholarship in the humanities and social sciences now situates sex as a socially constructed category. The prefix trans – meaning to cross, go beyond, and to change – when combined with gender, means to go beyond, to change and to cross the anthropocentric category of socially constructed gender. Transgender as a category is also closely associated with ideas about human individual identities and imagined and real human collective communities, even as David Valentine has shown that the category conveys different meanings to many of those who use it and to those it is used to describe in the same local contexts.6 So why does the term transgender continue to commonly be held in close association with the human, when the term literally means to change and disrupt the human-centeredness of the category of gender itself? Transgender as a category is just as much about queering the human as it is about queering sex and gender. Because of the human-centered paradox of the category of transgender, I prefer the term transsex in this essay, in an attempt to use another (just as problematic) signifier to expand the trajectory of transgender studies and to describe the eco-systemic relations and negations of re/production of multiple species and things. To change, go beyond and across normal meanings of sex is to expose the queer relations of re/production of multiple species and things.

Border Disputes

Discourses of statehood reliant on stability, integrity, unity, geographic coherence and which understand borders as “containers” project a masculine notion of sovereignty that constructs women’s bodies as abject and as threatening to practices of sovereignty. Their securitization requires the abjection and elimination or confinement of women across and within borders.

Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, “Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations,” 86-87)CJQ

Sovereignty produces the state as a unified, singular entity: the body politic has one body and speaks with a single voice (Gatens 1996, 23). The body politic is represented as a generic, individual body, but of course there is no such thing. Rather, among other markers of difference, bodies are always sexed. Feminists have argued that this body politic is not only constituted by the exclusion of women, but also relies on masculine representations of bodies. The analogization of the state to a body, characterized by sharply delineated borders between inside and outside and between different units (other states, other bodies), is a representation of bodies (and thus states) as masculine and fully grown, without the inevitable decline of the life cycle (Cavarero 2002, 114)—the eternal body of the sovereign, rather than his fleshy, decaying body. The unitary of the state—one sovereign speaking on behalf of the state, and the social contract constituted by the voices of men (Pateman 1988; Gatens 1996)—is an erasure of sexual difference, using the masculine to represent the human. The production of the state as a self-contained and bounded body reproduces sovereignty as a masculine practice. The representation of the state as a kind of container is sometimes considered a natural or inevitable metaphor. Lakoff (1987) asserts that because we live in bodies that are containers, we experience everything as inside a container or outside it. Because of our embodied experience, the “container” model of the state has an essential basis in our bodily life. However, the actual experience of embodiment for all people is not of self-contained bodies demarcated from the world by the boundaries of the skin, and experiencing one’s body as a container is more common to men than to women (Battersby 1999). The modern, self-contained, bounded body that is seen as the normative body is culturally associated with white, heterosexual, able-bodied men rather than women, racial “others,” sexual minorities, or disabled persons. Women’s bodies have not so much been constructed as absence, or lack, but as leaking or fluid, through a mode of seepage or liquidity (Grosz 1994, 203; Shildrick, 1997). As such, women’s bodies have been figured as abject in their instability and their refusal to obey borders. These non-normative bodies are seen as particularly vulnerable and, as such, not suitable for full status as a sovereign subject.3 Sovereign practices reproduce subjects and states in terms of masculine solidity and containment, which are destabilized by the practices of suicide bombing that violate the boundaries that sovereignty erects.