Queer/Trans K’s

Biopower

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,” 169)CJQ

This is a shift from prior definitions of sovereignty. Sovereignty as it is traditionally theorized in International Relations bestows a formal equality on all states and enables them to use violence and make war legitimately. We are still within the terms of sovereign power, but RtoP is a way in which security is now also articulated in biopolitical terms. Evans and Sahnoun write, “at the heart of this conceptual approach is a shift in thinking about the essence of sovereignty, from control to responsibility” (2002, 101). The reformulation of sovereignty as responsibility casts sovereignty in biopolitical terms: no longer the power to take life over a specific territory, sovereignty is a beneficent form of patriarchal power, governing the population with its best interests in mind (Foucault 2007, 100, 129). RtoP takes seriously the concept of human security, itself a critique of how the “narrow perception of security leaves out the most elementary and legitimate concerns of ordinary people regarding security in their daily lives” (ICISS 2001, 15). Failing to protect citizens from hunger, disease, flooding, unemployment, and environmental hazards are given as examples of human security issues that RtoP is designed to address. Such phenomena take place not at the level of individuals, but at the level of population. By recasting sovereignty as responsibility, RtoP installs a biopolitical understanding of sovereignty as promoting the lives of citizens as a population of organisms—preventing mass violent deaths and ensuring the proper circulation of basic necessities. However, the responsibility to protect explicitly applies only to the four violations of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity—instances of “calamities” such as HIV/AIDS, climate change, or natural disasters are explicitly considered to undermine the consensus over the concept (UN General Assembly 2009, para. 10b). RtoP is meant to protect against certain forms of violence but not others: it protects against forms of widespread direct violence usually associated with wars or mass atrocities, but not broader forms of structural violence, deprivation, or precaritization.

Cis-Security

Their theorization of security and stability produces an ontology of cisgender privilege as birthright of biological gender, erasing trans scholarship and embodiment as a routine theoretical maneuver.

Shepherd and Sjoberg 12

Laura J. Shepherd Laura J. Shepherd is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the School of Social Sciences and International Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, at the University of New South Wales,..and Laura Sjoberg University of Florida Department of Political Science JD Boston College, PhD in IR USC “trans- bodies in/of war(s): cisprivilege and contemporary security strategy” Feminist Review June 2012 google scholar

Feminist scholars have asked what assumptions about gender (and other markers of identity, including but not limited to race, class, nationality and sexuality) are necessary to make particular statements, policies and actions meaningful in security discourses (see, inter alia, classic interventions by Tickner, 1992; Peterson, 1992a,b; Zalewski, 1995; and more recent overviews provided by Blanchard, 2003; Sjoberg and Martin, 2010; Shepherd, 2010b). Looking at global politics, feminists see that ‘gender is necessary, conceptually, for understanding international security, it is important in analysing causes and predicting outcomes, and it is essential to thinking about solutions and promoting positive change in the security realm’ (Sjoberg, 2009: 200). They have therefore argued that ‘the performance of gender is immanent in the performance of security and vice versa’, and looking at security without gender or gender without security necessarily renders both concepts partial and analytically inadequate (Shepherd, 2008: 172).However, even these nuanced accounts of the immanence of gender in global politics as a noun, a verb and an organisational logic do not explicitly interrogate transgender and genderqueer logics of security. In fact, frequently they focus on a dichotomous or binary understanding of sex/gender to read gendered logics of security. This is not to deride or dismiss the important and varied contributions of these scholars, but rather to suggest a way in which we might contribute in this article to the literature on which we draw, and in relation to which we wish to situate ourselves. Feminist scholars of security have emphasised the analytical salience of gender and, in doing so, raised questions about the possibility of security/ies of the self, particularly in reference both to (corpo)realities of gendered violence (see, for example, Bracewell, 2000; Hansen, 2001; Alison, 2007) and to the ontological security of gender identity itself (see, for example, Browne, 2004; Shepherd, 2008; MacKenzie, 2010). Opening to critical scrutiny, however, the practices through which gender uncertainty is erased and gender certainty inscribed the practices through which the ontological presumption of gender difference is maintained and gender fluidity denied. Fallows scholars to develop different understandings of the ways in which in/security is not only written on the body but is performative of corporeality.

Normalized regimes of state security require the contemporary projection of insecurity onto trans and genderqueer people: unruly bodies which cannot be coded and managed by security experts become “risks” to the nation, requiring the abjection and expulsion of trans and genderqueer bodies. Sex and gender are categories that serve to naturalize the fiction of security by exposing those who can’t conform to increasingly intense insecurity.

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,” 114-115)CJQ

The airport security assemblage is site of the state’s investment in gathering information and classifying bodies as part of a project of state building. David Campbell’s book Writing Security (2000 [1992]) influentially argued that security is a discursive practice through which states demarcate certain forms of life as normal, healthy, civilized, and worthy, and others as abnormal, sick, and barbaric. Contemporary security practices surrounding the body scanners are an example of this practice by producing deviant, suspicious bodies through their simultaneous objectification and dematerialization of bodies. Such bodies are the biologized internal enemies against whom society must defend itself (Foucault 2003). The biometric practices of state surveillance, including body scanners, take the body as the ultimate sign of truth. Margrit Shildrik reminds us that these categories of safe bodies and unruly, “monstrous” bodies are unstable: “ ‘monstrous bodies’ after all, are disruptive; they refuse to stay in place and displace the distinctions that show the border of the human subject” (Shildrick 2002, 4). Security is not so much about identifying deviant bodies, but about producing deviant bodies that serve to define safe, healthy, and moral bodies. In the transformation of bodies to digital images at the border, “deviant” or “unruly” bodies are made to confess. This has the effect of “outing” trans and genderqueer people and constituting them as potential threats in the non-alignment of bodily morphology and gender presentation and/or the use of prosthetics to create “unnatural” bodies. The airport security assemblage becomes a site revealing the state’s investment in securing gender and the conditions under which certain bodies can lead livable lives. The “virtual strip search” of the body scanners is not experienced as “virtual” but rather affects the experience of lived embodiment. The bodily experience of the airport security assemblages undermines the distinction between a “really existing body” and a “virtual body,” or a body of pure information. The experience of trans- and genderqueer bodies shows more than how certain bodies are produced as unruly or deviant; these “deviant” bodies show the instability of bodies as signs of the “truth” of either sex or gender and refocus our attention on how regimes of truth produce certain lives as intelligible and others as unreal. The airport security assemblage is thus both a site for the production of abject “bodies of information” and a site that reveals what is at stake in certain understandings of the materiality or “realness” of bodies. Airport security assemblages produce a narrative about bodies in which biological sex is immutable and determined by the body, and is either one of two categories (M or F); while gender might be socially constructed, it is produced in a predictable relation to sex such that one’s sexed embodiment “matches” one’s gender identity and gender presentation. A “misalignment” between gender presentation and sexed embodiment that may be revealed by a body scanner therefore represents a security threat to trans- individuals, as would a gender presentation that does not match the sex listed on a person’s government ID, required by “Secure Flight.” The National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC) has reported that one in five transgender travelers have felt harassed by TSA agents, and has documented stories of transgender people who were detained for several hours because their bodies did not conform with the agents’ expectations in either body scan images or pat-downs. Transpeople have been subject to detention, strip searches, humiliating questions, and reviews by bomb squads because their bodies do not match the expectations of security personnel (Keisling, Kendall, and Davis 2010; Bohling 2014; Sjoberg 2014, 85–90; Coyote 2010, Costello 2012). The airport security assemblage orders bodies according to a normative sex/gender regime that casts trans-, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming people as threats and unruly bodies. The point here is not only that a relatively small number of people are discriminated against in airport security assemblages, although this is certainly true, and it is undoubtedly true regarding other non-normative bodies as well, such as the racialized bodies or the bodies of people with disabilities. What is also at stake is how materiality and language are understood in terms of securing bodies. In a regime in which the materiality of one’s body is supposed to be the ultimate sign of riskiness, or truthworthiness, the experience of trans- and genderqueer people challenge the terms in which “materiality” is understood.

Cis security is a reification of the biopolitical principle of necropolitics through which trans people must conceal their transness through passing to be deemed worthy to live. Those who fail are subject to microaggressions and violence which culminate in erosion of life and systematic extermination.

Stryker 14
(Susan Stryker is associate professor of gender and women’s studies and director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona and serves as general coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Her most recent publication is The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (coedited with Aren Z. Aizura, 2013), winner of the 2013 Ruth Benedict Book Prize. Transgender Studies Quarterly, Volume 1, Numbers 1–2 http://tsq.dukejournals.org/content/1/1-2/61.full.pdf. cVs)

The term biopolitics dates to the early twentieth century (Lemke 2011), but it is only in Michel Foucault’s work from the 1970s forward that the concept (sometimes denominated by him as biopower) begins to be considered a constitutive aspect of governance within Eurocentric modernity (Foucault 1978, 1997, 2004). Biopolitics, generally speaking, describes the calculus of costs and benefits through which the biological capacities of a population are optimally managed for state or state-like ends. In its Foucauldian formulation, the term refers specifically to the combination of disciplinary and excitatory practices aimed at each and every body, which results in the somaticization by individuals of the bodily norms and ideals that regulate the entire population to which they belong. In Foucauldian biopolitics, the individualizing and collectivizing poles of biopower are conjoined by the domain of sexuality, by which Foucault means reproductive capacity as well as modes of subjective identification, the expression of desire, and the pursuit of erotic pleasure. Sexuality, in this double sense of the biological reproduction of new bodies that make up the body politic as well as the ensemble of techniques that produce individualized subjectivities available for aggregation, supplies the capillary space of power’s circulation throughout the biopoliticized populus. To accept Foucault’s account of sexuality’s biopolitical function is to encounter a lacuna in his theoretical oeuvre: the near-total absence of a gender analysis. This is perhaps unsurprising given the anglophone roots of the gender concept, which was developed by the psychologist John Money and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in the 1950s during their research on intersexuality, and which was only gradually making its way into the humanities and social science departments of the English-speaking academy in the 1970s when Foucault was delivering his first lectures on biopolitics in France (Germon 2009; Scott 1986). Yet as an account of how embodied subjects acquire behaviors and form particularized identities and of how social organization relies upon the sometimes fixed, sometimes flexible categorization of bodies with differing biological capacities, gender as an analytical concept is commensurable with a Foucauldian perspective on biopolitics. Gendering practices are inextricably enmeshed with sexuality. The identity of the desiring subject and that of the object of desire are characterized by gender. Gender difference undergirds the homo/hetero distinction. Gender conventions code permissible and disallowed forms of erotic expression, and gender stereotyping is strongly linked with practices of bodily normativization. Gender subjectivizes individuals in such a manner that socially constructed categories of personhood typically come to be experienced as innate and ontologically given. It is a system filled with habits and traditions, underpinned by ideological, religious, and scientific supports that all conspire to give bodies the appearance of a natural inevitability, when in fact embodiment is a highly contingent and reconfigurable artifice that coordinates a particular material body with a particular biopolitical apparatus. Approached biopolitically, gender does not pertain primarily to questions of representation— that is, to forming correct or incorrect images of the alignment of a signifying sex (male or female) with a signified social category (man or woman) or psychical disposition (masculine or feminine). Gender, rather, is an apparatus within which all bodies are taken up, which creates material effects through bureaucratic tracking that begins with birth, ends with death, and traverses all manner of state-issued or state-sanctioned documentation practices in between. It is thus an integral part of the mechanism through which power settles a given population onto a given territory through a given set of administrative structures and practices. Transgender phenomena—anything that calls our attention to the contingency and unnaturalness of gender normativity—appear at the margins of the biopolitically operated-upon body, at those fleeting and variable points at which particular bodies exceed or elude capture within the gender apparatus when they defy the logic of the biopolitical calculus or present a case that confounds an administrative rule or bureaucratic practice. Consequently, transgender phenomena constantly flicker across the threshold of viability, simultaneously courting danger and attracting death even as they promise life in new forms, along new pathways. Bodies that manifest such transgender phenomena have typically become vulnerable to a panoply of structural oppressions and repressions; they are more likely to be passed over for social investment and less likely to be cultivated as useful for the body politic. They experience microaggressions that cumulatively erode the quality of psychical life, and they also encounter major forms of violence, including deliberate killing. And yet, increasingly, some transgender subjects who previously might have been marked for death now find themselves hailed as legally recognized, protected, depathologized, rights-bearing minority subjects within biopolitical strategies for the cultivation of life from which they previously had been excluded, often to the point of death. The criterion for this bifurcation of the population along the border of life and death is race, which Foucault (1997: 254) describes as ‘‘the basic mechanism of power.’’ Certainly, trans bodies of color (particularly if they are poor and feminized) are disproportionately targeted by the death-dealing, ‘‘necropolitical’’ operations of biopower (Mbembe 2003), while bodies deemed white are more likely to experience viability. However, Foucault critically disarticulates race and color to enable a theorization of racism capable of doing more than pointing out that people of color tend to suffer more than whites, and this theorization is particularly useful for transgender studies. Foucault (1997: 80) understands racism as an artificial biologization of social, cultural, linguistic, or economic differences within a supposedly biologically monist population— that is, as a selective evolutionary process of ‘‘speciation’’ through which new kinds of social entities that are considered biologically distinct from one another emerge. The racism through which biopower operates can be described as a ‘‘somatechnical assemblage’’ (Pugliese and Stryker 2009: 2–3) that brings together a hierarchizing schema of values and preferences, sets of lifeaffirming or death-making techniques that enact those values and preferences, and a variety of phenotypic, morphological, or genitative qualities and characteristics associated with individual bodies, upon which those techniques operate. Race and racism are therefore broadly understood as the enmeshment of hierarchizing cultural values with hierarchized biological attributes to produce distinct categories of beings who are divided into those rendered vulnerable to premature death and those nurtured to maximize their life. Race thus construed conceptually underpins the biopolitical division not only of color from whiteness but of men from women, of queers from straights, of abled-bodied from disabled, and of cisgender from transgender, to the extent that a body on one side of any of these binaries is conceptualized as biologically distinct from a body on the other side. The caesura, or break, that race introduces into the body politic allows the population to be segmented and selected, enhanced or eliminated, according to biological notions of heritability, degeneracy, foreignness, differentness, or unassimilability—all in the name of ‘‘defending’’ society and making it ‘‘pure.’’ Contemporary transgender identities, populations, and sociopolitical movements exemplify this process of biopolitical racialization. Biopower constitutes transgender as a category that it surveils, splits, and sorts in order to move some trans bodies toward emergent possibilities for transgender normativity and citizenship while consigning others to decreased chances for life. Recent work in transgender studies addressing this biopolitical problematic includes Dean Spade 2011, Toby Beauchamp 2009, Aren Z. Aizura 2012, and C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn 2013. A critical theoretical task now confronting the field is to advance effective strategies for noncompliance and noncomplicity with the biopolitical project itself.

To end violence against trans folx, we must correct the transphobic idea that trans people are threats to be securitized. Reading and studying the stories of trans people positions gender, rooted in the flesh but expanded to intersocial relations, to give meaning to inherently-politicized bodies. This performance is neither invisible nor hypervisible; rather, it accesses trans liberatory potential.

Alexander 5
(Jonathan Alexander is a three-time recipient of the Ellen Nold Award for Best Articles in the field of Computers and Composition Studies. His books have been nominated for various awards, including the Lambda Literary Award. In 2011, he was awarded the Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Computers and Writing Studies. From 2010-2013, Jonathan was named a UCI Chancellor's Fellow in recognition of his scholarly achievements. Jonathan's work focuses primarily on the use of emerging communications technologies in the teaching of writing and in shifting conceptions of what writing, composing, and authoring mean. Jonathan also works at the intersection of the fields of writing studies and sexuality studies, where he explores what discursive theories of sexuality have to teach us about literacy and literate practice in pluralistic democracies. “Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body” Vol. 57, No. 1 (Sep., 2005), pp. 70-72 cVs)

What does such an approach to writing about gender teach us and our students? What can we learn-personally, politically, and pedagogically-from experimenting with Califia-Rice's call to compose narratives of virtual gender swapping? In "On Becoming a Woman: Pedagogies of the Self," Romano remarks on some of the potential goals of feminist compositionist practice. She suggests that what may be "crucial to the production of equitable discourse is the possibility that when many women are present and differ in their self-representations, then 'women' as a category-represented variously-can be taken back from its reductive forms and rebuilt as multiple" (462). Part of the goal of my paired fiction exercises was certainly to expand students' sense of the multiple ways that women-and men-exist as gendered beings in the world. But we also experienced, in writing and analyzing those narratives, a sense of the gendered body and how gender finds itself written on-and read from-the bodies we inhabit and through which we both derive and articulate a sense of self. Those bodies, though, are never simply personal; they are profoundly politicized bodies, called to a gendered scrutiny, sculpting, and legibility that determine which bodies are male and female, powerful and weak. Interestingly enough, transgender and transsexual theorists such as Prosser have argued forcefully that it is in the examination of narrations of gender that we come to a fuller and richer understanding of its "composition"- both personally and politically, in mind and on body. Prosser argues, for instance, that "transsexual and transgendered narratives alike produce not the revelation of the fictionality of gender categories but the sobering realization of their ongoing foundational power" (11). We might be tempted to think of gender as a set of roles, many stereotypical, that can be critiqued and cast off, like so many changes of clothing. But Prosser maintains, as my students' narratives reveal, that gender inscribes itself at the level of the flesh. This is particularly true when considering narratives of gender transition: "Transsexuality reveals the extent to which embodiment forms an essential base to subjectivity; but it also reveals that embodiment is as much about feeling one inhabits material flesh as the flesh itself" (7). For Prosser, examining such narratives is the key to opening up a more expansive and thorough discussion of gender; as he maintains, "To talk of the strange and unpredictable contours of body image, and to reinsert into theory the experience of embodiment, we might begin our work through [ ..] autobiographical narratives" (96). As a pedagogue invested in the expansive possibilities of feminist compositionist practices, I must ask myself what potential for actual critical agency lies in a closer attention to the body and its composition in gender narrations. On one hand, I believe that my students may have encountered powerfully in the paired fiction exercise how gender functions in our society to condition certain expectations and norms for how women and men are to behave-at least stereotypically. In this way, the exercise is in line with Will Banks's recent call for working with students on creating "embodied writing":' or writing that takes into consideration the specific needs, desires, and beingness of particular bodies and of particular experiences of the body. As Banks suggests, such writing "offers us and our students spaces to think through all those multiple and shifting signifiers at work on us so that we come up with sharper understandings of ourselves and those around us" (38). At the same time, though, the narrative "performances" of my students are suggestive of the double bind of gender-a double bind neatly evoked by transsexuality, which itself evokes tropes both of boundary crossing and the power of boundaries to (re)inscribe norms. For Stryker, transsexuality [...] is simultaneously an elaborately articulated medico-juridical discourse imposed on particular forms of deviant subjectivity, and a radical practice that promises to explode dominant constructions of self and society. (594) In a new historical survey and analysis, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, Joanne Meyerowitz argues in a similar vein-that transsexuality in particular is a simultaneous reification, on one hand, of gender norms and expectations, and, on the other hand, a mobilization of gender: Transsexuals, some argue, reinscribe the conservative stereotypes of male and female and masculine and feminine. They take the signifiers of sex and the prescriptions of gender too seriously. They are "utterly invested" in the boundaries between female and male. Or they represent individual autonomy run amok in the late modern age. [...] some theorists identify transsexuals as emblems of liberatory potential. (11, 12) Did my students experience that liberatory potential? Our discussions postexercise were revealing, thoughtful, and even critical. We could spot stereotypes "in action,:' noting how we craft stories for ourselves-and others in which the most limiting and even sexist of gender norms are deployed again and again, for both "traditional" sexes and genders.