Queer/Trans K’s

Perm- Trans Specific

Perm do both – it allows for trans studies to be empowered in politically productive ways

Stryker 12 – Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona earned her PhD in US History at UC Berkeley [Susan, 2012, Chapter 11: De/Colonizing Transgender Studies of China in Transgender China by Howard Chiang, 10.1057/9781137082503] AMarb

What kinds of questions and practices, then, can transgender studies offer that advance an anticolonial, de/colonial, or (post) colonial agenda, and that resist the subsumption of non-Western configurations of personhood into Western-dominant frameworks? At the very least, it would involve careful attention to the movement of transgender phenomena, knowledge, and practices across regions, nations, and rural-urban spaces, and it would acknowledge that the relationship between highly mobile medicalized categories such as transsexual, and culturally specific terms that travel shorter distances is not a monolithic one in which the purity of an ethnic practice is polluted and diminished by the introduction of a standardized modern import: in any site, the uptake of an imported term makes it as local and as indigenous as it is foreign and invasive. Such a transgender studies would also concern itself with how various forms of personhood in locations around the world imagine their own relationship to those things that transgender can be made to evoke, such as modernity, metropolitanism, Eurocentrism, whiteness, or globalization. It would explore the adaptive reuse of the category itself—whether transgender is experienced as a form of colonization, as an avenue for alliancebuilding or resource development, as a means of resistance to local pressures or transnationalizing forces, as an empowering new frame of reference, as an erasure of cultural specificity, as a countermodernity, as an alternative to tradition, or as a mode of survival and translation for traditional cultural forms that are unintelligible within the conceptual double binary of man/woman and homo/hetero associated with the modern West. Transgender studies should also acknowledge that transgender sometimes functions as a rubric for bringing together, in mutually supportive and politically productive ways, marginalized individuals and communities of people in many parts of the world who experience oppression because of their variance from socially privileged expressions of manhood or womanhood. Furthermore, when academic researchers in the Anglophone global north and west investigate communities, identities, practices, institutions, and statuses elsewhere that look “transgendered” to contemporary Eurocentric observers, the work of the transgender studies field necessarily involves an ethicocritical assessment of whether or how the phenomena toward which the researcher is oriented and invested in either can or cannot, or should or should not be apprehended through the optics of transgender studies. It involves attending to the implications of either including or excluding such phenomena from consideration. Moreover, it calls for reflexive selfconsciousness on the part of researchers as to why they themselves desire to include or exclude various phenomena from being considered transgendered, why they might seek to name it as something else, and what their own stakes are in seeking particular identifications or disidentifications with the phenomena they study. In addition, what holds true for research across cultural boundaries today holds equally true for historical and speculative research across the boundaries of time: we should be very careful not to impose presentist categories of sex and gender on the unruly strangeness of the past or the unfathomable future yet to come. Finally, the field of transgender studies should not imagine that knowledge flows in one direction only—extracted from the bodies of the subaltern, the underclass, the colored, the colonized, the uneducated, the unsophisticated, the deviant, and the improperly socialized—for the benefit of a privileged elite for whom that knowledge becomes an instrument or technique for the profitable management of difference. Ideally, the field of transgender studies is a site where a critical gaze can be turned back by Others toward the scene of normativity’s engenderment, and where those othered within Eurocentric modernity can produce counterknowledge for projects of their own. Transgender China takes important steps in that direction.

Homogenization DA

Queer theory homogenizes difference and oppression

Johnson 1 (E. Patrick, Assistant professor of performance studies at Northwestern University, “ ‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from My Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 1, January)

Because much of queer theory critically interrogates notions of selfhood, agency, and experience, it is often unable to accommodate the issues faced by gays and lesbians of color who come from ‘‘raced’’ communities. Gloria Anzaldu´ a explicitly addresses this limitation when she warns that ‘‘queer is used as a false unifying umbrella which all ‘queers’ of all races, ethnicities and classes are shored under’’ (250). While acknowledging that ‘‘at times we need this umbrella to solidify our ranks against outsiders,’’ Anzaldu´ a nevertheless urges that ‘‘even when we seek shelter under it [‘‘queer’’], we must not forget that it homogenizes, erases our differences’’ (250). ‘‘Quare,’’ on the other hand, not only speaks across identities, it articulates identities as well. ‘‘Quare’’ offers a way to critique stable notions of identity and, at the same time, to locate racialized and class knowledges. My project is one of recapitulation and recuperation. I want to maintain the inclusivity and playful spirit of ‘‘queer’’ that animates much of queer theory, but I also want to jettison its homogenizing tendencies. As a disciplinary expansion, then, I wish to ‘‘quare’’ ‘‘queer’’ such that ways of knowing are viewed both as discursively mediated and as historically situated and materially conditioned. This reconceptualization foregrounds the ways in which lesbians, bisexuals, gays, and transgendered people of color come to sexual and racial knowledge. Moreover, quare studies acknowledges the different ‘‘standpoints’’ found among lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgendered people of color—differences that are also conditioned by class and gender.3 Quare studies is a theory of and for gays and lesbians of color. Thus, I acknowledge that in my attempt to advance quare studies, I run the risk of advancing another version of identity politics. Despite this, I find it necessary to traverse this political mine field in order to illuminate the ways in which some strands of queer theory fail to incorporate racialized sexuality. The theory that I advance is a ‘‘theory in the flesh’’ (Moraga and Anzaldu´ a 23). Theories in the flesh emphasize the diversity within and among gays, bisexuals, lesbians, and transgendered people of color while simultaneously accounting for how racism and classism affect how we experience and theorize the world. Theories in the flesh also conjoin theory and practice through an embodied politics of resistance. This politics of resistance is manifest in vernacular traditions such as performance, folklore, literature, and verbal art.

Queer Theory Fails – can’t break down patriarchy

Beresford, Law Prof @ Lancaster University, 14 (Sarah, “The Age of Consent and the Ending of Queer Theory,” Laws (3) pg. 759–779)

What, therefore, links the debate surrounding the age of consent and Queer Theory? I suggest that whilst on the face it, the age of consent debate is inclusive of all identities, it is instead, inherently privileging of patriarchy. Queer identity and Queer Theory have rested on the assumption that lesbians and gay men are “all in this together”, that there is a common cause to fight. Queer Theory as an approach, fails to fully recognize how patriarchy functions because it fails to acknowledge the lived experiences of women (whether lesbian or heterosexual). As pointed out by Parnaby, one of the major demands of Outrage! (a British pressure group, formed in 1990 to campaign for lesbian and gay rights), for example, was to campaign for a change in the age of consent laws. Given that there was no age of consent restriction at all for lesbians until the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000, this was an issue which did not affect lesbians, yet Queer tried to convince women to join a movement based almost solely on a gay male agenda ([25], p. 96). Thus, illustrating that the campaign ran by Outrage! whilst purporting to be inclusive, was far from inclusive, illustrating as it does the patriarchy presumed in the debate. In this context, the mention of, and use of Queer Theory is not being presented as a useful analysis in and of itself, but rather as an illustration of how “consent debates” are in and of themselves, limitingly queer. At this juncture, it may be useful to mention the tension(s) between the liberal legal subject at the heart of the consent issue and some of the insights that could be potentially offered by Queer Theory. I do not of course wish to see norms of equality imposed upon the subject which will merely result in conformity to heterosexual and patriarchal identities. I am aware in this regard of liberal subjectivity underpinning the consent to sex debate and of course, tensions between so called liberal understandings of consent/autonomy. As I explore later in more detail, whilst I dispute the liberal notion of a sovereign singular physical body defined by heterosexuality and patriarchy, I accept that the physical body inhabited by the concept of “women” has to exist in order to argue the relevance of subjectively lived experience. Whilst Queer Theory (as originally conceived) has the potentiality to contribute some interesting viewpoints that might alter perspectives on the debate, the current application of Queer Theory is ill equipped to do either, given that Queer Theory perspectives are incapable of acknowledging heteropatriarchal norms. I now turn to examine in slightly more detail, some of the origins of the term.

Alt Fails- Generic

The alt inevitably falls prey to Homonationalism and the same Eurocentric ontological categories it criticizes

Stryker 12 – Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona earned her PhD in US History at UC Berkeley [Susan, 2012, Chapter 11: De/Colonizing Transgender Studies of China in Transgender China by Howard Chiang, 10.1057/9781137082503] AMarb

Valentine’s work can be read as hostile to the project of a “transgender studies,” to the extent that such a project is imagined only as a conceptual export of the global west and north that is being spread to the global south and east, or that begins only in elite academic settings from which it trickles down to a street that finds it irrelevant. Valentine argues that the category “transgender” itself is often imagined as a superior modern form that advances itself at the expense of old-fashioned, premodern, traditional, or “local” non-Western understandings of sex, sexuality, embodiment, gender, and identity. This is a progress narrative in which transgender, through a reverse discourse, positions itself as even more modern than the increasingly shopworn categories of “gay” and “lesbian,” with their rigid, fixed, outmoded concepts of man and woman, and their complicities in homonationalist and consumerist forms of citizenship. Particularly within the discipline of anthropology, Valentine contends, “transgender” increasingly supplies the conceptual scaffolding that organizes and interprets cross-cultural variations in embodied personhood; but in doing so, he suggests, it extends the trope of modernization and inappropriately deploys Eurocentric ontological categories. One implication of this conceptual move is that the academic institutionalization of transgender studies— which advances a goal of transgender social legitimization through the development of an expertise structured by the foundational preconditions of transgender’s intelligibility—risks deploying a kind of Cartesian grid on the world of human diversity and mapping it in ways that relentlessly orient it, in indubitably imperialist fashion, toward Anglophone and Eurocentric standards and measurements. In directing our attention to those ways in which transgender activism and advocacy themselves can become complicit with the globalizing logic of neoliberalism, with the concomitant risk of transgender studies scholarship becoming the (un)witting ideological accomplice of this (un)stated politics, Valentine offers an important caution against naïve liberationist and progressivist transgender discourses, and usefully points out their racial, class, nationalist, and linguistic biases. When transgender is understood to include all gender variant practices and identities rather than being understood as an analytical stance vis-à-vis the refigurable interrelationality of sex, gender, and identity, transgender studies does indeed risk erasing violent colonial histories of knowledge-production about embodied difference. After all, cataloguing divergences from modern Eurocentric understandings of sex, gender, sexuality, embodiment, and identity in different cultures or classes, assigning meaning and moral weight to such “abnormalities,” and exploiting or fetishizing that difference according to the developmental logic of colonialism and capitalism, have all been central features of Euro-American societies for over 500 years. Understanding the dissemination of transgender as a category that originated among white people within Eurocentric modernity thus necessarily involves an engagement with the political conditions under which that term was produced and within and through which it now circulates.

The alt ignores everday violence

Amoureux 15 – Scholar postdoctoral fellow at Wake Forest University; received his PhD from Brown University in Political Science [Jack, 2015, “Queer Ethics of World Politics”, Academia.edu] AMarb

What does queer theory have to offer thinking about ethics in IR? Queer theorists have sharply criticized the political and economic structures of neoliberalism. There is little to no concern with democracy in this literature because democratic processes still leave out queers. Perhaps, more accurately, they accept only those who can be rendered part of a normalized population—those who evince ‘same-sex’ desires that take shape as monogamous families in which economic, social and political norms and activities are oriented toward the future and the protection of children. In light of this criticism, most forcefully made by Lee Edelman, it is not difficult to see the attractiveness of an ethic of ‘no future’, a stance that could be attractive to IR scholars who have engaged poststructural and psychoanalytic analyses. Yet, it may be difficult to accept an ethics of ‘anti-politics’—as the negation of meaning—as desirable for ‘world politics’ or IR scholarship. As even sympathetic critics of Edleman have pointed out, Edelman’s politics appears all too sterile and ignorant of everyday lived experiences and struggles. These critics have cited not only the concerns of non-normative queers such as the polyamorous but also those often pushed to the margins of neoliberal economies such as transgender persons of color. What do we make of the political tactics they engage to extract real improvements in state practices such as policing and state welfare benefits such as health care? Similarly, transnational critiques and struggles aim to secure changes in the policies, practices and decisions of states, international organizations, and NGOs. Furthermore, what would an embrace of the death drive look like for IR? Would it be passivity in the face of ‘great power’ politics or global neoliberalism? To be sure, there is something potentially powerful about rejecting a neoliberal politics of reproductive futurity, in which the entire world must be ordered and put into motion to contribute to a global political economy of consumption at the expense of steep inequality and environmental degradation. It is to point out the impossibility altogether of arriving at a well-ordered global polity. When virtuous intentions lay claim to violent interventions, and norms and rules define knowledge, queer negativity could be leveraged on behalf of spaces and times that assert perverse desires and attend to the trauma of lives that have been deemed undesirable and backward. This is a politics of refusal that, at its best, is its own form of agency. It is an active embrace, following Edelman, of no meaning, no stability, and no responsibility. The provocations of Edelman, and Love, might contribute to an IR literature that has offered critiques of neoliberalism and has explored trauma and scarring (e.g., Edkins 2002; Steele 2013).

1^ See Foucault (2003) where discipline is the operation of power which regulates individual behavior within a social body through the regulated organization of activity, time, and space. See discussion in Edkins, 1999. For discussion in specific reference to Feminist IR, see Steans, 2003: 428-454.

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