This week, find the last of three excerpts of Rogers Brubaker’s book, Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities. The first excerpt, which you can see here, includes and introduction by Prof. Brubaker for this republication. There he explained how the portion of his book republished for our Substack fits within his larger thesis and explores new ways to think about going beyond gender categories.
Parts One and Two of this republication went into three different ways in which one might go beyond the binary gender using neo-categorical , anti-categorical and post-categorical stances. This Part Three will look at various feminist visions of what it means to go beyond gender.
Beyond Gender excerpt, Part Three
Used with permission of Princeton University Press from Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities by Rogers Brubaker, 2016; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
Normative accounts of what it might mean to live "beyond gender" are varied and contested, even among feminists. (Accounts of what it might mean to move "beyond race" are much clearer and—on a conceptual level — less controversial.) Feminists are divided, for example, on the question of whether overcoming gender oppression or gender inequality requires transcending gender per se. Accounts of a post-gender society envision a world in which gender categories are no longer central in organizing some combination of the following: (1) the allocation of legal and political rights, social and economic rewards, and respect; (2) the division of labor, including household labor and caring work as well as paid labor; (3) social expectations about appropriate forms of expression and behavior; (4) the perception and interpretation of the social world; and (5) the cognitive and emotional organization of the self.
The first three are straightforward. It is clear enough what it would mean to go "beyond gender" in the allocation of rights and rewards, the division of labor, and the structuring of expectations, though there are important disagreements among feminists about the desirability as well as the possibility of full "gender symmetry" in the division of labor.1 What it might mean to go "beyond gender" in perceiving and interpreting the world and in organizing the self is less clear. The central role of gender in these last two domains comes from the fact that gender is not only a social structure but a symbolic structure, a cognitive lens through which we perceive and interpret the social world as well as our own embodied selves, assigning gendered meanings to identities, attributes, styles, tasks, and even sights, sounds, colors, and material objects.2 Though the scope and content of the assigned meanings vary across time and place, gender appears to be a universal or nearly universal symbolic structure and cognitive lens for interpreting self and world.
The complexity of the question of what it might mean to go "beyond gender" results from the various ways in which combinations of changes in these five domains can be envisioned and evaluated. Exploring this complexity is beyond the scope of this chapter. But it may be helpful to distinguish liberationist, egalitarian, and assimilationist visions of going beyond gender, aimed at overcoming domination and constraint, distributional inequality, and difference, respectively.
The various feminist projects for going "beyond gender," as I observed above, are not articulated as expressly transgender projects. And I have repeatedly noted the longstanding feminist critique of certain transgender claims and practices. Feminists have been particularly critical of the trans of migration, especially in its medicalized forms, arguing that it reinforces rather than subverts the gender binary. The paradigm shift in understandings of transgender in the last two decades, however, has focused more attention on the trans of between and the trans of beyond and has highlighted their transformative potential. In so doing, that paradigm shift has opened up new possibilities for alliance between feminist and transgender projects and movements, though it has at the same time created new complexities and tensions.3
The possibilities for alliance are most visible in connection with what I call the liberationist strand of feminist visions of a world "beyond gender." These visions emphasize not only the liberation of women from male domination, but also, at least in some versions, the liberation of men and women from the constraints of gendered norms and expectations. Some feminist analyses view transgender practices and identifications as a key source of movement toward a world beyond gender.4 Since such practices and identifications are more common among youth, they see cohort succession—the emergence of new cohorts who no longer share assumptions about the gender order that are taken for granted by earlier cohorts — as a key vector of social change.
Relations between the egalitarian strand of feminist thinking about a world "beyond gender" and expressly transgender projects and stances are much more complex and contested.5 Feminist accounts of distributional inequality and movements to overcome it focus squarely on inequalities between men and women in power, authority, income, wealth, and so on. Transgender projects and stances disturb the conceptual and political clarity of such accounts by introducing new categories— such as trans woman and trans man—into the calculus of gender inequality and by challenging the foundational, taken-for-granted status of the category "woman" in feminist thought.6 For many feminists, this is at best a distraction from the core question of inequality between men and women, at worst a frontal assault on feminism.7 But for trans activists and scholars, the focus on men and women obscures crucial forms of gender inequality and oppression that feminists have largely ignored and that radical feminists have aggravated by refusing to recognize trans women as women. That refusal has led to bitter struggles between trans activists and radical feminists about ownership and control over the category "woman," access to women's spaces, and the "trans-exclusionary " stance of radical feminists.8
The assimilationist strand of feminist thinking about a world "beyond gender" stands in equally sharp tension with the differentialist ethos of many transgender projects and stances. Assimilationist feminism envisions men and women ultimately becoming fundamentally similar, not least in their similar investments in domestic caregiving and paid work.9 This envisioned diminution of difference is antithetical to the preservation or indeed proliferation of difference envisioned by most transgender projects. Far from seeking to abolish gender difference (as Elan-Cane may have done), the trans of migration presupposes and reproduces gender difference, while transgender projects that seek to carve out a space between or beyond binary gender categories celebrate the liberation and proliferation of previously unimaginable forms of gender difference; they are not assimilationist but hyper-differentialist.
For feminist debates on gender symmetry, see Orloff 2009.
On gender as a symbolic structure, see Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Ortner 1996; and Bourdieu 2001. Ortner underscores the "relationship of mutual metaphorization" through which gender "becomes a powerful language for talking about the great existential questions of nature and culture, while a language of nature and culture ... can become a powerful language for talking about gender, sexuality, and reproduction"(1996, 179).
For overviews of feminist stances toward trans issues and explorations of the possibility of feminist-trans alliances, see Heyes 2003 and Bettcher 2014b. For efforts to elaborate a specifically trans feminism, see Bettcher 2014a and Serano 2016. For a critique of the tendency of some feminists to embrace certain forms of trans as progressive while criticizing others as reactionary, distinguishing for example "good genderqueers" from "bad transsexuals," see Schilt 2010, 173-75.
See especially Risman, Lorber, and Sherwood (2012), who see genderqueer and transgender youth as a key force generating "crisis tendencies in the gender order" (pp. 12-16).
All feminist thinking is of course egalitarian in some respects. The strand I am calling egalitarian focuses on distributional inequalities between men and women, while the liberationist strand focuses on the constraints exercised by the gender system on both women and men.
On transgender challenges to the category "woman," see for example Wilchins 1997, 81-83, and, for a more extended discussion, drawing primarily on Judith Butler, Wilchins 2004, 133-45.
See, most recently, Jeffreys 2014.
See for example the New Yorker account by Michelle Goldberg (2014) and the critical response by the transgender writer and activist Julia Serano (2014).
For a sharp analysis and critique of this strand of feminist thought, with particular reference to the "universal caregiver" model articulated by Nancy Fraser, see Orloff 2009. For a critique of feminist theory for failing to take seriously the "pleasures of gender" experienced by trans and cis people alike, see Schilt and Meadow 2012.
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References from this excerpt
Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2014a. "Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance." Signs 39, no. 2: 383-406.
Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2014b."Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 2001. Masculine Domination. Translated by Richard Nice.Cambridge: Polity.
Goldberg, Michelle. 2014. “What is a Woman?” New Yorker, August 4.
Heyes, Cressida J. 2003. “Feminist Solidarity after Queer Theory: The Case of Transgender.” Signs 28, no. 4: 1093-1120.
Jeffreys, Sheila. 2014. Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism. Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge.
Orloff, Ann. 2009. "Should Feminists Aim for Gender Symmetry? Why a Dual-Earner/Dual-Caregiver Society Is Not Every Feminist's Utopia." In Gender Equality: Transforming Family Divisions of Labor, edited by Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers, 129-60. London: Verso.
Ortner, Sherry B. 1997. "So, Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" In Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture, 173-80. Boston: Beacon Press.
Ortner, Sherry B., and Harriet Whitehead. 1981. "Introduction: Accounting for Sexual Meanings." In Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, edited by Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, 1-27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Risman, Barbara, Judith Lorber, and Jessica Holden Sherwood. 2012. "Toward a World Beyond Gender: A Utopian Vision." Paper prepared for American Sociological Association Annual Meeting.
Schilt, Kristen. 2010. Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schilt, Kristen, and Tey Meadow. 2012. "The Pleasures of Gender." Paper presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting.
Serano, Julia. 2014. "Op-Ed: An Open Letter to the New Yorker." Advocate, August 5.
Serano, Julia. 2016. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. 2nd ed. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press.
Wilchins, Riki Anne. 1997. Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books.
Wilchins, Riki Anne. 2004 . Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer. Los Angeles: Alyson Books.
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