On a hot Berlin summer evening in 2009, 18-year-old Caster Semenya 1 became the surprise world champion in the 800 meter run by completely outclassing her competitors. Quickly, however, one nagging question came to the forefront: âIs she really a woman?â What followed was a previously unseen and unheard of global media war of speculations surrounding Semenyaâs âtrueâ sex, and a discussion that was characterized by complete factual ignorance and incompetence. This case saliently highlights three circumstances: that, even well into the twenty-first century, the existence of exclusively two sexes is still considered to be not only an accepted, but apparently the only acceptable âscientific factâ; that this supposedly solid assumption should not be challenged; and consequently, that the existence of a socio-biological continuum of sex is still largely ignored and sex diversity suppressed.
What this discussion also, albeit indirectly, made clear was that the two-sex model (as well as the prevailing understanding of sex as a unique, innate and immutable characteristic of a human being) is primarily a social construct which causes the oppression, discrimination, and marginalization of all those who cannot conform to these arbitrary principles. Through the sheer fact of their existence, the phenomena of transgender 2 and intersex demonstrate that a cultural system that postulates the existence of two, and only two, sexes and genders has reached its limits and that any system that uncritically presupposes an identity between a felt or experienced gender identity and a non-contradictory notion of biological sex must be questioned.
Transgender and intersex studies, which are understood here âas wide-reaching scholarly undertakingsâ (Stryker and Aizura 1), are located at the intersections of the humanities and the arts, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. If we wish to understand the construction of transgender, intersex, and other gender identities in their full complexity, fragility, and mutability as well as in their interdependency and interplay with socio-cultural, historical, political and biological factors, trans- and interdisciplinary approaches are absolutely necessary, as is intersectionality. Transgender and intersex studies question not only traditional concepts and binaries, but also our very modes of thinking. By doing so, they pose epistemological and biopolitical 3 questions; questions that âare ultimately about the categories and concepts we use, about the kinds of knowledgeâ (Floyd 33) gender studies has produced and the limits to what it can produce. Or, as Judith Butler argues,
In almost the same vein, Cheryl Chase maintains that â[t]hough the male/female binary is constructed as natural and presumed to be immutable, the phenomenon of intersexuality offers clear evidence to the contrary and furnishes an opportunity to deploy ânatureâ strategically to disrupt heteronormative systems of sex, gender, and sexualityâ (301). If intersex and transgender are less medically indicated facts (resulting from a supposedly pregiven ânaturalâ material reality), rather than the product of a culturally constructed, interpreting and evaluating perception (not to say projection or even construction), which is also political, they bring about serious consequences for the socially accepted and legally dominant concepts of masculinity and femininity as well as for feminism 4 and gender studies in general, given that neither masculinity nor femininity can any longer be taken a priori as natural or as the strict province of âmenâ or âwomenâ.the intersexed movement has sought to ask why society maintains the ideal of gender dimorphism when a significant percentage of children are chromosomally various, and a continuum exists between male and female that suggests the arbitrariness and falsity of gender dimorphism as a prerequisite of human development. There are humans, in other words, who live and breathe in the interstices of this binary relation, showing that it is not exhaustive; it is not necessary. (2006, 187)
This anthology endeavors to take both transgender and intersex positions into account, andâinstead of playing them off against each otherâto ask about commonalities and strategic alliances, in terms of knowledge, theory, philosophy, art, and life experience. It intends to strike a balance between work on literature, film, photography, law, sports, and general theory, bringing together humanistic approaches with social science approaches and integrating lenses for studying gender in one book, which would usually rather be found in separate volumes either on intersex or transgender studies. Moreover, this book aims to adopt a non-hierarchical, multi-perspective approach that endeavors to overcome the limitations of sex and gender research within the media, disciplines, and fields of studies mentioned above by asking how transgender and intersex issues are negotiated and conceptualized from a variety of different points of view, what specific findings arise from there, and to what extent artistic and creative discourses offer their own uniquely relevant forms of knowledge and expression. For reasons of space and coherence, this book mostly adopts a Western, that is US/European focus, which is supplemented by a chapter on âTransgender in Global Frameâ (Chap. 7). Thus, there still remains a lot of research on the global dimensions of transgender and intersex to be carried out (see below)âwhich might be the subject of a second volume. In addition to the political, social, ethical, legal, biopolitical, and philosophical dimensions covered in this volume, at least six chapters pay special attention to the knowledge that art produces towards a better understanding of transgender and intersex.
Transgender and Intersex: Theoretical, Practical, and Artistic Perspectives was inspired by an international and interdisciplinary conference on âTransgender and Intersex in the Arts, Science and Societyâ (18â20 January 2012), which I organized at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden and which was supported by the Dresden University of Technology, the British Council, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and Dreilinden. I am especially grateful to the British Council who continued to support this project even after the conference with a project grant that made this book possible 5 ; a book which is meant to appeal to a wider audience, that is not only to researchers but also to readers familiar with gender studies and feminism, but not necessarily with the concepts of transgender and intersex. Therefore, it seems necessary to define ourâmore often than notâshifting categories of analysis. However, as I will discuss later, the differentiation between transgender and intersex is not always clear and a lot more complicated than the binary structure of the following subchapters suggests.
Transgender and Transgender Studies
As early as in 1999, Jack Halberstam and Annamarie Jagose maintain that
[t]ransgender is for the most part a vernacular term developed within gender communities to account for the cross-identification experiences of people who may not accept the protocols and strictures of transsexuality. Such people understand cross-identification as a crucial part of their gendered self, but they may pick and choose among the options of body modification, social presentation and legal recognition available to them. So, you may find that a transgender male is a female-born subject who has had no sex-reassignment surgery, takes testosterone (with or without medical supervision), and lives as a man mostly, but is recognized by his community as a transgendered man in particular. In this context, the term âtransgenderâ refuses the stability that the term âtranssexualâ may offer to some folks, and embraces more hybrid possibilities for embodiment and identification. At the same time ⊠the term âtranssexualâ is undergoing reconstruction ⊠In other words, transsexual is not simply the conservative medical term to transgenderâs transgressive vernacular; rather, both transsexual and transgender shift and change in meaning and application in relation to each other rather than in relation to a hegemonic medical discourse. (n.pag.) 6
In their introduction to the first issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah argue that transgender
was meant to convey a nonpathological sense that one could live in a social gender not typically associated with oneâs biological sex or that a single individual should be able to combine elements of different gender styles and presentations. Thus, from the beginning, the category âtransgenderâ represented a resistance to medicalization, to pathologization, and to the many mechanisms whereby the administrative state and its associated medico-legal-psychiatric institutions sought to contain and delimit the socially disruptive potentials of sex/gender atypicality, incongruence, and nonnormativity. (2014a, 5)
Thus, transgender can âfunction as a rubric for bringing together, in mutually supportive and politically productive ways, gender-marginalized people in many parts of the world, who experience oppression because of their variance from socially privileged expressions of manhood or womanhoodâ (8). From this definition of âtransgenderâ, the question arises as to the agenda of the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies. 7
For Stryker and Currah the field âencompasses the possibility that transgender people ⊠can be subjects of knowledge as well as objects of knowledge. That is, they can articulate critical knowledge from embodied positions that would otherwise be rendered pathological, marginal, invisible, or unintelligible within dominant and normative organizations of power/knowledgeâ (9). In analogy to fields of intellectual activism such as feminist studies, disability studies, race, and ethnicity studies âand other areas of inquiry that seek to dismantle social hierarchies rooted in forms of bodily difference, the critique of knowledge that operates within transgender studies has an intricate and inseparable connection to broader movements for social justice and social transformationâ (ibid.). From this it follows that transgender studies is not merely investigating transgender phenomena as its proper object; âit also treats as its archive and object of study the very practices of power/knowledge over gender-variant bodies that construct transgender people as deviantâ (4). Thus transgender studies âis to the medico-juridical and psychotherapeutic management of transgender phenomena what performance studies is to performance, or science studies is to scienceâ (ibid.). As a consequence, transgender studies
does not ⊠merely extend previously existing research agendas ⊠[but] draws upon the powerful contestations of normative knowledge that emerged over the course of the twentieth century from critical theory, poststructuralist and postmodernist epistemologies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies of science, and identity-based critiques of dominant cultural practices emanating from feminism, communities of color, diasporic and displaced communities, disability studies, AIDS activism, and queer subcultures and from the lives of people interpellated as being transgender. (ibid.)
The work of the field, Stryker and Currah further argue, is also to comprehend the nature of past and present shifts in attitudes toward what gender itself means and does, as well as âthe new forms of sociality that have emerged from themâ (5). Transgender studies thus reevaluates.
prior understandings of gender, sex, sexuality, embodiment, and identity, in light of recent transgender phenomena, from critical perspectives informed by and in dialogue with transgender practices and knowledge formations. As historically new possibilities for gender self-perception and expression emerge, as states reevaluate and sometimes alter their practices of administering gender, as biomedical technologies blur customary boundaries between men and women and transform our mode of reproduction, as bodies and environments collapse into one another across newly technologized refigurations of subjects and objects, transgender studies appears [to be] an increasingly vital way of making sense of the world we live in and of the directions in which contemporary changes are trending. (5)
Moreover, transgender studies âengages with the radically transformative implications of contemporary and prospective biomedical technologies of the bodyâ. It engages âwith critical questions about the boundaries between human and nonhum...