You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Transgendered Person: Contemporary Photography and the Construction of Queer(Ed) Identities Stefanie Snider
You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Transgendered Person: Contemporary Photography and the Construction of Queer(ed) Identities Stefanie Snider Some queer identities have appeared recently might be seen as a process of repetition that both reifies and in lesbian zines and elsewhere: guys with makes unstable the identities in question.2 I would suggest pussies, dykes with dicks, queer butches, that not only might methods of queering be seen in this way, aggressive femmes, F2Ms, lesbians who like but also the process of photography itself. Butler writes that men, daddy boys, gender queens, drag kings, the construction of sex is a repeated process that takes place pomo afro homos, bulldaggers, women who in time and space and both produces and destabilizes itself fuck boys, women who fuck like boys, dyke through its very acts of repetition. The categories of sex and mommies, transsexual lesbians, male lesbi- gender appear natural because they come about through a ans. As the list suggests, gay/lesbian/straight reiterative or ritual practice […] yet, it is simply cannot account for the range of sexual also by virtue of this reiteration that gaps experience available.1 and fissures are opened up as the constitu- Sex, gender, and sexual identities have exploded in the tive instabilities in such constructions, as last ten to twenty years on both theoretical and practical lev- that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as els. The roles described by Judith Halberstam certainly put that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed pressure on the seemingly uniform categories of straight, les- by the repetitive labor of that norm.3 bian, gay, bisexual, and transgender.
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