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Click Here to Read This Text Advance Praise for Trans “This provocative and perceptive book argues that the current ‘trans mo- ment’ pres ents an unparalleled opportunity for exploring vernacular classifi cation systems and po liti cal claims about identities. Transposing and generalizing to the arena of race and ethnicity insights developed by transgender and feminist analysts, Trans reveals the paradoxical deploy- ment of social construction, contingency, and biology.” — Ann Shola Orloff , Northwestern University “Taking up Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition and Rachel Dolezal’s status as a self- proclaimed black person, Brubaker sheds light on the paradox es of choice and constraint that swirl around conceptions of identity at a time when our cultural understandings of gender and race are very much in fl ux. This is a timely, judicious, and tremendously thoughtful and learned investigation into pres ent- day debates. Every one will want to read this book.” — Steven Epstein, author of Inclusion: The Politics of Diff erence in Medical Research “Trans provides an exceptionally lucid, insightful account of the con tem- porary discussion on ‘trans’ and an extremely useful investigation of the directions that ‘transgenderism’ and ‘transracialism’ might take. Off ering original thinking about gender to prod us to consider race in new ways, this dauntingly good book will garner a great deal of attention.” — Ann Morning, author of The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Diff erence “Trans provides a strong, nuanced perspective on the rapidly shift ing cul- tural imaginary of transgender identities and the emerging questions about possibilities for transracial identifi cation. In its analy sis of how popu lar thinking on race aligns and diverges from beliefs about gender, this timely book will engender much discussion and perhaps some con- troversy— but it will defi nitely be read.” — Kristen Schilt, University of Chicago trans Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities Rogers Brubaker Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved ISBN 978- 0- 691- 17235- 4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936750 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Next LT Pro Printed on acid- free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 In memory of Allan Silver Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 Part One: The Trans Moment 1 Transgender, Transracial? 15 “Transgender ” and “Transracial” before the Dolezal Aff air 17 The Field of Argument 21 “If Jenner, Then Dolezal”: The Argument from Similarity 22 Boundary Work: The Argument from Diff erence 31 2 Categories in Flux 40 Unsettled Identities 41 The Empire of Choice 50 The Policing of Identity Claims 56 The New Objectivism 64 Part Two: Thinking with Trans 3 The Trans of Migration 71 Unidirectional Transgender Trajectories 74 Reconsidering “Transracial” 80 Transracial Trajectories, Past and Present 82 viii Contents 4 The Trans of Between 92 Transgender Betweenness: Oscillation, Recombination, Gradation 94 Racial and Gender Betweenness 101 Recombinatory Racial Betweenness: Classifi cation and Identifi cation 104 Performing Betweenness 108 5 The Trans of Beyond 113 Beyond Gender? 114 Beyond Race? 122 Conclusion 131 Notes 153 Bibliography 183 Index 229 Preface This is a book that took me by surprise. In June 2015, as UCLA’s spring quarter was drawing to a close, I was settling in for a summer’s work on a longstanding book project on the politics of religious and linguistic pluralism when my attention was drawn to the pairing of “transgender ” and “transracial” in debates about whether Caitlyn Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman and Rachel Dolezal as black. The provocative pairing generated an unusual mo- ment of vernacular sociology: a contentious, sprawling, multi- stranded public seminar about the contemporary mean- ings and workings of gender and racial identities. For a week, until the fi ckle spotlight of public attention moved on, the mainstream media, the blogosphere, and social media were abuzz with discussions not only about Jenner and Dolezal but about the similarities and diff erences between gender and race, the ways in which gender and racial iden- tities were naturally given or socially constructed, and the possibilities for choosing and changing gender and racial identities. I found these debates interesting, revealing, and— surprisingly oft en— moving (though of course much of the online commentary was crude, narrow- minded, and riddled x Preface with sarcasm and invective). Contributors brought a wide range of personal experience to bear, sometimes in fresh and unexpected ways, on larger social and political questions. Still, discussion was fundamentally limited by what Loïc Wacquant, in a diff erent context, has called the “logic of the trial,” oriented to adjudication rather than understanding.1 Analysis was largely subordinated to eff orts to validate or in- validate the identities claimed by Jenner and Dolezal. Refl ecting on the initial round of commentary, Susan Stryker, a leading fi gure in transgender studies, urged schol- ars to “hold open a space for real intellectual curiosity, for investigations that deepen our understanding of how iden- tity claims and processes function, rather than rushing to off er well- formed opinions based on what we already think we know. ”2 It is in this spirit that I have written this book. The controversy that swirled around Jenner and Dolezal serves as a useful point of entry into my subject. But I step back from that controversy in order to analyze the deep tensions— between chosenness and givenness, self- transformation and social constraint— that structure contemporary understandings of gender and race. This is an essay, not a monograph, and it has (I hope) some of the virtues as well as the limitations of that genre. An essay is by defi nition exploratory, tentative, and incomplete. It is a “means of thinking on paper, of trying things out in writ- ing,” as Carl Klaus has observed. Even when it is more disci- plined than Samuel Johnson’s “loose sally of the mind, an irregular indigested piece,” the essay remains— as suggested by the original meaning of the word, a “process of trying or testing ”— an open- ended experiment, a means of trying out new ideas and exploring new territory.3 The essay off ers a de- gree of freedom that the monograph does not. The limitations of the essay form— limitations of depth, systematicity, and defi nitiveness— are evident enough. To Preface xi these must be added the limitations of the author. The book is not just an essay; it is an “essay in trespassing,” to borrow Albert Hirschman’s wonderful title. My previous work has touched only glancingly on gender and not at all on trans- gender issues. And while I have written at length on ethnic- ity, argued for an integrated analysis of race, ethnicity, and nationalism, and analyzed the “return of biology ” in the the- ory and practice of race and ethnicity, my work has not been centrally concerned with race per se. An outsider who wades into conceptual and political thickets as densely controversial as these can scarcely hope to emerge unscathed. Yet writing as an outsider may off er certain advantages. As a comparativist with broad interests in the workings of identity categories and the politics of dif- ference, I hope that the intellectual friction generated by thinking about sex and gender in relation to race and eth- nicity may prove productive rather than reductive: I hope that it may suggest ways of going beyond misleading equivalen- cies and ready- at- hand analogies to a richer and more nuanced understanding of both similarities and diff erences. I am an outsider not only to the fi elds of gender and trans- gender studies but also to the experience of crossing gender or racial boundaries. My analysis is no doubt shaped and limited by my own identity as a white cisgender male. But my primary interest in the book is not in the lived experi- ence of those who move between gender or racial categories or position themselves between or beyond such categories. It is rather in the contemporary transformations of, and struggles over, gender and race as systems of social classifi - cation. An ample literature describes the experiences of those engaged in these transformations and struggles; I have learned a great deal from it. But I seek in this book to pro- vide a broader account, one that is necessarily more distant from lived experience. xii Preface The book is addressed to all who are interested in con- temporary transformations of identity, not simply those with a special interest in race or gender. To make the argument accessible to a wide readership, I have sought to avoid aca- demic jargon as much as possible. At the same time, how- ever, I have tried not to oversimplify complex issues. I have made ample use of notes— for the most part endnotes, but a handful of footnotes as well— to qualify, illustrate, and ex- tend the argument without encumbering the main text. Sources are cited in the notes by author and date only; full publication details can be found in the bibliography. Two matters of terminology require brief comment. The fi rst concerns sex and gender. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the distinction between them seemed relatively clear and stable. “Sex ” denoted biological diff erences, “gender ” the varied and complex systems of cul- tural meanings, norms, and expectations attached to sex dif- ferences. In recent decades, the distinction has been chal- lenged by those who argue that sex is just as socially and culturally constructed as gender, and that it is therefore misleading to treat sex as biological and gender as cultural.
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