General Editors' Introduction
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General Editors’ Introduction PAISLEY CURRAH and SUSAN STRYKER une 2016 saw the US‐based multinational bank Goldman Sachs flying the J pink, white, and blue transgender flag outside its Manhattan headquarters. It saw the United Nations Human Rights Council passing a resolution to appoint an “Independent Expert” to study violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It saw Pentagon officials announcing the end of the ban on transgender people serving in the US armed forces. No longer occu- pying a position on the margins of civic and economic life, transgender people, it would seem, are increasingly valued as employees, as consumers, as victims in need of saving, and now in the United States, as potential warriors. Valued is right. The recognition of transgender as a source of value, not only for corporations but also for nonprofit sectors that have embraced the rhetoric of the market, has become a popular theme for the ideologues of the current capitalist moment. Whether rescuing trans “victims,” profiting from the creativity of gender‐diverse employees, or carving out new transgender‐specific consumer markets, the neoliberal creed now presents discrimination against trans (and GLB) people as “an enormous waste of human potential, of talent, of cre- ativity, of productivity, that weighs heavily on society and on the economy” (Park 2015: 1). As the head of the largest GLBT advocacy group in the United States explained at the Davos World Economic Forum, “Around the world, businesses have far outpaced lawmakers in embracing the basic premise that the hard work and talents of all their employees—regardless of who they are or whom they love—are rewarded fairly in their workplaces. ...Noexecutive wants to lose the next brilliant employee to a competitor simply because the business has not caught up with the times in terms of inclusive policies” (Griffin 2016). Of course, precisely how transgender becomes a source of value depends on its location vis‐à‐vis the “coloniality of power,” as guest editors Vek Lewis and Dan Irving point out in the introduction to this issue. Understanding “how contemporary ‘architectures’ of power differentially and unequally affect trans TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 4, Number 1 * February 2017 1 DOI 10.1215/23289252-3711481 ª 2017 Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/4/1/1/486063/1Currah.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 2 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly and sex/gender‐diverse people across the globe,” they write, requires us to “grapple with the complexity of trans/gender capitalist and colonial relations, including the ways in which the transgender paradigm itself, which is of US origin, can be epistemologically and politically complicit.” For example, an activ- ist writing about the UN Human Rights Council’s decision to appoint an expert on sexual orientation and gender identity suggests that “employing SOGI/LGBTI/ queer/trans as a singular palatable thing, rather than a queer, feminist and anti‐ colonial resistance,” fails to “trouble the normativity of a human rights discourse that leaves colonialism, racism and global north exceptionalism largely unchal- lenged” (Hoosain Khan 2016). Directing our attention to particular identities in need of rescue masks the processes and structures that manufacture privilege and precarity alongside commodities. Such an approach also makes possible the emergence of a “comprador LGBT movement” (some of largest LGBT organiza- tions doing international work are funded by the US State Department) that advances the interests of global capitalism, economic imperialism, and militarism (Long 2016). Indeed, as we were drafting this introduction, one of us received a fund‐raising solicitation from a US‐based international LGBTQ rights organi- zation with “Fight ISIS” in its subject line. This special issue of TSQ on what the authors call trans‐ political economy (TPE) provides a timely and necessary intervention in trans studies. In their extensive introduction, Lewis and Irving lay out the contours of TPE as it cur- rently exists and map the field’s relation to the feminist, antiracist, and decolonial work in political economy that made it possible. The articles that follow dem- onstrate how trans studies and political economy’s reigning binaries, labor‐capital and transgender‐cisgender, obscure the centrality of racializing, colonizing, and gendering processes within the architectures of power they purport to interrogate. As Lewis and Irving point out, and as the contributors empirically demonstrate, the production of vulnerability in racialized and colonized gender‐nonconforming populations is not accidental but integral to capitalism and the neoliberal political project—from the commodification of a legible minoritizing trans identity in asylum claims to the economic value attached to whiteness, able‐bodiedness, and hegemonic gender, to the cultivation of trans entrepreneurship in the new sharing economy, to the affective yet marginalized labor demanded of some trans people in the Global South. Far from inserting a conservatizing identity politics into the field of political economy, and far from simply asking that trans and sex/gender‐diverse people be added to such already existing categories as worker and consumer, Lewis and Irving and the contributors to this issue reveal how the narrowly constructed “proper objects” of trans studies and political economy (e.g., gender, labor, class, the economy) have been “complicit in necropolitical devaluations of Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/4/1/1/486063/1Currah.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 CURRAH and STRYKER * General Editors’ Introduction 3 trans lives and actually existing strategies crafted for trans survival.” Certainly the efforts of TPE scholars to remedy these exclusions are far from complete. But at a moment when “the main center of discontent within the capitalist dynamic is increasingly shifting [from production] to struggles over the realization of value” (Harvey 2016), the field’s attention to “the ways that particular trans lives become imbued with (or stripped of) value,” as Lewis and Irving put it, augurs well for its significance in the years to come. Paisley Currah is professor of political science and women’s and gender studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and general coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Susan Stryker is associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona and general coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. References Griffin, Chad. 2016. “How Businesses Are Standing Up for LGBT Rights.” World Economic Forum, January 7. www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/how-businesses-are-standing-up-for-lgbt -rights/. Harvey, David. 2016. “Neoliberalism Is a Political Project.” Jacobin, July 23. www.jacobinmag.com /2016/07/david-harvey-neoliberalism-capitalism-labor-crisis-resistance/. Hoosain Khan, Gabriel. 2016. “The UN, Seen from Khayelitsha: Guest Post.” APaperBird: Sex, Rights, and the World (blog), July 6. paper-bird.net/2016/07/06/the-un-seen-from -khayelitsha/. Long. 2016. “Cairo, and Our Comprador Gay Movements.” A Paper Bird: Sex, Rights, and the World (blog), June 22. paper-bird.net/2016/06/22/cairo-comprador-gay-movements/. Park, Andrew. 2015. “The Price of Exclusion: A Research Guide to Accompany the Price of Exclusion Video by Free & Equal, Narrated by Zachary Quinto.” Williams Institute. December 11. williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/The-Price-of-Exclusion -Research-Guide.pdf. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/4/1/1/486063/1Currah.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 Strange Alchemies The Trans- Mutations of Power and Political Economy VEK LEWIS and DAN IRVING he Rebis, the early modern European alchemical symbol pictured on the cover T of this issue, is a winged hermaphroditic figure—half woman, holding aloft a crown, half bearded man, brandishing a scepter—that stands on a dragon whose twin heads encircle the dual figure’s legs. The Rebis represented the pinnacle of alchemical transformation: it conjoined the lower realms with the higher, the secular with the divine, the physical with the spiritual, mind with matter, and masculine with feminine to depict the perfect resolution of all dichotomies, dualities, and antinomies. The Rebis is also a figure of sovereignty; it bears symbols of authority, holds sway over the elements, and is capable of surveilling all directions simultaneously with its double‐headed vision. As an emblem red- olent of godlike mastery over the material transformations of bodies, lives, and worlds, the Rebis exemplifies a Eurocentric and implicitly colonizing fantasy about the nature of power. As such, it exemplifies as well the key vectors of anal- ysis, central categories of thought, and principal forms of rhetoric and repre- sentation that we seek (in less mystical and magical modes) to explore, critique, and resist in this special issue of TSQ on trans‐ political economy. Our chief concern is with how contemporary “architectures” of power differentially and unequally affect trans and sex/gender‐diverse people across the globe—and how we all, from our different social and political locations, become implicated in those architectures through our everyday interactions with a variety of coordinated and contradictory institutions and rationalities that order our lives across different