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This PDF Contains the Complete Keywords Section of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Volume 1, Numbers 1–2 This PDF contains the complete Keywords section of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Volume 1, Numbers 1–2. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/1-2/232/485677/19.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 KEYWORDS Abstract This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, ‘‘Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty- First-Century Transgender Studies,’’ revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some con- tributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender stud- ies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines. Abjection ROBERT PHILLIPS Abjection refers to the vague sense of horror that permeates the boundary between the self and the other. In a broader sense, the term refers to the process by which identificatory regimes exclude subjects that they render unintelligible or beyond classification. As such, the abjection of others serves to maintain or reinforce boundaries that are threatened. This term can be used to think of the instability of gendered and/or sexed bodies—especially those occupied by transgender individuals—which are at the center of academic debates surrounding queer, feminist, and trans subjectivity. Drawing on a psychoanalytic reading of subjective identity as a defensive con- struction and on the French literary obsession with monsters, psychoanalyst and linguist Julia Kristeva develops the term abjection in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 1, Numbers 1–2 * May 2014 19 ª 2014 Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/1-2/232/485677/19.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 20 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly Abjection literally means ‘‘to cast out,’’ yet Kristeva’s theorization plays with this definition by recognizing that in the context of marginalized subjects, abjection goes beyond ‘‘casting out’’ and becomes a more interactive process through which the boundaries of the self are protected by rejecting whatever ‘‘does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the com- posite’’ (4). In other words, it renders problematic any assumption regarding the fixity of the borders separating subjects from objects and self from other. Abjection, as Kristeva describes it, ‘‘disturbs identity, system, order’’ (ibid.) and encompasses a kind of borderline uncertainty—ambiguous, horrifying, and polluting. Transgendered bodies, then, especially when viewed as physical bodies in transition, defy the borders of systemic order by refusing to adhere to clear definitions of sex and gender. The abject can thus serve as a cleaving point of abstruseness and unease—separating, pathologizing, and psychologizing trans subjectivity. The anxiety at the root of this unease with transgender subjectivity can be traced back, in part, to a fear of the ambiguous. Judith Butler employs Kristeva’s concept of abjection to discuss the often problematic embodiment of sexuality and gender. Specifically, Butler explores how normative heterosexual identities are circumscribed via a process that rejects and excludes ‘‘figures of homosexual abjection’’ (1993: 103). Like homosexual subjectivities, transgender subjectivities challenge heteronormative understand- ings of gender, sex, bodies, embodiment, and (dis)ability. Heteronormative sub- jects, then, can come to feel threatened, because in order to maintain their own tenuous subjectivity, they must simultaneously identify with the abject others whom they are also required to reject (ibid.: 113). In a similar manner, Nico Besnier (2004) draws on Kristeva’s formulation of abjection in his analysis of transgender Tongan men whose gender practices make them socially illegible. Despite the strategic negotiation of social relations with their fellow Tongans, many transgender Tongan men found themselves excluded from the multitude of mainstream social relationships that would usually afford them protection. While historically the term has had a negative connotation, groups that have traditionally been thought of as marginal are reclaiming their difference and embracing their abjection. Trans activists have taken up abjection as a con- structive political strategy, which can disrupt and confound long-standing sys- tems of power that are sustained by the methodical exclusion, repression, and silencing of certain others. Abjection, Kristeva wrote, ‘‘draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’’ (1982: 2). It is in this liminal space where the subject experiences a crisis of meaning in which transformation is possible—the dif- ference between internal and external becomes unclear, and in the process, conditional identity is stripped away to reveal a queer object. In this sense the Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/1-2/232/485677/19.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 PHILLIPS * Abjection * Keywords 21 notion of embracing abjection is epitomized by Susan Stryker’s essay ‘‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage’’ (1994), in which she connects her own transsexual body with the figure of Frankenstein’s monster. Stryker acknowledges and welcomes her abjection when she declares, ‘‘I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster’’ (240). Through this declaration, she is reclaiming the word monster in order to relieve it of its power; but more importantly, abjection becomes a tool with which to further challenge and problematize conventions of socially constructed gender categories. In David Halperin’s formulation of abjection (2007), the promiscuous behavior of some gay men has come to threaten the ‘‘normalization’’ of ‘‘gayness’’ and alienate the concomitant goal of equality. While Halperin specifically addresses gay men, his ideas may also be applied to trans subjects. He argues that it is becoming increasingly commonplace for many gay men to mimic a desex- ualized heterosexual existence consisting of married, monogamous couplings and to emphasize their normativity in order to appear acceptable to others. Yet, as Halperin argues, by acknowledging and welcoming the abjection that accom- panies their subjectivity and subsequently taking advantage of the moments when meaning collapses, marginalized subjects (including transgender individuals and gay men) can question the hegemonic forces that seek their oppression and in the process regain control of the signification of their subjectivity. In modern literature, the abject is a prominent feature in the work of writers such as Jean Genet and Marcel Jouhandeau. Robert Phillips lectures on anthropology and women’s and gender studies at the University of Manitoba. His book Little Pink Dot: Technology, Sexuality, and the Nation in Singapore is forthcoming. References Besnier, Nico. 2004. ‘‘The Social Production of Abjection: Desire and Silencing among Trans- gender Tongans.’’ Social Anthropology 12, no. 3: 301–23. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex.’’ New York: Routledge. Halperin, David. 2007. What Do Gay Men Want? Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Stryker, Susan. 1994. ‘‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Per- forming Transgender Rage.’’ GLQ 1, no. 3: 237–54. DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399470 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/1-2/232/485677/19.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 22 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly Adolescence GABRIELLE OWEN The idea of adolescence is a relatively recent social category, emerging in the late nineteenth century alongside medicolegal notions of homosexuality and the concept of inversion, which conflates gay or lesbian desire with trans phenomena. While the word adolescence dates back to the fifteenth century in English and can be found to designate a stage of human life through the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries, adolescence begins to function later in medical discourse and early psychology as a type of person, one who can be shaped and directed away from perceived social ills, such as homosexuality and prostitution, and toward social aims such as marriage and reproduction. By the turn of the century, G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence (1904) claimed that adolescence was the key to the advancement of civilization, the developmental moment of state intervention that would propel humankind into the next stage of evolutionary history. We might understand the idea of adolescence as a mechanism of Fou- cault’s biopower, a technology
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