Queer, Or Cross-Dressers (China Development Brief 2017)
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General Editors’ Introduction SUSAN STRYKER and PAISLEY CURRAH n this special issue, guest editors Howard Chiang, Todd Henry, and Helen I Hok-Sze Leung present work drawn from the intersections of Asian area studies and trans studies. In doing so, they simultaneously address two comple- mentary problems—the marginalization of “trans” topics within Asian studies, and implicit biases within trans studies that center the West, the global North, and the Anglophone. While “solving” those problems exceeds the scope of a single special issue of a journal, the work collected here calls attention to the cross- currents that make this confluence difficult to navigate, while offering a useful point of departure for further work. In a recent issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel (2016) interrogate the continued salience of area studies as a conceptual construct, an epistemology, and a field formation. Given the “strident refusal” (152) of so much recent transnational work on queer sexuality to engage with area studies as an ethically suspect undertaking rooted in post–World War II and Cold War intelligence gathering on behalf of the United States and its geopolitical ambitions, they ask what critical gains might be achieved through the field’s reinterrogation. They suggest that “the elision of area studies within queer studies” might “constitute a willed refusal to name the epistemological genres that US political initiatives have taken outside its territorial borders, a refusal to concede perhaps that these very common- places might hold the residue of post–Cold War settler colonial intimations” (153). In thinking through these provocations to queer studies for their impli- cations in the often-adjacent field of trans studies, given that the latter field often offers to the former a parallax view of the same phenomena, it’s worth pointing out several resonances between Arondekar and Patel’s query and recent or forth- coming thematic issues of TSQ. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 5, Number 3 * August 2018 295 DOI 10.1215/23289252-6900668 ª 2018 Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/5/3/295/537968/295stryker.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 296 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly In their upcoming special issue on “trans*historicities,” for example, guest editors Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici (forthcoming) draw explicitly on earlier work by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (2013) that similarly poses the question of how the commonplace “epistemological genres” of “man” and “woman” operate across space and time; in doing so, these genres of person- hood export naturalized and ontologized configurations of embodied subjec- tivity that are implicitly coded with both presentist and colonial framings of Eurocentric origin, which are capable of overwriting diverse local and regional forms of selfhood. In her issue on “transpsychoanalytics,” Sheila Cavanagh (2017) assembles a remarkable body of work that explores the “willed refusal” to traverse the aporias of sexual difference that abject and invisibilize potentials for trans subjectivities. A forthcoming issue on American hemispheric per- spectives (Garriga-López et al., forthcoming) as well as this current issue attest to a rekindled curiosity about meso-scale (neither local nor global) frameworks for attending to the material, cultural, linguistic, and political-economic speci- ficities of lives that resist undue particularization on the one hand, and overblown generalization on the other. Taken together, all of these seemingly diverse questions, topics, and methods reach toward a common preoccupation with how best to acknowledge and account for the ways that gender and sexuality form part of larger appa- ratuses that classify and hierarchize forms of life, assemble them in ways that benefit some forms more than others, and connect them all to movements of bodies and resources from one place to another. Transgender studies has something important to offer this conversation in that it addresses both cate- gories and movements, and attends to emergent forms of personhood as well as traversals of existing categories, across scales that range from the intrapersonal to the transnational. In selecting and contextualizing the articles chosen for inclusion in this special issue, Chiang, Henry, and Leung critique “diffusionist” and “globalist” notions of transgender that reduce it to merely an oppressive imposition of the West on the rest of the world—a conceptual move that, however true it might ring in one register, risks eliding other ways in which regional “glocalizations” can operate in concert as well as in opposition to regimes of coercive normalization emanating from a geopolitical elsewhere. Instead, they foreground the existence of many “transgenders,” as well as many “Asias.” In doing so, they enable a useful, and largely unprecedented, analysis of the multidirectional flows of meaning and power across the trans/Asian conceptual interface. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/5/3/295/537968/295stryker.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 STRYKER and CURRAH * General Editors’ Introduction 297 Susan Stryker is associate professor of gender and women’s studies and director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona and general coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. 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. References Arondekar, Anjali, and Geeta Patel. 2016. “Area Impossible: Notes toward an Introduction.” GLQ 22, no. 2: 151–71. Cavanagh, Sheila, ed. 2017. “Transpsychoanalytics.” Special issue, TSQ 4, nos. 3–4. DeVun, Leah, and Zeb Tortorici, eds. Forthcoming. “Trans*historicities.” Special issue, TSQ 5, no. 4. Garriga-López, Claudia Sofía, Denilson Lopes, Cole Rizki, and Juana Maria Rodriguez, eds. Forthcoming. “Trans Studies en las Américas.” Special issue, TSQ 6, no. 2. Stryker, Susan, and Aren Z. Aizura. 2013. “Introduction: Transgender Studies 2.0.” In The Transgender Studies Reader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, 1–12. New York: Routledge. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/5/3/295/537968/295stryker.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 Trans-in-Asia, Asia-in-Trans An Introduction HOWARDCHIANG,TODDA.HENRY,andHELENHOK-SZELEUNG his special issue originated in the concerns of three members of TSQ’s edi- T torial board. We were troubled that the various intellectual fields in which we operate do not adequately speak to one another and that bridging dialogues were necessary to foreground a host of marginalized and unnamed subjects. Broadly 1 speaking, these fields are Asian studies and queer/trans studies. They also intersect with the various concerns and approaches of our respective and overlapping dis- ciplines, which include history, anthropology, science, medicine, literature, film, mass media, and cultural studies. This interdisciplinary matrix also characterizes the pioneering work of the authors who actively responded to this special issue, “Trans-in-Asia, Asia-in-Trans.” In the call for papers, we expressed our excitement that, over the past two decades, scholars and activists have begun to examine long-standing histories and the politically engaged nature of trans cultures across the diverse societies of Asia (e.g., Blackwood and Wieringa 1999; Chiang 2012; Furth 1988; Johnson 1997; Leung 2008; Li 2003; Peletz 2009; Reddy 2005; and Sang 2006). We recognized, however, that such work remains at the margins of Asian studies, rather than receiving the spotlight. In what follows, we challenge the “ghettoization” of trans-in-Asia as a small subfield about minority bodies in the quantitative sense of representing a small number of people (themselves often already marginalized due to a variety of cultural attitudes and institutional practices) in the overall scope of human experiences. By contrast, we propose to take seriously the empirical and theo- retical insights to be gained from focusing on nonnormative bodies and their embodiments. Furthermore, we argue that trans perspectives help us see new issues and processes that should interest those who study and write about Asia, which we consider a geopolitical formation, an economic discourse, a regional imaginary, and/or an institutionalized object of study (Chen 2010). TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 5, Number 3 * August 2018 298 DOI 10.1215/23289252-6900682 ª 2018 Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/5/3/298/537970/298chiang.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 CHIANG, HENRY, and LEUNG * Introduction 299 If one source of discomfort derived from an unwillingness of Asian studies to adequately consider critiques of area studies that partly operate by minimizing trans (and queer) perspectives, another dissatisfaction driving this special issue centered on how discussions of nonnormative embodiments have tended to ref- erence the West. To be sure, the aforementioned surge of intellectual and activist work on the politics of nonnormative embodiment in various Asian locales was accelerated by the transnational circulation of trans vocabularies after the 1990s. Indeed, this framework clearly allowed some committed scholars and confron- tational advocates to visualize and mobilize marginalized