Foundations of Trans and Theory and History Jessica Kurr, PhD [email protected] Women’s Debate Institute What are we covering?

• Movement history • Normativity • Visibility Politics • • Corporatization • What can you do?

Women's Debate Institute 2020 Early Trans and Movements

Mattachine Society Stonewall Women's Debate Institute 2020 Differing Political Strategies

Run for office Disrupt conservatives

Women's Debate Institute 2020 Movement’s

Transphobic Event 1976-2014

LGB-only Equality Act of 1974

Women's Debate Institute 2020 in the Movement

“Three decades later, despite some genuine efforts to increase , especially in progressive movement circles, exclusivity and still divide us … Unless we eradicate the systemic that undermine the lives of the majority of L.G.B.T.Q. people, we will never achieve queer liberation.” -- Barbara Smith (2019)

Women's Debate Institute 2020 For example, ....

Women's Debate Institute 2020 ACT Up and AIDS Protest

Women's Debate Institute 2020 What is ?

“Contests over sexuality and its regulation are generally linked to views of social institutions and norms of the most basic sort. … stigmatization is intricated with gender, with the family, with notions of individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body.” - (1991, p. 6)

Women's Debate Institute 2020 One version of Homonormativity

“A new homonormativity that does not challenge heterosexist institutions and values, but rather upholds, sustains, and seeks inclusion within them.” - Lisa Duggan (2003, p. 50)

Women's Debate Institute 2020 Trans-focused Homonormativity

“Homonormativity, as I first “Homonormativity aimed heard and used the term in at securing privilege for the early 1990s, was an gender-normative gays and attempt to articulate the based on double sense of adherence to dominant marginalization and cultural constructions of displacement experienced gender, and it diminished within political the scope of potential and cultural activism.” resistance to .” - (2008, p. - Susan Stryker (2008, p. 145) 147)

Women's Debate Institute 2020 Defining Visibility Politics

“Theory and practice which assume that ‘being seen’ and ‘being heard’ are beneficial and often crucial for individuals or a group to gain greater social, political, cultural or economic legitimacy, power, authority, or access to resources” - Dan Brouwer (1998, p. 118)

Women's Debate Institute 2020 Visibility & Media Representation

Women's Debate Institute 2020 Visibility & the Personal Closet

Women's Debate Institute 2020 Backlash to Visibility

“There is a “link between periods of media visibility for trans people and increased levels of physical and legislative violence against them … Visibility, this supposed cure-all, might actually be poison.”

- Morgan Page (2017, p. 143)

Women's Debate Institute 2020 What’s Homonationalism?

“Homonationalism marks arrangements of US sexual exceptionalism in relation to the nation … generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by and queer subjects”

- Jasbir Puar (2007, p. 39)

Women's Debate Institute 2020 Corporatization of Pride

“The rainbowification of June produces a vision of queer life as if through some kind of an absurdist corporate rainbow random word generator … We have now gone beyond the point of queer identity and politics being co-opted, stripped of meaning, and sold back to us.” - Myrl Beam (2019)

Women's Debate Institute 2020 So, what can you do?

• Read and learn!!! • Think about what you are able/willing to do • Create spaces where people feel comfortable • Be supportive if someone ever discloses • Know that you will make mistakes

Women's Debate Institute 2020 Works Cited

• Barbara Smith, “Why I Left the Mainstream Queer Rights Movement,” New York Times, June 19, 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/us/barbara-smith-black-queer-rights.html • Michael Warner, “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet,” Social Text, no. 29 (1991): 3-17. • Lisa Duggan, The Twilight for Equality?: , Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003) • Susan Stryker, “Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity,” Radical History Review, no. 100 (2008): 145-157. • Dan Brouwer, “The Precarious Visibility Politcs of Self-Stigmatization: The Case of HIV/AIDs Tattoos,” Text and Performance Quality 18, no. 2 (1998): 114-136. • Morgan M. Page, “One from the Vaults: Gossip, Access, and Trans History-Telling,” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, eds. Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 135-146. • Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) • Myrl Beam, “Against the Rainbow,” The Abusable Past, July 25, 2019, https://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/abusablepast/?p=3180

Women's Debate Institute 2020