Queer Theory Reader

Personal research blog of an aspiring scholar of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Currently reading: "Discipline and Punish" by Michel Foucault

[queertheoryreader]

“The first person I really knew who died of AIDS, died when I was twenty-four. The last person I knew died last year, but actually he had a severe crystal meth problem. But for the first fifteen years, the centerpiece of my young adulthood, I watched many people die and suffer and in the end forgot many of them. And all along it has puzzled me that the AIDS experience is not recognized as an American experience, while for me it is the American experience. How can something be equally the and equally not? Because it belongs to people still considered, even postmortem, to be second-rate and special interest. It has not been integrated into the American identity of which it is a product. AIDS most often appears as a banal subplot point in some yuppie's inconsequential novel, or a morose distortion in a stupid movie. But no true, accurate, complex, deeply felt and accountable engagement with the AIDS crisis has become integrated into the American self-perception. It puts those of us who do know what happened in the awkward position of trying to remember what we used to know in a world that officially knows none of it.”

Schulman, Sarah, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012) 69-70. 

[queertheoryreader]

“In 1964 the British sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification to denote the influx of middle-class people to cities and neighborhoods, displacing the lower-class worker residents; the example was London and its working-class districts, such as Islington. 

Of course, enormous shifts in migration and urban demographics are rarely coincidental or neutral occurrences. Usually people don't want to leave their homes and only do so when forced or highly motivated. The impetus can be political events as well as aggressive policy changes that push one community out while actively attracting another to replace it. 

 After World War II, the G.I. Bill provided great impetus for urban ethnic whites to move to newly developed moderate income suburbs outside of the city. The bill provided low-interest loans for veterans that made home ownership possible for the first time, and racist housing often de facto restricted these benefits to white families. This period, often known as ‘white flight,’ recontextualized many white families into privatized suburban lifestyles, with a much higher rate of gender conformity, class conformity, compulsory heterosexuality, racial segregation, and homogenous cultural experience than they had known in the city. Built into this was an increased ‘fear’ of or alienation from urban culture, from multiculturalism, gender nonconformity, and individuated behavior. Innovative aesthetics, diverse food traditions, new innovations in arts and entertainment, new discoveries in music, ease with mixed-race and mixed religious communities, free sexual expression, and political radicalism were often unknown, separate from or considered antithetical to suburban experience. An emphasis on new consumer products, car culture, and home ownership itself formed the foundation of values cementing many communities’ ethical systems.”

Schulman, Sarah, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012) 24-25.

[queertheoryreader]

“In a succinct entry for the keyword ‘The Child’ in the first issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly, sociologist Tey Meadow narrates the emergence of the transgender child: ‘A relatively new social form, we see no references to transgender children prior to the mid-1990s.’ Meadow continues in this keyword entry to provide a quick history of the category of trans-childhood and points to activism by parents on behalf of their gender-variant children in the early twenty-first century as key to the production of definitions and explanations for what gender-variant expression in very young children might mean. Meadow’s account, powerful as it is, does not situate these gender-variant children alongside any other historical definitions of queer kinship.

Prior to the 1990s, a middle-class child who expressed a strong and abiding desire to be recognized as ‘the other sex’ might have been described as having a gender identity disorder and perhaps even treated for psychological disturbances. Such a child might also have been understood as gay or lesbian and been a source of confusion and consternation for his or her parents. Presently, however, as Meadow’s work chronicles, the gender-variant child has been the occasion for activism and outreach by parents and family members who seek not to restrain and reorient their gender-queer children but who advocate for them and recognize them in their gender-nonconforming identities. As Meadow’s work also shows, intriguingly, this new generation of gender variant children may experience their gender identity in vastly different ways vis-à-vis people just a decade older than them. Meadow describes this disjunction in transgender histories as follows: ‘Trans adults must cope with the deeply different trajectories and life chances of the smallest gender outlaws. Some of these children may elect to be stealth (maintain total privacy about their gender histories) as adults; some may never identify openly as transgender; many will never go through their natal puberties or retain childhood memory books filled with pictures that do not mirror their gender identities as adults. For these reasons, this new generation may have wider latitude to disidentify with transgender history and with those who came before them.’ 

While Meadow does not follow up on this point in his short essay, it is a mind-blowing statement. Unlike in other social justice contexts where young people might acknowledge and even thank the adults who came before them and made the world a more hospitable place, Meadow proposes that the support that many white middle-class trans children now enjoy from their families and communities affords them a radically different experience of childhood than that of trans people even a decade older. While transgender individuals of my generation, now in their forties and fifties, often could not transition until they were adults, lacked a complex language for their gender variance, and had to live large parts of their lives conforming to gender identities with which they were at odds, today’s gender nonconforming children, with parental support, may grow up trans rather than struggling through long periods of enforced gender normativity. While that is cause for some amount of celebration, it also, Meadow suggests, puts these young people at odds with the history that produced the conditions for their smoother passage from trans childhood to adulthood. 

And indeed, perhaps the disidentification that Meadow describes between a new generation of trans children/young adults and those that came before them is precisely what has given rise to the battles over naming that I summarized in the introduction. While for an older generation a term like ‘tranny’ harkens back to a time when medical terminology dominated the landscape and forced gender-variant people to present in gender- normative bodies for long periods of their lives, for younger trans people the term speaks to a shadowy world where insults had to be rehabilitated and turned into identity claims and where ‘trans’ was a marker of some kind of irresolvable damage and dysphoria. Indeed, ‘dysphoria’ itself, a term that allowed earlier generations to explain their bodily discomfort, has fallen out of favor and stands as a reminder of the bad old days.”

Halberstam, Jack, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018) 67-69.

[queertheoryreader]

“If ‘queer’ in the 1990s and 2000s was the marker of a politics of sex and gender that exceeded identity and gestured toward a critique of state power and assimilationist goals, we could say the term ‘trans*’ marks a politics based on a general instability of identity and oriented toward social transformation, not political accommodation. As the term ‘transgender’ comes to represent the acceptable edge of gender variance, the category of trans* signifies the cost of that level of acceptance. The category takes the prefix for transitivity and couples it with the asterisk that indicates a wildcard in internet searches; it is a diacritical mark that poses a question to its prefix and stands in for what exceeds the politics of naming and recognition. Trans* also signals the insufficiency of current classificatory systems, many of which we inherited from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The solution, as I discussed earlier, is not to impose ever more precise calibrations of bodily identity but rather to think in new and different ways about what it means to claim a body.”

Halberstam, Jack, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018) 50.

[queertheoryreader]

“...historian María Elena Martínez noted the incompleteness of the historical record, the impossibility of reading ‘truth’ in the fragments that one finds there, and the inapplicability of contemporary models of sex and gender to historical figures, warning in general against applying terms like ‘gay,’ ‘lesbian,’ and ‘transgender’ or ‘intersex’ to figures from other eras. ‘The act of mapping a category onto subjects who may not have recognized the practices, lifestyles, notions of body and self, and so forth that it references,’ she writes, ‘aligns itself with a genealogy of power—one that imposes, distorts, or forecloses certain desires, identifications, and experiences. It can also entail missing an opportunity to discover in the past human possibilities and imaginings that were suppressed or left unfulfilled but that can provide guidance in the present for creating better worlds in the future.’ This is a beautiful passage and a subtly nuanced proposal for how to go about historicizing ambiguous bodies.”

Halberstam, Jack, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018) 25.

[queertheoryreader]

CW: potentially transphobic language/slurs

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“... While some strands of transgender activism have committed to the abolition of state regulation of the body (see, e.g., work by Dean Spade on administrative law, for example, or by Eric Stanley on prisons), others have committed to a politics of recognition and participated in local and often futile and counter-productive quarrels over naming, language, and speech norms.

We can find one example of this last set of tensions between naming and being named in a local skirmish in San Francisco in the summer of 2014 when trans activists asked the owner of a queer bar called Trannyshack to change its name. The term ‘tranny,’ as the owner of Trannyshack, San Francisco-based drag queen Hekelina (a.k.a. Stefan Grygelko), tried to explain in posts on Facebook and elsewhere, was not always understood as a hateful slur. The club began in 1996, and at that time ‘tranny’ has the ring of a term of endearment - it was a diminutive, after all, like ‘kitten,’ rather than a degrading pornographic term like ‘she-male.’ Trannyshack was also a space often shared by gay men and trans women and may have provided a meeting place for gay men who had, at some point in their lives, been marked by the term ‘sissy’ and trans women for whom gay club spaces were experimental and flexible. By 2014, two decades later, the term rang a false note and sounded to trans activists in the city like an insult. After heated debates on Facebook and elsewhere that involved public trans entertainers such as Vivian Bond and RuPaul (who defended the use of the term ‘tranny’), Heklina, fearing that she might be on the wrong side of history, changed the club’s name to T-shack... Heklina cites both business and pleasure in her justification for the name change. But she also acknowledges that certain modes of naming gender-transitive bodies might be archaic as we enter a new mode of sex/gender norms.”

Halberstam, Jack, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018) 12-13.

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I’m interested in reading further about this specific instance in San Francisco & the historical use of the term ‘tr*nny.’ In my experience as a trans person and someone existing in queer spaces, I’ve always been told by peers and never questioned that it was a slur. At the same time, I have older (in their 40s and 50s) trans mentors who have lamented that they can no longer use the term to apply to themselves or their friends, but generally consider it a small thing the sacrifice in the greater push for trans rights. Given my discomfort using it myself, I’ve censored the term in my own commentary, but left it as is in the quotation by Halberstam.

Surely Halberstam would accuse me of the exact kind of nitpicking that he’s criticizing in this book, but I find his identification of RuPaul as a trans person fraught. Given the author’s previous emphasis on his use of the asterisk to describe a more inclusive, ever-shifting type of gendernonconforming person, perhaps RuPaul would make sense as “trans*,” but certainly not “trans.”

[queertheoryreader]

“When it came to gender and sexuality, few eras were as turbulent as the 1890s and the early decades of the twentieth century. And while today Facebook famously offers you fifty-one ways of identifying yourself on their site, a hundred years ago those categories were under rapid construction using the raw materials of accelerated urbanization, diverse populations in small and dense areas, and intensification of the desire to classify, know, and define. So, rather than a Great Leap Forward, our current profusion of classificatiry options actually harks back to the early days of sexology, when doctors like Richard von Krafft-Ebing produces new, expert knowledge on human sexual and gendered behavior. In 1886, Krafft-Ebing circulated a huge compendium of what he called ‘contrary sexual instinct,’ and in the table of contents readers could find discussions on a multitude of erotic states, from ‘Anthropophagy’ to ‘Whipping of Boys,’ ‘Necrophilia’ to ‘Larvated Masochism.’ For Krafft-Ebing (writing before Freud had codified sexual instincts in relation to fixed orientations), the task was to document exhaustively the variety of forms within which the sexual instinct could be expressed. Of less interest to Krafft-Ebing was was the articulation of streamlined system opposing male to female and homo- to heterosexuality. Krafft-Ebing’s work on gender and sexuality emerged at a time when Europe was engaged in a large-scale imperial orientation toward classification, collection, and expertise. Our current investments in the naming of all specificities of bodily form, gender permutations, and desire emerge from this period.”

Halberstam, Jack, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018) 6-7.

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I don’t entirely agree with Halberstam’s claim that contemporary emphasis on identity categorization is directly linked to colonialism or, by extension, white supremacy. I’m posting this passage because it is a very big claim to make in the introduction of the book and one that I would like to return to and address later. From other work I’ve read by Halberstam, his discomfort with naming seems to stem from the barriers that segregation into micro-indentifications poses to community building among those with shared political goals. While I do agree with that sentiment generally, I worry that Halberstam’s language makes it easy for what should be a necessary intra-community discussion among queers to be appropriated by non-queers to justify claims that identity politics hurts leftist movements, when reality is far more complicated than that.

[queertheoryreader]

“Naming, needless to say, is a powerful activity and one that has been embedded in modern productions of expertise and knowledge production. I have selected the term ‘trans*’ for this book precisely to open the term up to unfolding categories of being organized around but not confined to firms of gender variance. As we will see, the asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk holds off the certainty of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender variant form may be, and perhaps most importantly, it makes trans* people the authors of their own categorizations. As this book will show, trans* can be a name for expansive forms of difference, haptic relations to knowing, uncertain modes of being, and the disaggregation of identity politics predicated upon the separating out of many kinds of experience that actually blend together, intersect, and mix. This terminology, trans*, stands at odds with the history of gender variance, which has been collapsed into concise definitions, sure medical pronouncements, and fierce exclusions.”

Halberstam, Jack, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018) 4-5.

[queertheoryreader]

“Gays and lesbians of all ages are obsessing over gay marriage as if it's going to cure AIDS, stop anti-queer/anti-trans violence, provide all uninsured queers with health care, and reform racist immigration policies. Unfortunately, marriage does little more than consolidate even more power in the hands of already privileged gay couples engaged in middle class hetero-mimicry.

Let's be clear: The national gay marriage campaign is NOT a social justice movement. Gay marriage reinforces the for-profit medical industrial complex by tying access to health care to employment and relational status. Gay marriage does not challenge patent laws that keep poor/working class poz folks from accessing life-extending medications. Gay marriage reinforces the nuclear family as the primary support structure for youth even though nuclear families are largely responsible for queer teen homelessness, depression and suicide. Gay marriage does not challenge economic systems set up to champion people over property and profit. Gay marriage reinforces racist immigration laws by only allowing productive, "good", soon-to-be-wed, non-citizens in while ignoring the rights of migrant workers. Gay marriage simply has nothing to do with social justice.”

Conrad, Ryan, “Against Equality, In Maine and Everywhere,” in Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion, ed. Ryan Conrad, 59, Chico, California: AK Press, 2014.

[queertheoryreader]

“The Queer population, in addition to others in the 60s and 70s, fought against the State and Capitalism, in large part because they had no material connection to the State. Queers found themselves outside of the nuclear family structure and the light of mainstream acceptance. This is why you see the great flight to San Francisco happen; this is why you see San Francisco become a Mecca of all things Gay. A home was needed and a home was found. This home, ironically, is the most symbolic of the radical change that happened in the Queer population in the last 40-50 years.

The Castro disctrict in San Francisco now stands as the most alienating piece of land to anyone that finds himself or herself not a rich, white, gay male. It is a destination for global tourism and one of the city’s biggest moneymakers. Commodities line the windows of almost every store and you’d be lucky to find a flat here that is under 4,000 dollars. A few years back, the residents of the Castro district refused to have a youth center be built in the neighborhood because it would ‘bring down property value,’ in their own words. The Castro is the perfect symbol of the complete bankruptcy and the co-option of the Queer Rights movement. Tourism and profit stand over the lives and safety of youth who desperately need to escape from their abusive families. This is what happens when the Queers desire to become mainstream. It becomes an issue of ‘who can comfortably assimilate and who can’t.’ And you can see what happens to those who can’t.

My problem with the hype and pressure around DADT [Don’t Ask Don’t Tell] is that it distracts from the very things that Queer Liberation was founded on: Anti-imperialism, anti-racism, equal access to housing and health care, and struggles against patriarchy. It seems almost irrelevant to me whether or not gay soldiers can ‘come out’ in the military when the US military is not only carrying out two genocidal campaigns for US imperialism and corporate profit, but also when the war budget is draining the funds needed for almost every other service we so desperately need in this country. When I see the situation as such, not only does it become apparent to me that the Queer Movement must be anti-war, but also the movement, as is, has been hijacked by a few high-powered assimilationists dragging everyone along through corporate propaganda.”

Jones, Jamal Rashad, “Why I Won’t Be Celebrating the Repeal of DADT: Queer Soldiers are Still Agents of Genocide,” in Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion, ed. Ryan Conrad, 142-143. Chico, California: AK Press, 2014.

[queertheoryreader]

A rare personal note: So, I tag my posts with titles, authors, and themes in case other people interested in queer history or theory may be interested in reading the same things I am. I understand a lot of these works are not available in most libraries, and the full texts are nearly impossible to find for free online. I started this tumblr with the intention of transcribing excerpts from books I’ve read that I thought I would like to save as I may want to cite them later. I can’t afford these books usually, and therefore can’t return to them whenever I need them, but am privileged to live in Brooklyn, where I have access to both the Brooklyn Public Library and New York Public Library systems.

I’m glad the recent excepts I’ve posted from “When Brooklyn Was Queer” has gotten attention from other blogs. It’s a wonderful book and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in New York history or queer history in general.

The unexpected problem I encountered was that one transcription I made about Victorian lesbianism and queer historiography was reblogged by transphobic and anti-sex worker blogs. I have not blocked them yet because I believe the spread of real history is important even when it is spread by ignorant people. Perhaps some of their followers will see and become interested in actual history rather than transphobic, eurocentrist, anti-woman fearmongering?

In any case, I wanted to take this opportunity, in the chance that Queer Theory Reader gains any real readership, to establish myself as firmly anti-TERF and anti-SWERF. I, myself, am a binary transgender man (who also recognizes the validity of nonbinary genders) and former sex worker.

I do find it unfortunate, given the amount of affirming and worldly cis-lesbian women I know who have historically supported trans rights, that tumblr lends a platform to transphobic hate groups who use lesbianism as a cover to disguise their conservative, white suprematist, gender essentialist ideals. I didn’t think this would have to be a thing I’d deal with just posting book quotes.

[queertheoryreader]

Same-sex desire has always flourished in single-sex locations such as boarding schools, ships, prisons, and brothels, much as situational heterosexuality has been practiced by many queer people stuck in straight marriages or conservative social situations.

Ryan, Hugh, When Brooklyn Was Queer, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019), 40.

[queertheoryreader]

“… for historical figures to be seen as homosexual we require a different, and higher, burden of proof: either explicit, verifiable sexual contact, or a degree of shame or fear about loving someone of the same sex, neither of which is present in this case. Neither [Mary Hallock] Foote nor [Helene de Kay] Gilder expresses any shame in their letters, just the enormous pressure of being pulled between multiple loves. Even as late as the 1920s, Foote’s own daughter openly described the relationship between Foote and Gilder as having a ‘romance and a kind of glory like that the Greeks took in their epic friendships – Achilles and Patroclus’ (a pair long associated with homoerotic friendship).

Paradoxically, this openness about their feelings has helped to make them invisible to modern historians, for whom queer love and shame are inseparable. But the very appropriateness of Foote and Gilder’s behavior is what allowed them to profess their love and publicly as they did. Their ability to have an intense, passionate relationship rested in part on their respectability: their whiteness, their class, their education, their commitment to the family and the home, and their eventual heterosexual marriages. Without these underpinning, what was accepted as an intense but healthy relationship might well have been seen as abnormal or even pathological. Indeed, within just a few years, Victorian sexual morality would begin to give way to the emerging science of sexology, which saw these kinds of intense female-female relationships as suspect. In particular, friendships between women who were poor, “mannish,” or vocal advocates for women’s equality would be demonized as unnatural.”

Ryan, Hugh, When Brooklyn Was Queer, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019), 36.

[queertheoryreader]

Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar Nelson
“Born in 1875 in New Orleans, Nelson graduated from college at the age of seventeen and published her first book of short stories when she was just twenty. Nelson was active in the black women’s uplift movement, which created an entire parallel world of volunteer-run social services for black communities and generally emphasized education and respectability as the proper path to equality. This work brought her to Brooklyn in 1885, as a teacher in PS 83, the public school in Weeksville. According to historian Judith Wellman, Weeksville was on the forefront of the national fight to desegregate schools in America, and PS 83 was ‘one of the first schools in the United States to hire both black and white teachers to teach both black and white students.’ While teaching, Nelson lived in Brooklyn Heights with Victoria Earle Matthews, a leader in the uplift movement. Matthews was the founder of the White Rose Mission in Harlem, the first settlement house for black women in the city, where Nelson volunteered.
Little information survives from this early period of Nelson’s life, except for her correspondence with the man she would briefly marry, author Paul Dunbar. However, thanks to Nelson’s later letters and diaries, we know that she had intense, sometimes romantic relationships with other middle-class black women reformers dating back at least to the early 1900s. For instance, in 1907, she worked in Delaware with black education reformer Edwina Kruse, who wrote passionate letters to Nelson declaring that ‘every thought of my life is for you, every throb of my heart is yours and yours alone.’” 
Ryan, Hugh, When Brooklyn Was Queer, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019), 28-29
IMAGE: Culp, Daniel Wallace, “DUNBAR, MRS. PAUL LAURENCE, Washington, D.C.,” in 20th Century Negro Literature (J.L Nichols & Company, 1902), 139.

[queertheoryreader]

“…Another tricky thing about researching queer history is that our ideas about gender and sexuality have continually changed over the last 150 years, leading to a nearly endless string of forgotten terms such as tribade, urning, gynander, and invert. Other words have stayed in usage, but their meanings have radically changed, such as bisexual, which once meant roughly what we mean by transgender today. When you add in all the euphemisms, slang words, and legal categories, it becomes easy to miss (or misunderstand) queer history, even when it seems obvious.”

Ryan, Hugh, When Brooklyn Was Queer, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019), 7.

[queertheoryreader]

“One might imagine that the Y would be an uncontroversial case of a chromosome with a “sex.” Since 1959, we have known that without a Y chromosome—or at least without the gene it carries that is needed for testes determination—the developing fetus will not become a male. Moreover, only males have a Y.* But outsized conceptions of the Y as the seat of biological maleness and the essence of masculinity are not fixed by these facts. These conceptions have a history and a context. They were developed and hardened within the particular dynamics of mid-twentieth-century cytogenetics, behavioral genetics, and sociobiology.

XYY “supermale” theories in the 1960s and 1970s, which asserted that males with an extra Y were bigger, taller, and more aggressive—more male—represent the first episode in the construction of the notion of the Y as the chromosome for maleness. Today scientists regard XYY as an embarrassing episode in the history of genetics. The studies were characterized by notorious empirical and methodological failings.

The arrival of the XYY male initiated the first serious cytogenetic studies of the Y chromosome. Research on the so-called supermale flourished in the United States, Britain, and Denmark during the 1960s and 1970s. The so-called XYY syndrome was a mainstream target of investigation in the most prestigious journals of biology, genetics, and cytogenetics. In 1970, the US National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) published an eighty-page “Report on the XYY Chromosome Abnormality,” a move that conveyed a high-level sense of urgency about XYY males and fortifi ed the impression that XYY was a veritable medical disorder and a serious factor in criminal sociopathy. The link between XYY and aggression was hotly pursued...

As Jeremy Green, a British science studies scholar whose 1985 account of the XYY episode remains the principal secondary historical literature on it, records, “by the early 1970s, there had been at least two ‘thriller’ films in which the main character is a violent criminal driven by a chromosome abnormality, a series of crime novels with an XYY hero (who constantly wrestles with his inner compulsion to commit crimes), and as a spin-off from the novels, a TV series called ‘The XYY Man.”...

It took enormous resources and more than a decade of work by multiple research groups to reverse Jacobs’s initial conjecture. Through large epidemiological studies published in 1976 and 1977, researchers proved that 97 percent of XYY individuals will never commit a crime, that the higher prevalence of XYYs in security institutions than the general population was due, if anything, to slightly lower median intelligence, that their offenses were actually less aggressive and violent than those of their fellow XY inmates, and that the only phenotype reliably associated with XYY was increased height. This profile of the XYY male showed that any behavioral differences in XYYs were due to a generalized developmental effect, consistent with a chromosome imbalance, not a double dosage of Y-chromosomal genes specialized for aggression or violence. XYY vanished almost completely from the scientific literature by 1980.”

*Notation: “Some males do not have a Y, of course. This includes XX individuals with an SRY gene transplanted to one of their X chromosomes; individuals with disorders of sexual development, such as congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who are XX but may develop male gonads and secondary sexual characters; and transgender individuals who have transitioned from female-bodied to male-identified.”

Richardson, Sarah S, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 82-85. 

[queertheoryreader]

“It is curious that sex difference research has not been a more central focus of discussion among those studying the implications of genomics. Given the well-documented history of methodological problems with sex difference research, as well as of harmful abuses of sex difference claims by those who would limit women’s opportunities, it is remarkable to find women’s health activists promoting, with little qualification, sex based biology’s expansive picture of sex differences. As the sociologist Steven Epstein notes, “one of the most striking aspects of the movement for sex-based biology is its unabashed embrace of a thoroughgoing conception of difference between women and men.” Anne Fausto-Sterling suggests that the movement’s focus on biological sex differences may result, in part, from its leadership by elite, politically connected, professionalized women’s health activists not closely allied with feminist grassroots activism or critical theory. As she writes, ‘members of the feminist medical establishment, that is, those researchers and physicians for whom the activities and programs of the SWHR make eminent sense, see themselves perched on the forward edge of a nascent movement to bring gender equity to the healthcare system. These feminists work outside of an intellectual milieu that would permit the more revolutionary task . . . of contesting not only ‘the domination of the body by biological terms but also [contesting] the terms of biology itself.’

It is a widely shared consensus among social scientists that genomics is transforming social relations. It is remaking categories of identity— concepts such as “blood relations,” racial or geographic ancestry, citizenship, and subjectivity—as well as notions such as what it is to be normal and healthy, what rights we have to privacy and to health care, and what responsibilities we have to others to maintain and pursue information about our health. Research on the emerging genomic concept of race, a topic with which I have also been deeply engaged, provides a helpful analogue for an investigation of gender in the age of the genome. This research shows the revival of old, debunked models of race in the language of genomics, and underscores the way in which trends such as pharmacogenomics, personalized medicine, and health movements for racial and ethnic minorities are supporting an often uncritical turn toward research on race-specific genetics. The same may be said of genetic research on sex and gender.”

Richardson, Sarah S, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 215-216.