Ideas
trans-lating gender studies
PrintAsked to picture a feminist, the average Columbia student might think of the images of Wollstonecraft or Beauvoir adorning Contemporary Civilizations’ canonical texts, or scour his memory for grainy photographs of early women suffragists hidden in high school history books. He might think of hordes of enthused hippies with waist-length hair burning bras, or lipsticked women of the ’90s reappropriating short skirts and high heels. It’s likely that for many students at Columbia, the notion of feminism is still deeply embedded in a historical narrative addressing the economic, legal, and political inequality of women in society. But this vein of feminism—one which is organized around essentialist divisions between women and men—is only one of a multiplicity of perspectives represented in the field of women and gender studies today.
Professor Janet Jakobsen, director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), argues that feminism is anything but straightforward. “The version of feminism popularized by the media becomes a moniker,” she says. “One of the questions we have to ask is ‘why does one strand of thought stand in for feminism as a whole?’” Challenging gender norms and gender expression is a natural undertaking for Barnard College, which has been a pioneer of feminist inquiry since the ’60s. Today, it explores a critique of feminist theory and activism through a particularly interesting lens: transgender studies. Transgender studies have been a part of LGBT studies since the inception of the discipline in the late ’70s, but recently a new wealth of scholarship has emerged. Since the 2006 publication of Susan Stryker’s seminal text, The Transgender Studies Reader, trans studies have come far to carve out their niche in gender studies departments across the country.
This semester, visiting professor Paisley Currah is offering a seminar entitled “Sex, Gender, and Transgender Queries.” The class examines “trans” both as a particular kind of claim for gender recognition and as a move away from norms organized around the gender binary. An expert on gender identity and the law, Currah will publish an article in the Journal of Feminist Philosophy this summer entitled “‘We Won’t Know Who You Are’: Contesting Sex Designations on New York City Birth Certificates.” This study, conducted with sociologist Lisa Jean Moore, examines the way in which the state reinforces traditional gender/sex binaries by regulating gender identity on the basis of physical characteristics. His upcoming book, slated for publication in the fall of 2010, furthers the examination of the relationship between the state and the individual, exploring how the state categorizes gender and sex in relation to its larger project of distributing resources.
But Currah’s work isn’t always confined within the walls of the classroom, he often collaborates with fellow law professors and activists on matters of transgender advocacy. This should come as no surprise; as a discipline borne from the labors of a powerful social justice movement, gender studies still blurs the line between academia and activism today.
Barnard alumnus Dean Spade (BC ’97), an exemplar of the kind of activist who combines public and academic spheres, was recently sponsored by the BCRW to speak on campus. A professor at the Seattle University School of Law and active figure in the transgender rights movement, Spade provided an insightful critique of the contemporary liberal landscape and the gay rights movement in his lecture “Trans Rights in a Neoliberal Landscape.”
For over an hour, in the James Room of Barnard Hall, Spade enthralled his audience with his conceptualization of the current neoliberal mindset, in which social justice movements are normalized to serve the interests of their most privileged members. A minority within an already marginalized population, he argued that transgender activists have a unique opportunity to challenge the values and goals of well-funded LGBT non-profit organizations, such as the Human Rights Campaign. Social justice, Spade argued, doesn’t trickle down—it trickles up. For social justice movements to maintain their integrity and maximize their efficacy, they must take on the issues of the most oppressed in a given population. Spade’s own organization, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, takes this very approach to activism. It provides a venue for non gender-conforming individuals from exceptionally marginalized backgrounds (low income, homeless, minorities) to access political agency and fundamental human rights.
26 February 2009
vol. 6, issue 5
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