Trans : gender and race in an age of unsettled identities / Rogers Brubaker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brubaker, Rogers, 1956- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Identity politics.

Trans people.

Transgender people.

Race.

Identity (Psychology).

Race awareness.

Multiracial people--Race identity--United States.

Multiracial people.

Multiracial people--Race identity.

United States.

Physical Description:

xvii, 236 pages ; 23 cm

Other Title:

Gender and race in an age of unsettled identities

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2016]

Summary:

"In the summer of 2015, shortly after Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender, the NAACP official and political activist Rachel Dolezal was "outed" by her parents as white, touching off a heated debate in the media about the fluidity of gender and race. If Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman, could Dolezal legitimately identify as black? Taking the controversial pairing of "transgender" and "transracial" as his starting point, Rogers Brubaker shows how gender and race, long understood as stable, inborn, and unambiguous, have in the past few decades opened up in different ways and to different degrees to the forces of change and choice. Transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream with dizzying speed, and ethnoracial boundaries have blurred. Paradoxically, while sex has a much deeper biological basis than race, choosing or changing one's sex or gender is more widely accepted than choosing or changing one's race. Yet while few accepted Dolezal's claim to be black, racial identities are becoming more fluid as ancestry increasingly understood as mixed loses its authority over identity, and as race and ethnicity, like gender, come to be understood as something we do, not just something we have. By rethinking race and ethnicity through the multifaceted lens of the transgender experience encompassing not just a movement from one category to another but positions between and beyond existing categories Brubaker underscores the malleability, contingency, and arbitrariness of racial categories.

Contents:

Part One: The trans movement

1. Transgender, transracial?

"Transgender" and "transracial" before the Dolezal Affair

The field of argument

"If Jennifer, then Dolezal": the argument from similarity

Boundary work: the argument from difference

2. Categories in flux

Unsettled identities

The empire of choice

The policing of identity claims

The new objectivism. Part two: Thinking with trans

3. The trans of migration

Unidirectional transgender trajectories

Reconsidering "transracial"

Transracial trajectories, past and present

4. The trans of between

Transgender betweenness: oscillation, recombination, gradation

Racial and gender betweenness

Recombinatory racial betweenness: classification and identification

Performing betweenness

5. The trans of beyond

Beyond gender?

Beyond race?

Notes:

Includes bibliographic references (pages [183]-228) and index.

ISBN:

9780691172354

0691172358

OCLC:

942707393