Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities
- ISBN-10
- 0691181187
- ISBN-13
- 9780691181189
- Series
- Trans
- Category
- Social Science
- Pages
- 256
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2018-05-29
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Author
- Rogers Brubaker
Description
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. At a critical time when gender and race are being reimagined and reconstructed, Trans explores fruitful new paths for thinking about identity.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2016-09-20
- 256 pages
- Ebook
- Princeton University Press
Similar books
-
Trans* in College: Transgender Students' Strategies for Navigating Campus Life and the Institutional Politics of Inclusion
By Z. NicolazzoWINNER of 2017 AERA DIVISION J OUTSTANDING PUBLICATION AWARD CHOICE 2017 Outstanding Academic Title This is both a personal book that offers an account of the author's own trans* identity and a deeply engaged study of trans* collegians that ...
-
The Transgender Issue: Trans Justice Is Justice for All
By Shon FayeAn incisive case for trans justice from a powerful new voice In this brilliant introduction to trans politics, journalist Shon Faye gives an incisive overview of systemic transphobia and argues that the struggle for trans rights is ...
-
Trans: A Memoir
By Juliet JacquesRevealing, honest, humorous, and self-deprecating, Trans includes an epilogue with Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?, in which Jacques and Heti discuss the cruxes of writing and identity.
-
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
By Abigail ShrierBut today whole groups of female friends in colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country are coming out as “transgender.” These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they ...
-
Advances in Trans Studies: Moving Toward Gender Expansion and Trans Hope
By Austin H. Johnson, Baker A. Rogers, Tiffany TaylorWith clear implications for policy and advocacy, this volume demonstrates the promise of an empirical turn in transgender studies.
-
The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) are Creating a Gender Revolution
By Ann TraversWinner, 2019 PROSE Award for Anthropology, Criminology and Anthropology, presented by the Association of American Publishers A groundbreaking look at the lives of transgender children and their families Some “boys” will only wear ...
-
Calvin
By JR Ford, Vanessa FordIn this joyful and impactful picture book, a transgender boy prepares for the first day of school and introduces himself to his family and friends for the first time. Calvin has always been a boy, even if the world sees him as a girl.
-
Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality
By Sarah McBride“A brave, powerful memoir” (People) that will change the way we look at identity and equality in this country, from the activist elected as the first openly transgender state senator in U.S. history “The energy and vigor Sarah has ...
-
Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender
By Stef M. ShusterIn Trans Medicine, stef shuster makes an important intervention in how we understand the development of this field and how it is being used to “treat” gender identity today.