This panel analyzes trans studies through time, focusing on questions of historicity, life narration, chronology, and periodization. Each of the essays below exposes violence in seemingly benign narrative structures and explores alternative models of temporality by trans or queer people. Building on Zeb Tortorici and Leah DeVun’s 2018 TSQ issue, “Trans*historicities,” and the 2013 “Timely Matters” collection of essays (Aizura and Stryker), this panel aims to further advance discussions of trans temporality by moving “beyond the question of ‘Is a particular historical figure or community trans, and how do we know?’” to the operations of contemporary demands and desires on marginalized trans subjects.
In particular, this panel examines strategies of time that disrupt capitalism, from a developmentalism that ties hormones and surgery to “progress,” to the centering of violence in trans-of-color life. Throughout the following essays, we center typically marginalized experiences—children appealing to other children, trans deferral and waiting, racialized labor and sex work—to consider the possibilities of trans narration outside production and productivity.
For example, our first essay, by Cameron Awkward-Rich, shifts typical understandings of Pauli Murray (as a figure in/for a black trans past) from a recovery project defined by desistance to a life deliberately invested in “wait.” That is to say, while some renditions of Murray center the poet’s lack of hormonal transition as an abatement of desire, Awkward-Rich posits whether deferral might actually be necessary for trans (of color) life. In many ways, the organizing power of the desistance narrative around Murray depends on the universalization of trans as felicitous temporal and physical movement, a universalization that is as much a racial story as a trans one. Reading Murray’s life and poetry as trans, this paper offers not a story about desire and desistance, but instead a story about bearing the killing wait of trans time.
Like Awkward-Rich’s work on desistance and deferral, our second paper by Ava Kim focuses on a model of trans time that devalues visions of the future. In “The Global Trans Child,” Kim argues that Argentina’s Gender Identity Law of 2012 exposes a transnormativity that renders gender transition through the country’s national transition to democracy. Building on Jules Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child, Kim writes that the law’s focus on surgery and medicalization aims to incorporate trans people into a transnational market that values the “plasticity of the body” for potential exchange between Argentina and the U.S. and Europe. Turning to Lucía Puenzo’s 2007 film, XXY, Kim explores alternative transition timelines that belie narratives of democratization through a multilingual “child’s play,” an ephemeral exchange that intentionally sidelines the prospect of adulthood.
The panel’s third paper by Eva Pensis similarly engages with trans childhood by turning to the genre of disclosure. When transness is framed as sexual deviancy, Pensis argues, transness is something one supposedly develops into by dint of childhood experiences of sexual violence. Though this essentialist thesis has been refuted, these confessional accounts of sexual violence continue to abound in memoir and documentary narratives of trans women. Pensis invites us then to reconsider the relationship between gendering and time, reading Dominique Jackson’s The Transsexual from Tobago (2014) alongside the 2015 documentary, I Am The Queen. In these, Pensis analyzes the role of “temporal reckoning” as a central component to self-making, one that consistently undermines linear time and tethers personhood—and womanhood—to its most endurant forms: ways of being that outlast the traumas of the past (which are always present) to imagine a present self (from what always was).
Finally, our fourth paper by Jules Gill-Peterson considers a mid-twentieth century trans feminine personage, the ‘street queen,’ as a problem for the modernizing, sexological, and homogenizing temporalities of trans studies and politics. Against an extreme idealizing impulse that flattens the trans femme of color in an exhausted dialectic between pornified violence and model for revolution, Gill-Peterson asks what the street queen might have meant in her own historical context. Juxtaposing her appearance in queer of color writing with archival and oral historical evidence from the 1960s and 1970s, Gill-Peterson argues that the street queen does not genealogically endorse the contemporary abstraction and whitewashing of trans femininity as a bourgeois gendered interiority but instead poses trans femininity first and foremost as a category of racialized labor—principally sex work and its policing—generating a different ground for intersectional trans politics and theory.
Our chair, Cassius Adair, is a key figure in trans studies and media studies, whose work in journals like American Quarterly and Transgender Studies Quarterly engages with many of these papers’ provocations.