- How are transgender studies positioned in relation to queer theory?
I would say that in the past, they were part of queer theory, queer theory being the critique of socionormativity from a perspective of margin, where Transgenders were a particular kind of queer. But over time queer kind of came to be equal to homo, losing that radical potential and the original focus of the discipline: the focus is not the homosexual itself but its position within a system of social relations. So many transsexuals do not necessarily see themselves as allied to queer. From queer to LGBT, I see another step going from a potential radical thing to a liberal, inclusive politic, a liberal logic of identity management, of flexible accumulation. I don’t particularly like LGBT because it collides with a neoliberal politics of inclusion.
- Are you saying that there is a need to rethink the LGBT category?
I think a lot of good things happened under the umbrella of the LGBT alphabet soup, precisely because our society is defined through these categories, the categories we are made to live through and so, of course they should be politicized and of course we should think about ways to bring them together to overcome the “divide and conquer” strategy. Of course, it’s important when you are dealing with marginalized communities that are small in numbers, to find ways to link specific issues to broader social issues, so this is all good. I think any tactic that you can use to make quality of life better for people you should use, but I also think that a rights-based and an identity-based politics will always be insufficient. So it’s not enough to say for the transgender issue “we want to include transgender rights in our platform, program, manifesto” because transgender is simply not ONE category. Are you talking about cross-dressers, transsexuals or non-gender binary people? What, exactly, what demands, are you articulating?
At the same time, I think the state and capital also work to split transgender into those kind of transgender that are increasingly allowed to be a vector of life rather than those who are marked for premature death. The category itself is not coherent, power works through the categories to increasingly split and specify. That process of sorting the heterogeneous population into those fractions deemed worthy of life and those who are consigned to premature death works through the categories, not only on the categories.
- How can we rethink European colonial history through transgender studies?
Transgender studies demands a re-reading of European history. Our very mode of embodiment and identity is organized according to logics of biocertification, which try to ground the social category through which the body is operated on through, in the material substance of the body. These acts of biocertified social categories are organized according to different binaries, imagined as spectrums and ranges, as if there is a place where the body can be situated. There is a conceptual space that the body is supposed to be nailed onto, where the categorization and the materiality of the body collapse into one another and this is a particular technique of management of subjectivity and embodiment identity.
It is through this biocertified social categories that populations are settled on land and become a resource available for states or capital. When state apparatuses or capital move into new territories, they carry with them certain modes of organizing bodies and identities as part of the administrative structure through which they work, they export and impose them on other populations and other territories. I am thinking in particular of settler colonial society and the problem of indigenous knowledge formations. Thinking it with Guattari, we can’t think about subjectivity in isolation, but we must analyze it in relation to other institutional settings, as a part of social assemblages, and in a particular geographical location. Particular notions of indigenous modes of embodiment are related to the environment, so the struggle around indigenous knowledge formation entails the struggles around cultural categorizations, notions of the self, cosmology. And one of the terrain in which these struggles for power are worked out, is precisely over how sexuality, identity embodiments are configured as part of a political technique, as part of the settlement of a population on a territory.
4.In terms of political tactics: how do you see transgender struggle connecting to broader social struggles?
I think, on the one hand, you have to attend to the specificities of the identitarian struggle -Guattari calls this the existential territories- you have to talk about existence, as it has been particularized through certain modes of embodied subjectivities.
So yes, you have to pay attention to the specificity of the transgender demands, but to only do that reproduces the logic of dividing the population into categories and it doesn’t deal with the structural processes and it doesn’t necessarily deal with institutions.
Of course, you would make the whole movement stronger the more you can bring these issues in, and then think about the creative solutions that are specific to the context that you are working in. I think there are a lot of tactics: you can articulate your points in a way that is persuasive; create new spaces to move in, to attract interest, some people will follow; change the way about how people feel, the structures of feeling are very, very resistant sometimes, you can do things that make some kind of performative intervention that has an affective result, whatever you can do that make people stop and feel something differently. Which is very important in queer politic: how do you take the negativity that gets directed toward marginalized and despised ways of being and not simply accept that but do the work that transforms and turns it back? How can you take something which is pointed at, trans for instance, and turn it in a way that opens the conversation in some new way? Finally, I think it’s always much easier to throw a good party and develop techniques that intervene in the existing situation.
*Susan Stryker is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, as well as Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies. She is the author of many articles and several books on transgender and queer topics, most recently Transgender History (Seal Press 2008). She won a Lambda Literary Award for the anthology The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge 2006), and an Emmy Award for the documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (Frameline/ITVS 2005).
