Beyond Autopoiesis

Bibliographic Data

ID13087282
AuthorsSid Hansen (corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume10
Issue3-4
Pages369-387
Publication date2023-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTSQ Transgender Studies Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2328-9252 • E-ISSN: 2328-9260
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/23289252-10900900
OpenAlexW4392971452
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited19

As the notion of biological sex becomes increasingly invested with binary, anti-trans meanings in US discourse, some scholars suggest that “reimagining biology” as diverse and not dichotomous might help affirm trans identities. Instead of ignoring science and emboldening its reductionist forms, it is said that theorists should celebrate trans identities as biological diversity. This essay explores the fraught terrain of this hopeful project. The first section examines how dominant histories of the sex-gender distinction autopoietically flatten trans lives by conflating them with the passive materiality of biological sex. The second section turns to two histories of trans life that challenge this historiographic tendency—Jules Gill-Peterson's Histories of the Transgender Child and C. Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides. Following Sylvia Wynter's call to forge liminal sciences, the article shows how Gill-Peterson and Snorton reimagine biology by encountering marginalized modes of trans scientific practice. In the margins, gaps, and opacities of the archive, there are encounters with trans experimentation, rearrangements of biology and science that do not “affirm” transness as much as they rebel against the racist order of cis-normativity

Aesthetics · Biological sex · Diversity (politics · Epistemology · Liminality · Materiality (auditing · Reductionism · Sociology · Transgender · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Race, Genetics, and Society

Tools

Open DOI