Troubling transracialism

A Transnational Perspective

Bibliographic Data

ID4919085
AuthorsMansi Hitesh (0000-0001-8957-5107, Emory University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume26
Issue1
Pages83-100
Publication date2025-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/14647001241231717
OpenAlexW4392292808
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited31

What kinds of feminist projects are made possible by (dis)analogising race and gender and/or transing them? The article asserts that an arbitrary separation is enacted when the transgender-transracial question is pulled apart such that an examination of the conceptual prefix that connects the two, i.e. trans, is discarded for an examination of the elements that allow for their separation - race and gender. Rather than affirm a (dis)analogy between race and gender, the article offers two correctives to the feminist discourse around transracialism / the possibility of reading race as malleable. First, I contest the shock value of transracialism by suggesting that a modality of transracial crossing has existed in the feminist imagination in the form of transnational, diasporic crossings that are separate, though not disparate, from transgender crossings. Second, through a glimpse into the history of racial prerequisite cases in early twentieth-century USA, I suggest the necessity of deploying trans analytics to understand the ways in which race has been made unevenly malleable in highly regulated and contested ways for different populations in different historical contexts. Race operated as fluid, flexible terrain accessed and claimed through discourses of citizenship and diaspora with mixed success. Hence, the article offers diaspora and citizenship, rather than the cultural and biological, as key analytics that enable the mapping of trans formations through patterns of migration and movement

Epistemology · Sociology · Computer Science · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Philosophy

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