Everywhere Archives

Transgendering, Trans Asians, and the Internet

Bibliographic Data

ID5819796
AuthorsMel Y Chen (corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume25
Issue64
Pages199-208
Publication date2010-05-28
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAustralian Feminist Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1321-7568 • E-ISSN: 1465-3303
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/08164641003762503
OpenAlexW2319086607
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited6

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Julian Carter, Rebekah Edwards and Don Romesburg for their transformative contributions to this article. Any errors are the author's alone. Notes 1. See, for instance, Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004 Edelman , Lee . 2004 . No future: Queer theory and the death drive . Durham, NC : Duke University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), a psychoanalytic examination of the cultural assignation of queerness to negativity. 2. It might be useful to compare the ways in which race is and is not marked on YouTube with other Internet sites of exchange. Juana Rodriguez's (2002 Rodriguez , Juana . 2002 . Queer Latinidad . New York : New York University Press . [Google Scholar]) 'Confessions of a Latina Cyber-slut' recounts a number of identitarian misapprehensions on an online chat site. Notably, the chat site and the troubles to which she refers involve only textual exchanges; there are no photos or video. Thus, the Internet itself encompasses a variety of economies of signification involving text, image, and video. 3. I refer here to Adrienne Rich's noted use of the term, in which she refers to the transnational politics of racial location in the context of the United States and its implications for feminism, specifically the societal (predominantly white, middle-class) location from which American feminisms were being dominantly shaped. See Rich (1986 Rich , Adrienne . 1986 . Notes toward a politics of location . In Blood, bread, and poetry: Selected prose 1979-1985 . New York : Norton . [Google Scholar]). 4. Renée M. Sentilles (2005 Sentilles , Renée . 2005 . Toiling in the archives of cyberspace In Archive stories: Facts, fictions, and the writing of history Antoinette Burton Durham, NC : Duke University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) considers the complexities of the Internet as a possible resource for archival research and as a kind of 'archive of archives'. She ends by settling the question of the Internet with a return to her preference for and belief in the superior experience of physical repositories: '[i]t is that human response to tangible artifacts that I have seen time and again in my students as well as myself that convinces me that virtual archives will never serve as more than a place to begin and end the research journey; never as a place to dwell' (2005, 155). 5. See Wahng (2003 Wahng , Sel . 2003 . Double cross: Transmasculinity and Asian American gendering in trappings of transhood . In Violence and the body: Race, gender, and the state Arturo Aldama Alfred Arteaga . Bloomington : Indiana University Press . [Google Scholar]) for a performative reading of Asian transgendering and for an examination of the combinatory possibilities that occur in multiple narrations of gendering. 6. It is notable that the US 'Asian' archive has its own priorities, to the tune of East Asians. Its representative centre is constituted by stereotypes about Chinese and Japanese gender systems in particular, while tending to bypass Filipino and South Asian genders. For a refreshing recent study of Filipino tomboy identity in relation to the co-production of Filipino masculinities in global transit, see Kale Bantigue Fajardo (2008 Fajardo , Kale Bantigue . 2008 . Transportation: Translating Filipino and Filipino American tomboy masculinities through global migration and seafaring . GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14 2-3 403 24 .[Crossref], [Web of Science (R)] , [Google Scholar]). 7. See http://malepregnancy.com/ and its associated website, http://www.rythospital.com/2008/ 8. The question seems to remain, in an economy of gender appropriateness both within and without racialised identity categories, how far is too far; when does troubling categorial edges slide into appropriation, and then what ethics are called for? A recent controversy erupted in the Femme Conference of 2008 in San Francisco, California, around the film Female to Femme (2006 Female to Femme . 2006 . Directed by Kami Chisholm and Elizabeth Stark . San Francisco : Altcinema . [Google Scholar]), which provocatively used the concept of 'transitioning' in mock interviews to describe a woman's shift in aesthetic and gender sensibility from 'dyke' or 'lesbian' to 'femme'. Many people found the use of transition in this context offensive and trans-phobic. 9. Paisley Currah (2008 Currah , Paisley . 2008 . Expecting bodies: The pregnant man and transgender exclusion from the Employment Non-discrimination Act . WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 36 3-4 330 36 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) connects responses to Beatie's story to the recent debates about the status of transgender people in the formation of the US proposed bill, the Employment Non-discrimination Act (ENDA), which seeks to prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. After much controversy among activists and lawmakers about the inclusion of gender identity in a bill that was envisioned to address a core constituency of non-transgendered gays and lesbians, in 2009, for the first time in its years of attempted passage, ENDA included protections for gender identity as well as sexual orientation. However, despite bipartisan support at a September 2009 congressional hearing, the bill remains sidelined as of the time of writing of this article. The back and forth of the status of gender identity vis-à-vis sexual orientation suggests the uncertain political, epistemological, and affective position that 'gender identity', and/or 'transgender bodies', hold on the stage of national politics, mainstream LGBT organisations, and the US legal framework

Art history · Context (archaeology) · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Queer · Queer theory · Sociology · White (mutation · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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