【by Howard Chiang, Dec. 2024】
As someone who engages with sources from the early modern period sporadically, I felt humbled and excited when asked to serve as a discussant for the “Global Early Modern Trans Studies” symposium, held at the Folger Institute in May 2023.[1] If the chronological focus of the event itself was not enough, I felt even more opaque upon studying the program, which included no paper on my area of expertise: the Asia Pacific region. One saving grace, as it became increasingly pronounced over the course of the three-day event, was the emphasis on race and trans of color critique in most panels. In fact, upon receiving the invitation, I was promised to witness a dialogue that would “consider the intersections of early modern trans studies and early modern race studies in a global context.”[2] And I was especially drawn to the organizers’ interest in accounting for the dual genealogies of transness and race together in an era that “predates the U.S.-centric lens.”[3]
Toward the end of day three, however, I became quite puzzled by how such a noble agenda had gone wayward. The prohibitive tension of thinking about race merely in terms of blackness (or its binary opposite, whiteness) accumulated over time. The problem of substituting the Atlantic World for “the global,” whatever that descriptor was meant to capture, plagued the aura of the room. In the concluding session, where I spoke with my friend and co-panelist Abdulhamit Arvas, a scholar of queer English and Ottoman literary history, it suddenly dawned on me that our non-Americanist expertise had earned us a place as the discussants for the overall event.[4] The symposium featured no paper that engaged with either the Middle East or Asia in any sophisticated way, with the minor exception of a discussion of Macbeth’s hijras. Shockingly, texts or sources from outside the West did not interest a room of scholars who claimed race as their analytical priority and “the global” as the common denominator of their conversation.[5]
How do we explain the critical absence of both non-Anglophone (and to a lesser extent non-Hispanophone) sources and experts of non-Western culture at a major trans studies conference that behaved as if it represented a global block interest in 2023? Is it the case that transness is not a rubric that relates to racialization outside the transatlantic setting? Has there been no relevant work recently on transness and the politics of its Euro- and American-centrism? Is trans inquiry merely black and white? Is trans activism Western-centric? Is the inter-imperial gradation of race (consider Japan’s wartime apparatus in Asia for instance) or Sinophone culture (just to take an example for which I know the most) not an important rubric for trans studies? The obvious response to any of these questions is a hard “no.”[6] But why is it that two decades after the publication of the Social Text special issue on “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?,” a major conference on trans studies hosted by one of the most prestigious humanities institutes in the world still included no work on trans criticism beyond the absorption of transatlantic racialization?[7]
I want to respond to this question by offering an expanded version of the comments I delivered at the symposium. My aim is to highlight the way certain analytical baggage, or slippage, conceals the value of other important analytical vectors that have surfaced since the decolonial turn.[8] This point is especially acute when we consider the broader implications of how and why the field of trans studies has come to take the form it currently assumes.[9] From a sociological standpoint, my experience at the Folger Symposium typifies my encounters at trans-themed scholarly events held in the West. I argue that the reduction of race to blackness and “the global” to the transatlantic backdrop reinscribes the hegemonic double-bind that has animated scholarly interest in the analytics of race and the global in the first place. To diversify what we mean by these framing devices, we must readily confront the limits of their current conceptualization and imagine possible alternatives for the future of their implementation in relation to the study of gender variability.
***
There is a holy trinity in gender/sexuality studies departments across Europe and America that continues to govern the Western hegemony of transness. This has limited the way we consider gender and sexual variance from a genuinely cross-cultural and even global viewpoint. The first group of scholars that comprise this holy trinity are scholars in gay and lesbian studies. In the aftermath of the Stonewall, starting roughly in the 1970s, there emerged a recuperative effort to document the history and cultures of gay and lesbian people defined around the axis of same-sex desire/identities.[10] Gay and lesbian activism is traced back to the international homophile movement and especially the late 19th century sex reform movement; gay and lesbian history is sometimes followed to the earlier Molly houses in Europe.[11] If Gayle Rubin sought to distinguish sexuality as a domain of analysis separate from the preoccupation with gender in feminist studies, Michel Foucault did for gay and lesbian studies what feminists had done for gender.[12] The turn from essentialism to social constructionism in this subfield acknowledges the role of gender variance in gay and lesbian history, but oftentimes this was interpreted through a binary framework (e.g., butch/femme or fairy/trade dichotomies).[13] Despite the importance of their work, gay and lesbian scholars often submerge gender variance under the broader rubric of sexual variation. Whether the critiques are centered on the Global Gays (Dennis Altman) or the Gay International (Joseph Massad), through and through the West remains the pretext for serious discussion and our forever intimate enemy.[14]
The second group of scholars emerged two decades later, in the 1990s. Scholars such as Leslie Feinberg, Jay Prosser, Jack Halberstam (then Judith Halberstam), Susan Stryker, and others pioneered the subfield of transgender studies.[15] Moving beyond Rubin and Foucault, critical work defined around the framework of transgender pulled back gender as a focus of analysis and called attention to the problems of presumption in gay and lesbian criticism.[16] So, is Stephen Gordon a lesbian, an invert, or a transgender subject?[17] How do we know, and why does it matter to the politics of recuperation? Halberstam raises the stakes of such questions remarkably well in Female Masculinity (1998). The rise of transgender studies also began to escalate its tension with gay and lesbian studies. The lesbian butch/FTM border war was most exemplary of this tension. Yet just like the way gay and lesbian studies routinely references the Stonewall riots or Magnus Hirschfeld’s Berlin as a touchpoint, transgender studies continues to turn to Western cultural exemplars as the only and best way to challenge previous canonical methodologies in gender/sexuality studies.[18]
Still two decades later, in the 2010s, a third group of scholars that include perhaps almost all of us in this room have begun to distance ourselves from transgender and prefer instead the prefix trans(sometimes trans* with an asterisk) to mark our intellectual project. Trans suggests a more expansive approach. For the most part, trans studies scholars acknowledge the limitations of transgender in the purview of analysis, especially considering the conditions of its genealogical precipitation (from medicine, law, state, or other kinds of institutional power). Ironically, trans—the word itself meaning cross, across, or beyond—oftentimes becomes a legible code for transgender, the only difference being that the former is supposedly more inclusive than the latter. It’s against cis-ness; it’s against the rigid fixity around binary gender systems; it’s intrinsically more intersectional, and this is where trans of color critique and critiques of racial capitalism emerge as important movers of the ongoing momentum behind trans studies.[19] However, what I wish to point out is that the assumed greater inclusiveness of trans has served as an alibi for its imposition of the locational fixation on the Western hemisphere as the only basis for the theorization of transness. This formation prevents us from de-centering transness; it prevents us from critiquing an order of knowledge centered around the Middle Passage. The rest of the world remains an afterthought.
In this triad of gatekeepers, the journal GLQ often serves as the venue for scholarship that arises out of the intersection of the first two groups (that is, gay & lesbian and transgender; for example, Susan Stryker’s piece on transgender monstrosity appeared here); whereas the journal TSQ often provides the platform for studies that straddle across the latter two (transgender and trans studies).[20] But they also crucially rely on one another for their intrinsic and cross-disciplinary coherence: gay and lesbian studies would be meaningless without gender-crossing (Eve Sedgwick calls this the liminality vs. transitivity polarization); transgender studies and trans studies often reclaim subjects previously identified as gay and lesbian (consider the evolving scholarship on two-spirit and the recent perspectives from queer indigenous studies).[21] Finally, what we call queer theory today tends to bridge the earlier generation of gay and lesbian scholars and the more recent trans theorists.[22] The stigma of being Asian, African, or Middle Eastern in these three venues—GLQ, TSQ, and Queer Theory—can be seen in their lack of status in theory production. The truth is that even the theory of homonationalism has the U.S. and its racialized empire as its primary frame of reference.[23]
So how is this holy trinity relevant to the Folger symposium? It is worth looking closely at the title of the eight papers presented at the symposium (in order of appearance):
Panel 1:
“Diaspora, Transition, Trauma: Fraught Keywords in Black Studies”
“Macbeth’s Hijras: Trans/Nationalism and Shakespeare Performance”
“Whence? The Trans*/Atlantic Iberian Worlds”
Panel 2:
“Nigredo: The Dark Chaos of Alchemical Epicenity”
“Nonbinary Bodies Beyond: Medieval Mappings of Sex and Race”
Panel 3:
“Transpecific Transformations”
“Trans Feminine Histories, Piece by Piece: or, Vernacular Print and the Histories of Gender”
“Fantasies of Corporeal Eradication: Performing Genitalia in Colonial Latin American Archives”
The papers that pass as global or universal do not specify the geographical parameters in their title. These papers in one way or another belong to the third group, perhaps now the most entrenched cohort, in the holy trinity: trans studies. Because trans is more inclusive than transgender, this assumed inclusiveness pardons the need to acknowledge the geocultural constraints of the historical phenomenon under discussion. There are two papers that demarcate their focus on the Iberian and Latin American world more clearly. And the tension that I find most interesting is how the supposed “global” papers have moved toward a reverse-Foucauldian (or genealogical) mode of investigation: that is, to think about the conditions of impossibility; whereas the “localized” papers—if one can put it as such—have sought to resuscitate the alternate conditions of trans possibility.
Lest one remains unsure, this uneven academic imperialism is evident in our wider profession. To paraphrase Rey Chow, “whereas it would be acceptable for authors dealing with specific cultures such as those of . . . the United States . . . to sue generic titles such as [Gender Trouble, Female Masculinity, Transgender History, and Female Husbands: A Trans History], and so on, authors dealing with non-Western cultures are often expected to mark [our] subject matter with words such as Chinese, Japanese, Indian . . . and their alike.”[24] The latter results in a kind of ethnic supplementarity, which fixes their intellectual contribution by way of a locational realism (Chow calls it “geopolitical realism”). To this day, Americanists and Europeanists are still considered the proprietor of novel theoretical insights concerning trans proper.
To address such an impasse, I have introduced the neologism of transtopiato refer to different scales of gender transgression that are not always recognizable through the Western notion of transgender.[25] To the extent that this usage captures specific ways of being in the world, it represents an ontological intervention. At the same time, transtopia enables different ways of knowing in which transness appears less as a fixed entity than as individual and structural gradations that fundamentally ground most, if not all, facets of human life. In this sense, it denotes a critical epistemology. I conceive of transtopia as a method of historicizing gender mutability—one that exceeds the transphobic denial of the past and the transgender presumption of the present.
It is long overdue to question a one-sided hierarchy embedded in the umbrella concept of transgender, where the criteria of determination is transness, or, to put it more precisely, different degrees of transness. In this normativizing scheme, one can be more trans, and another can be less trans, and transness effectively becomes evaluable, measurable, and quantifiable. The politics of transness is nowhere more pronounced than in cross-cultural contexts. Transtopia announces the end date of transgender: categories such as South Asian hijra, Indonesia waria, Thai kathoey, Mexican muxe, Sinophone renyao, and native American two-spirit should be given a chance to be local and transversal. The congruence among these non-Western minoritarian formations exemplifies a kind of minor transnationalism that displaces the Western hegemony of transness.[26] In other words, the urgency for these constructs to be thought through only in relation to transgender or an implied hierarchy of transness has expired. The time has come to think about not just gender trouble, but also transgender trouble.
I have tried to express the condition of my impossibility as a commentator for this event. It would be too readily apparent to launch an allegation about how this symposium is not global enough, not having an African, Middle East, South Asian, or East Asia specialist. It would similarly be too obvious to accuse our ordering of racial knowledge as short-sighted via a purely transatlantic framing.[27] Arvas’ and Şahin Açikgöz’ work on black eunuchs in the Ottoman empire shows the relevance of the Red Sea slave trade to the global history of racial capitalism.[28] My work on indigenous transtopian activism in Taiwan inserts the complex dynamics of transpacific settlement into the global dialogue about ethnic relations and decolonial racialization. In the spirit of AAPI month, then, I want to take what Tân Hoàng Nguyen has called “the view from the bottom”: to organize an ethical mode of relation around vulnerability and shame.[29] So I take the riskier road: to be the useful fluffer that leads to no happy ending.
Most of the case studies brought up in this symposium sit uncomfortably inside (or alongside) the holy trinity that I have described. Is transness always already Western?[30] To quote Sooyoung Kim from a different but highly relevant context, “How has a certain universalized understanding of transness alienated […] and blocked Korean trans community from [being] position[ed] in the longer trans history? How has the historical amnesia preconditioned our understanding of transness?”[31] These are questions as germane to the Folger symposium as to the politics of trans studies academic culture at large. In what ways are female husbands, Macbeth’s hijras, nigredo, monstrous races, mutable species, self-castrates, and Rafael Rodríguez rendered meaningful only in relation to the modern categories of gay, lesbian, transgender, or trans? In closing, I would like to issue an invitation to think about the way each paper relates to both descriptors “global” and “early modern.” The need for these descriptors suggests a condition of impossibility operating as a specter of existence. That is, without these descriptors, the symposium would be too Western- or modern- centric, and thus too normatively trans.
AUTHOR
Howard Chiang holds the Lai Ho and Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, where he is also Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, Director of the Center for Taiwan Studies, and affiliated faculty of History and Feminist Studies. He is the author of After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia University Press, 2021). He served as the Editor-in-Chief of The Global Encyclopedia of LGBTQ History (Gale, 2019). He currently coedits the “Global Queer Asias” series from the University of Michigan Press and edits the “Critical Perspectives on Taiwan” series from Columbia University Press.
NOTES
[1] The Folger symposium was co-organized by Simone Chess, Nicholas Jones, Will Fisher, Colby Gordon, and Melissa E. Sanchez. My invitation letter came from Nick and Melissa, both of whom have been supportive interlocutors and expressed enormous enthusiasm toward my commentary. I thank them for agreeing to my request to publish my symposium comment separately.
[2] Nicholas Jones to Howard Chiang, “Invitation as Respondent for ‘Global Early Modern Trans Studies’ Folger Symposium” (e-mail), June 12, 2022 (emphasis added).
[3] Jones, “Invitation.”
[4] Howard Chiang, ed., Transgender China (2012); Howard Chiang, After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Howard Chiang, Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021); Abdulhamit Arvas, Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2025).
[5] For other examples of research collaboration in the global history of gender and sexuality, see The Modern Girl Around the World Research Group, ed., The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Magaly Rodríguez García, Lex Heerma van Voss, and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, eds., Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s–2000s (Leiden: Brill, 2017); and Veronika Fuechtner, Douglas E. Haynes, and Ryan M. Jones, eds., A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).
[6] Martin F. Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Aren Aizura, Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Howard Chiang, Todd A. Henry, and Helen Hok-Sze Leung, “Trans-in-Asia, Asia-in-Trans: An Introduction,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 3 (2018): 298–310; Jian Neo Chen, Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); V. Jo Hsu, Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022); Sooyoung Kim, “Staying Backward with the History of Camptown Trans Sex Work,” TSQ 10, no. 1 (2023): 23–27; Şahin Açikgöz, Howard Chiang, Debanuj DasGupta, Joao Gabriel, Christoph Hanssmann, Rana M. Jaleel, Durba Mitra, and Evren Savci, “Roundtable: Queer/Trans of Color Transits of Racial Capitalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 123, no. 1 (2024): 157–182; Aniruddha Dutta, Globalizing through the Vernacular: Kothis, Hijras, and the Making of Queer and Trans Identities in India (London: Bloomsbury, 2024).
[7] David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, eds., “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?,” special issue, Social Text 23, nos. 3–4 (2005). I would argue that this is a problem already evident in the Social Text special issue, and it is a problem that persists. See, for example, Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Kłosowska, eds., Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021).
[8] Aren Z. Aizura, Trystan Cotton, Carsten Balzar/Carla LaGata, Marcia Ochoa, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, eds., “Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary,” special issue, TSQ 1, no. 3 (2014).
[9] Andrea Long Chu and Emmet Harsin Drager, “After Trans Studies,” TSQ 6, no. 1 (2019): 103–116.
[10] Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., eds., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: Penguin, 1989).
[11] John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Community in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, Volume 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s–1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).
[12] David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990); David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Gayle S. Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
[13] Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1983); Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989); Edward Stein, ed., Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy (New York: Routledge, 1990); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
[14] Dennis Altman, “Global Gaze/Global Gays,” GLQ 3, no. 4 (1997): 417–436; Joseph Massad, “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” Public Culture 14, no. 2 (2002): 361–385. Cf. Peter Jackson, “Capitalism and Global Queering: National Markets, Parallels among Sexual Cultures, and Multiple Queer Modernities,” GLQ 15, no. 3 (2009): 357–395.
[15] Sussan Stryker, “My Words to Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ 1, no. 3 (1994): 237–254; Bernice L. Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Susan Stryker, “The Transgender Issue: An Introduction,” GLQ 4, no. 2 (1998): 145–158.
[16] Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986) 1053–1075.
[17] Stephen Gordon is the protagonist of the English novel by Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London, Jonathan Cape, 1928).
[18] A popular counterpart to the Stonewall in trans studies is the Compton’s Cafeteria riot that occurred in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco in 1966.
[19] Marquis Bey, Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022); Açikgöz, Chiang, DasGupta, Gabriel, Hanssmann, Jaleel, Mitra, and Savci, “Roundtable”; Emma Heaney, ed., Feminism Against Cisness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024).
[20] Stryker, “My Words to Frankenstein.” See also Susan Stryker, When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024).
[21] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces Between US: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
[22] Susan Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin,” GLQ 10, no. 2 (2004): 212–215; David Valentine, “The Categories Themselves,” GLQ 10, no. 2 (2004): 215–220; David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
[23] Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Cf. Sa’ed Atshan, Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020); Evren Savci, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
[24] Rey Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” boundary 2 25, no. 3 (1998): 1–24, on 4.
[25] Chiang, Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific; Howard Chiang, “Trans without Borders: Resisting the Telos of Transgender Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 32, no. 1 (2023): 56–65.
[26] Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
[27] See, for example, Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Nicole Poppenhagen and Jens Temmen, “Across Currents: Connections between Atlantic and (Trans)Pacific Studies,” Atlantic Studies 15, no. 2 (2018): 149-159.
[28] Abdulhamit Arvas, “Early Modern Eunuchs and the Transing of Gender and Race,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (2019): 116–136; Şahin Açikgöz, “What Color Is Trans? Notes on Trans Historiography in the Afterlife of the East African Slave Trade,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 40, no. 1 (2024): 153–158.
[29] Tân Hoàng Nguyen, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
[30] Cultural anthropologists have asked this question in relation to queerness in insightful ways. For recent iterations, see Margot Weiss, “Queer Theory from Elsewhere and the Im/Proper Objects of Queer Anthropology,” Feminist Anthropology 3, no. 2 (2022): 315–335; Benjamin Hegarty, “A Queer Footnote: The Anthropology of Containment,” American Ethnologist 51, no. 1 (2024): 84–89.
[31] Kim, “Staying Backward,” 25.