For some time now feminists have struggled with the challenges that transgender subjectivity brings to sexuality and gender binaries, especially in the understanding of the category “woman.” There have been several compilations that have touched on the subject, such as Transgender History, the Transgender Studies Reader, and Transgender Rights, as well as special issues of a range of social science and interdisciplinary journals. Queer historian, writer, and filmmaker Susan Stryker has been on the forefront of such efforts, deftly linking participants in exchanges over common questions and issues as the editor for her transgender anthology and transgender special issues for the interdisciplinary journals–the GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and Women’s Studies Quarterly. In her introduction to the Transgender Studies Reader, Stryker draws our attention to the lack of contributions from people of color and the urgent need for a “transgender studies” that more adequately and carefully engaged the “complex interplay between race, ethnicity, and transgender phenomenon.” Bobby Noble makes a similar point in the review essay, “‘My Own Set of Keys’: Meditations on Transgender, Scholarship, Belonging,” with which we begin this special issue. While providing an overview of some of the field-defining books that have been published over the past decade, he comments also on some of the limitations of a predominantly white referent for transgender subjectivity as currently represented in critical theory. Noble also points to a burgeoning set of material that is beginning to emerge from scholars of color on this topic grounded in a queer of color critique.

We see this special issue of Feminist Studies as in part responding to Stryker’s and Noble’s calls and also as offering a series of interdisciplinary interventions that engage the varied intersections and mutual constitutiveness of transgender and critical race theory. {READ MORE as PDF}

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Bobby Noble
“My Own Set of Keys”:
Meditations on Transgender, Scholarship, Belonging
(Review Essay)
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Emily Skidmore
Constructing the “Good Transsexual”:
Christine Jorgensen, Whiteness, and
Heteronormativity in the Mid-Twentieth-Century Press
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Elizabeth Bucar and Anne Enke
Unlikely Sex Change Capitals of the World:
Trinidad, United States, and Tehran, Iran, as
Twin Yardsticks of Homonormative Liberalism
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Rebecca Rossen
Hasidic Drag: Jewishness and Transvestism in the
Modern Dances of Pauline Koner and Hadassah
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Marlon M. Bailey
Gender/Racial Realness:
Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture
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Gabeba Baderoon
“Gender within Gender”: Zanele Muholi’s
Images of Trans Being and Becoming (Art Essay)
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Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley
Songs for Ezili: Vodou
Epistemologies of (Trans)gender
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Sharon Doetsch-Kidder
“My Story Is Really Not Mine”:
An Interview with Latina Trans Activist Ruby Bracamonte
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Creative Writing

Trish Salah
Psychic Fair; Tenebrae as a Girl;
After Mahmoud Darwish’s “Beyond Identification” (Poetry)
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Matt Richardson
Brother/Sister/Comrade/Friend; How Long? (Poetry)
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Vanessa Huang
Driving with the top down sun
out & wind blowing all over the place
xoxo, mm (Poetry)
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Cover Art:
Photographs by Zanele Muholi.
Front Cover: “Skipper” Mogapi, 2010.
Revelation Xakoshe, 2010.

Back Cover: Miss D’vine I, 2007.