Abstract
This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, “Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies,” revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.
The handmade is a methodological orientation. It calls for a reconsideration of how we read the body — as text, interpretation of surface, excavation of depth, or dimensional record. To differently value the quantitative event and harness sensory perceptive data, the handmade generates evidence, collectively shared, that we cannot observe by the logics of diagnosis. How, for example, might we access still forms of motion or elastic temporalities? Many gestures of alignment — of making a body in relation to the social — are durational patterns and accidental and unconscious shapes. The handmade confronts the time of event and achievement to illuminate the everyday as a site of value for transgender politics and takes seriously the ordinary feelings and textures of crafting transgender life.
If we are to dislodge transgender from the event of its medicalization and meditate, alternatively, on the handmade dimensionality of experience, what might transgender come to mean? The labor of making transgender identity is handmade: collective — made with and across bodies, objects, and forces of power — a process, unfinished yet enough (process, not progress); autonomous choreography; free; do-it-yourself; nongeometrical transformation; freeform. The handmade is a haptic, affective theorization of the transgender body, a mode of animating material experience and accumulative felt matter. As bodily feeling and sensation transform flesh parallel to diagnostic and administrative forces, a handmade orientation foregrounds the work of crafting identity. The material properties of soft and pliable forms of emotional life, skin elasticity, scar tissue, cellular organization, and bodily capacity and dimension operate as a corrective to the limited categories of surface/depth and before/after. Density and texture yield felt knowledge. Labor congeals as residual emotion. Transgender life is made and remade as matter, identity, politics. The handmade generates new evidence of what a body and its difference might be.
Deploying ideas of craft — too frequently dismissed as low art, skilled labor, or “women's work” — the handmade connects transgender to collective process and quotidian aesthetics. Craft is a conceptual limit, categorically unlike the sublime; in Immanuel Kant's ([1790] 2000) aesthetic judgment, it is mere purpose, effect. Maligned in Renaissance hierarchies of liberal and mechanical arts, craft evokes the remunerative, utilitarian, ornamental, and manual labor and laborers — the feminine, ethnic and “primitive.” A philosophy that subordinates labor, the manual, and the sense of touch to abstraction, rationality, and the sense of sight operates in a political economy of devaluing bodies. Alternatively, Theodor Adorno theorizes aesthetic function and autonomy as dialectic of fine and applied arts: “Freedom from purpose and purposefulness can never be absolutely separated from one another” ([1965] 1979: 38). In these uneven historical accumulations of value written between bodies and objects, the hand and handmade compel a generative turn to the material. As the material is marginalized by discursive forms of legibility, the performative dimensions of craft privilege the politics of the hand, that which is worked on, and the sensory feelings and textures of crafting transgender identity.
