Journal of Homosexuality

ISSN: 0091-8369 (Print) 1540-3602 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjhm20

Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer

Studies Now?

Cáel M. Keegan

To cite this article: Cáel M. Keegan (2020) Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer
Studies Now?, Journal of Homosexuality, 67:3, 384-397, DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2018.1530885

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2018.1530885

Published online: 22 Oct 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 1120

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 3 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=wjhm20
JOURNAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY
2020, VOL. 67, NO. 3, 384–397
https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2018.1530885

Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer Studies

Now?
Cáel M. Keegan, PhD
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids, Michigan USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay maps the epistemological terrain trans* studies may face Transgender; trans* studies;
discipline; queer studies;
as it is widely incorporated into queer studies programs, often LGBTQ studies; feminism;
housed within women’s studies departments. Over the past two women’s studies
decades, queer studies and women’s studies have rapidly profes-
sionalized, producing new modes of disciplinary power that may
seek to either include or cite trans* studies, often without fully
welcoming its specific material and political investments. Under
such conditions, trans* studies may find itself heard largely as a but
—an epistemic blockage, a distraction from proper objects, a
hindrance to customary methods—that must be disciplined.

conjunction

(1) used to introduce something contrasting with what has already been
mentioned
(2) used to indicate the impossibility of anything other than what is being stated
(3) used to introduce a response expressing a feeling of surprise or anger

preposition

(1) except; apart from; other than

adverb

(1) no more than; only

noun

(1) an argument against something; an objection.

(Shraya, “often brown feels like but”)

Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one.

(Barthes, 1972, p. 3)

CONTACT Cáel M. Keegan Keeganc@gvsu.edu Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Grand Valley State
University, 212 Lake Ontario Hall, 1 Campus Dr., Allendale, MI 49401, USA.
© 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
 JOURNAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY 385

What is the position of trans* studies in queer studies now?1 Thirteen

years ago, David L. Eng, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz asked
“What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” (2005) in a special double issue
of Social Text devoted to examining the upstart field’s promises and road-
blocks. By 2005, queer studies had become well aware of its rigidification
around the investigation of sexuality as a “proper object” (Butler, 1994).
Responding to this emerging disciplinary trajectory, the three editors
requested a queer studies that would move away from an exclusive focus
on sexuality as a “privileged site of critical inquiry” (p. 4), calling for a
renewed, intersectional queer studies “calibrated to a firm understanding of
queer as a political metaphor without a fixed referent” (p. 1). Yet despite the
strong rejoinders contemporaneous transgender scholars had made to queer
studies’ narrowing focus on sexuality and its allegorizations of trans experi-
ence (Namaste, 2000; Prosser, 1998; Stryker, 2004), “transgender” and “trans-
sexuality” are suspiciously absent from the piece. To the extent that “What’s
Queer?” subsumes the earliest strains of trans* studies under the aegis of
something called “queer studies,” it is apparently without attention to the
difference and specificity of trans—a “conflation sometimes made because of
the suspicion that gender means sexuality, that gender. . .is merely a cover
story for not only sex but sexuality as well” (Salamon, 2010, p. 103). In this
early and formative accounting of the field’s promise, trans* studies is thus
obscured within the story of what queer studies can and should do by the
precise focus on sexuality the editors seek to address.
To those invested in trans* studies securing a place in the academy,
institutional trajectories since “What’s Queer?” seem promising: Over the
past 10 years, trans* studies has gained the status of a recognized field, now
boasting two critical readers, a Duke University Press journal, an interna-
tional conference, and a handful of hires and postdocs at prestigious uni-
versities. Courses investigating transgender identities and cultures—if not
courses in critical trans* theories—appear in many university curricula,
often within queer studies and women’s studies programs. Academia appears
to have arrived at a “transgender tipping point” (Steinmetz, 2014) beyond
which trans* studies may find a disciplinary home. Yet the pace and practice
of this arrival have been wildly uneven: running fully ahead in elite intellec-
tual centers, forced by student activism in others, taken up through dis-
courses of weak inclusion in many, and often shot through with
intergenerational and disciplinary hostilities. The increasing pressure to for-
malize queer studies and women’s studies programs within the neoliberal
university also presents epistemic and political barriers to trans* studies,
which is not equivalent to and values specific breaks from the frameworks
of both queer theory and academic feminism. Trans* studies scholars and
pedagogues working within queer and women’s studies contexts often run
386 C. M. KEEGAN

the risk of “becoming the problem by bringing up the problem” (Nicolazzo,

2017, p. 212) of trans* studies’ incomplete welcome in these spaces. Given the
precarity under which trans lives are lived and trans* studies is often con-
ducted, is this partial and ragged inclusion something that trans* studies
“cannot not want?” (Spivak, 1996, p. 28).
Inspired by trans of color poet Shraya’s (2016) piece “often brown feels
like but,” this essay maps the disciplinary scenarios trans* studies may face as
it is increasingly incorporated into queer studies programs, often housed
within women’s studies departments. These fields have rapidly professiona-
lized over the past two decades, producing new modes of disciplinary power
that may seek to include or cite trans* studies without fully welcoming its
specific material or political investments. Under such conditions, trans*
studies may be perceived as an epistemic blockage, a distraction from proper
objects, or a hindrance to customary methods that must be disciplined.2 We
might conceptualize trans* studies’ discursive position in such a disciplinary
scenario as but. This but would perform multiple functions: As a conjunc-
tion, but might alert us to the existence of a barrier or problem through
contrast, surprise, or the assertion of impossibility, only to be viewed as
constituting a barrier or problem itself. As a preposition or adverb, but might
insist on trans* studies’ discreteness or specificity, only to be dismissed as too
narrow or limited in scope. As a noun, but might be imposed on trans*
studies to frame its claims as merely oppositional, rather than for the creation
of new conditions or models. In all these instances, but may be perceived as
intolerance or frustration by a disciplinary arrangement that cannot acknowl-
edge its own force: but becomes both what trans* studies must say and how
trans* studies might be reciprocally dismissed.
To the extent that such disciplinary conditions exist, trans* studies might
therefore prove “too difficult” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 4) for its institutional hosts,
being received only as an interruption, an outburst, a disruptive body. One
can presume to include but, but such inclusions are often predicated on a
silence: a tacit agreement that the but will be withdrawn in exchange. If it is
not, trouble can follow. The bad feeling of this scene can then be ascribed to
the but as an “annihilation” (Awkward-Rich, 2017, p. 822) of the terms
presumed necessary to any conversation. The but might then be “heard as
a complaint, which is not actually being heard” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 4). If so,
trans* studies might become a but beyond which lies nothing meriting
investigation: “If you are heard as complaining then what you say is dis-
missible. . . When you are heard as complaining you lose the about: what you
are speaking about is not heard” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 4). The result is a sort of
epistemic conundrum: To those constructing and enforcing the disciplinary
arrangement, the but might be perceived as a form of discursive violence—
but not articulating the but could be, for transgender bodies, violence of
another and far more dire kind. “What does it cost to tell the truth”
 JOURNAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY 387

(Wilchins, 2006), trans* studies might wonder, when “truth” is a shape that
cannot come out of one’s mouth as something that might be heard? We do
not (yet) know what trans* studies might become outside of these epistemic
confrontations.
Trans* studies has long been concerned with narratology—with the project
of locating narrative structures that will adequately allow for the existence of
trans* bodies and becomings. These concerns arise directly from the episte-
mic and political needs of transgender people, some of whose lives have only
recently begun to count in the accounting of which lives matter. The need for
a “good story” is the need for a schema in which one can appear as other
than a problem: a good story is one in which we can say something other
than but. Bettcher (2013) noted this primary necessity when she wrote, “For
the longest time, I thought I needed a story that secured my claims to
womanhood and that illuminated my (often confusing) life experiences.
How else to justify my claims? How else to understand my experiences?”
(p. 384). We could approach trans* studies as one such story—a story that
seeks to illuminate the experiences of transgender people and give an account
of our claims to sex and gender, without which we cannot fully appear as
other than a problem in someone else’s narrative. As Sara Ahmed put it, “not
being accommodated can be pedagogy” (2016, p. 22). To insist on accom-
modation is a pedagogy of another kind, a “shift from framing the event to
framing the framer” (Steinbock, 2017, 49), so that we might investigate who
or what actually is causing the problem.
In what follows, I trace an implicit double-bind3 trans* studies is faced
with as it is invited to join either women’s studies or queer studies contexts
within the academy. Although the patterns I describe may not be descriptive
of every institutional scenario, I seek here to map the epistemic and institu-
tional structures through which women’s studies and queer studies might
interpellate and move to include trans* studies. Because these fields each
solicit trans* studies incompletely and to incommensurate purposes, their
increasing compression within the academy may exert further discipline on
trans* studies, which must take up contradictory performative positions in
relation to each of their expectations. To the extent that women’s studies
seeks the liberation of women and others (gay men, lesbians) who are
oppressed by sex “like women,” trans* studies must perform a but that insists
against the foundational schema of sexual subordination (M > F), saying but
gender is not real like that. However, in response to queer studies’ investment
in deconstructing the gender binary (M/F) to unravel heteronormativity,
trans* studies must turn inside out, articulating a constative but that asserts
but gender is real like this. This double-bind threatens to strand trans*
studies in an epistemic dilemma that repeats the disciplinary language
games transgender subjects are often forced to play (Spade, 2006). Trans*
studies can only thrive, I will claim, in a situation that gives it space to break
388 C. M. KEEGAN

from the epistemic structures of women’s studies and queer studies (Halley,
2006, p. 264). Unless such a space is intentionally created, trans* studies must
retort but to the frameworks of both disciplinary invitations.

Disciplinary position one: Suppression

In the academy, trans* studies is perhaps most powerfully solicited by
women’s studies—a field that has labored over the past decade to add
“gender” and “sexuality” to its proper objects. Although it has expanded its
topical purview to include both LGBT studies and queer theory, areas of this
revamped field (sometimes called women, gender, and sexuality studies) have
simultaneously become theoretically rigidified by incorporation into the
neoliberal university,4 largely under the guises of “diversity” and “equity.”
Required to make itself legible to the university in order to secure a home,
women’s studies has sometimes found it difficult to “sustain gender as a
critical self-reflexive category rather than a normative or nominal one”
(Brown, 2005, pp. 23–24). Because it increasingly wants to talk about gender
and is often compelled to tell a good diversity story, women’s studies might
solicit trans* studies as uniquely suited to analyzing the fixed taxonomies of
gender. But because women’s studies is also a field “whose very essence
depends upon gender to conform to just such a fixed economy” (Salamon,
2010, p. 98), it may simultaneously make a number of compensatory moves
to close trans* studies off, working to retain a “fantasy of itself as a field with
epistemological and methodological coherence” (Noble, 2012, p. 53).
Women’s studies programs attempting to incorporate trans* studies might
thus position “women” and “trans” as discrete categories (Malatino, 2015, p.
399), moving to include trans while also retaining the primacy of “women.”
This strategy ensures that trans* studies cannot raise the question of what the
category of “woman” might contain or whether the object (“woman”) actu-
ally exists as invoked. Rather than being taken up into the heart of the field’s
analytic, trans* studies becomes a “special guest” (Malatino, 2015, p. 399),
welcomed into the conversation through a “woman plus” model that strands
it on the margin of what is cognizable. Where such strategies are in place,
they mark “a self-generating, discipline-sustaining, and disciplining episte-
mological practice” (Wallach Scott, 2008, p. 51) that restricts what trans*
studies can ask and say.
The seeming paradox of “trans*/feminism” is evidence of this precise
situation: As trans* studies has appeared to arrive in the academy, it has
also been met with intensifying force from within more disciplinary feminist
orientations, which want to speak about and at trans bodies and identities
without offering the space to mount a reply. Much trans* studies work
addressing this situation comes as rebuttal, offering either a contrasting
account or a flat objection. For example, Stryker and Bettcher (2016) made
 JOURNAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY 389

clear in their introduction to the Trans/Feminisms special double issue of

Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ) that the issue was designed as a retort
to Jeffreys’s (2014) recent cissexist work, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis
of the Politics of Transgenderism. Jeffreys’s title reiterates the suppressive
strategy by which something called “feminism” gets to talk about and at
trans subjects while protecting itself from incursion by something called “the
politics of transgenderism.” Because of the university’s institutional will to
inclusion, women’s studies appears to be at least partially caught in a similar
bind—pressed to include and speak about trans* studies while also needing
to suppress its more critical energies through a foundational and self-gener-
ated exclusion (Noble, 2012, p. 43). As Cameron Awkward-Rich (2017) put
it, “The problem is not so much that (some) feminists would like (trans)
gone. Rather, the problem is that (trans) is here, and now we all have to
figure out how to live with that” (p. 832). It is not just that trans* studies
challenges the traditional referent of women’s studies as a field (queer studies
does this as well), but that the political stakes of the epistemic scene render it
particularly pressed to defend the legitimacy and place of that challenge. For
trans* studies, to find oneself in such a situation might feel impossible—or,
rather, it might produce the feeling that one is being made into an impos-
sibility. In such a disciplinary scenario, trans* studies might turn to women’s
studies and say, but—you invited me.
The situation of trans* studies vis-à-vis women’s studies is important to
queer studies for a number of reasons: Women’s studies departments are
increasingly absorbing and/or creating queer studies curricula at both the
undergraduate and graduate levels. LGBTQ studies, an amalgam of LGBT
studies and queer studies, is often added to women’s studies programs
through an ostensibly shared commitment to sexual subordination models
—the asymptotic assumption that ending patriarchy (M > F) will also end
heteronormativity. In this interdisciplinary arrangement, queer is often
deployed as a filter through which trans* studies can be rendered amenable
to feminisms that presume sexual subordination as a shared epistemological
mode.5 Because queer threatens to displace “women” through an implicit
focus on gay men (Awkward-Rich, 2017, p. 832), women’s studies might be
prompted to use “queer” to tell a story about how all oppressed subjects are
oppressed like women are—i.e., as classes that fail to be hegemonically
masculine—thus preserving the central position of “woman” as referent.
Trans* studies might then be affixed to the end of women’s studies con-
siderations through the addition of “queer” as a secondary and supporting
body of subordination theory, coming only after feminism and on the far
side of its trailing objects of concern—“LGB.”
To the extent that queer studies is disciplined by the university to accept
these frameworks, it cannot account for the unique positionalities of trans
bodies and politics, and so trans* studies must respond, insisting but gender
390 C. M. KEEGAN

is not real like that. Trans oppression cannot be conceptualized using a

subordination model in which one gender or sexuality unilaterally oppresses
the others, as if bodies simply are certain genders/sexes unquestionably, or as
if binary genders/sexes map neatly onto the operations of power.
Subordination feminisms and their disciplinary counterparts must fix gender
in order to link it to the binary power relations that undergird their founda-
tional critiques of patriarchy (M > F) and heteronormativity. They therefore
need to keep presuming that there are such things as “women” and “homo-
sexuals” (Halley, 2006, p. 113), categories that trans threatens to scramble in
its undercutting of the ability to tell which gender or sex is where. To fully
acknowledge trans* studies would be to upend the entire subordination
model’s investment in gender as a way to know that all women are oppressed
as a class, or that all gays or lesbians are oppressed as a class. In a women’s
studies + LGBTQ studies partnership struck through sexual subordination
models, W, L, and G will need T to stay quiet to retain their coherence as
categories based on the legibility of gender and sex. It is unclear how such an
arrangement, in which the recognition of primary members requires the
partial erasure of more marginal others, might happily cohere (Awkward-
Rich, 2017, p. 828). Although Awkward-Rich (2017) concluded that the
circumstances leave no one feeling good, elsewhere he observed that for W
and L, “what is being survived is primarily an academic dispute,” while for T
what is at stake is the “physical existence of a category of people” (p. 827).
Under such conditions, trans* studies might find itself saying but, even as
that but extends the very terms by which it may be excluded.

Disciplinary position two: Citation

Given the disciplinary scenario potentially unfolding within women’s studies,
trans* studies might look to queer studies programs unaffiliated with women’s
studies departments as places to find purchase. Queer studies has indeed been
more hospitable to trans* studies, although often only as an “addendum” (Love,
2014, p. 174) to its chief inquiry—sexuality. Because queer studies tends to
privilege sexual orientation as “the primary means of differing from heteronor-
mativity” (Stryker, 2004, p. 214), it often struggles to apprehend trans phenomena
and trans oppression as uniquely about both gender identity and sex assignment.
Instead, queer studies has historically deployed the category of “transgender” to
“contain all gender trouble,” thereby securing both homosexuality and hetero-
sexuality as “stable and normative categories” (Stryker, 2004, p. 214). Heather
Love reflected on queer studies’ use of trans phenomena as an evidentiary archive
for its theorizations of sex and gender, noting, “Queer studies has not engaged
fully with the material conditions of transgender people but has rather used gender
nonnormativity as a sign or allegory of queerness” (p. 174). In this specific mode of
queer studies, trans gets cited as an example of something else (queer) that
 JOURNAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY 391

supersedes and speaks for it: Rather than moving to suppress trans* studies
through weak forms of inclusion, queer studies may instead invoke and cite
trans* studies to the extent that trans can serve its aims: the dissolution of
heteronormativity and thus the undergirding gender binary. However, the effects
of this aim are not necessarily good for all transgender persons, many of whom
value the discrete categories of M/F and seek to claim status as either male or
female subjects (Awkward-Rich, 2017, p. 838). While women’s studies may need
to discipline trans* studies to the extent that it challenges the schema of sexual
subordination, queer studies has often moved to absorb trans* studies into its
antinormative and deconstructive regimes without adequately inquiring after the
consequences for transgender lives.
Because queer studies tends to understand gender, sexuality, and identity
as effects of normative power, it can erode the bases by which trans* studies
might legitimately claim gender as felt or innately experienced, thereby
replicating the denial of transgender experience also found in stigmatizing
medical and political discourses. In valuing trans phenomena largely when
they subvert gender norms, queer studies has historically sorted, cited, and
disciplined some portions of trans into itself while rejecting others as retro-
grade or conformist (crossdressing, genderqueer, and androgyny are wel-
come; transsexuality is not). Early on, trans* studies scholars staged strong
objections to queer studies’ acquisitive treatment of trans as an allegory for
the subversion of gender: Hale’s (1997) early piece, “Suggested Rules for
Non-Transsexuals Writing About Transsexuals, Transsexuality,
Transsexualism, or Trans,” recommended that researchers and theorists
“beware of replicating the following discursive movement: Initial fascination
with the exotic; denial of subjectivity, lack of access to dominant discourse;
followed by a species of rehabilitation” (p. 1), while Prosser’s (1998) Second
Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality pointed to how queer theory has
used transgender to “institutionalize homosexuality as queer” (p. 5), treating
trans as “a symptom of the constructedness of the sex/gender system and a
figure for the impossibility of this system’s achievement of identity” (p. 6).
However, it is perhaps Namaste (2000) who best summed up the need to
resist queer studies’ emerging, citational relationship with trans phenomena
in her largely overlooked book Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and
Transgendered People, which opensed with the flat thesis that “Queer theory,
as it is currently practiced, needs to be rejected for both theoretical and
political reasons” (p. 9). While today trans* studies is increasingly under-
stood as distinct from queer studies and as possessing its own discrete
intellectual trajectories and political frameworks, queer theory remains the
more privileged and central discourse.
To the extent that queer studies can strike a deal with women’s studies
to form a feminist queer studies, it may be through an agreement that
women’s studies abandon subordination models in favor of social
392 C. M. KEEGAN

construction—a theory that often enjoys near-disciplinary enforcement

where “feminism meets queer theory” (Schor & Weed, 1997). In this
more recent alignment between “Third Wave” feminist and queer studies
epistemologies, it is not sex that subordinates women and those like
women to White patriarchal authority, but instead gender norms that
occlude everyone from finding new modes of expression and therefore
realizing a new society. This scenario posits the dissolution of gender
normativity as the very precondition for social progress: The thing to be
gotten rid of is no longer M > F, but belief in and repetition of M/F as a
source of M > F. Some aspects of trans* studies do indeed fit under and
are amenable to a feminist queer studies project: To the extent that it
serves a shared aim to move “beyond the binary,” trans* studies can tell a
part of the story, although often in a manner that is rendered indistin-
guishable from queer studies. However, the adoption of social construc-
tion as a foundational concept in feminist queer studies might also
produce disciplining effects for transgender bodies, which are uniquely
“constructed as constructions” (Bettcher, 2013, p. 298) within the theory
itself.6 An alliance between women’s studies and queer studies may thus
value trans* studies for its ability to demonstrate gender as performative,
but may struggle to hear its specifically gendered or materially embodied
claims as real.
Any formalization of social construction as the shared episteme by
which a feminist queer studies might cohere must be concerning for
trans* studies, which contains strains of theorization and praxis that
understand gender to be innately sensed and actual—in other words,
constative rather than performative. Within queer studies, especially,
social construction and performativity have been historically deployed in
a manner that has opened up the constatively articulated aspects of trans
embodiment and identity to political dismissal. As Prosser (1998) wrote,
“There is much about transsexuality that must remain irreconcilable to
queer: (. . .) the importance of flesh to self; the difference between sex and
gender identity; the desire to pass as ‘real-ly gendered’ in the world
without trouble; perhaps above all. . . a particular experience of the body
that can’t simply transcend (or transubstatiate) the literal” (p. 59). In Split
Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break From Feminism, Halley (2006)
produced a structural mapping of this root division, illustrating through
citation how and why Prosser’s trans* studies narratology must break
from feminist queer studies’ Butlerian social construction. While newer
formations such as “transgender” and “trans” have attempted to smooth
this epistemological gap, the divide between queer studies’ emphasis on
deconstruction/failure and trans* studies’ focus on reconstruction/recov-
ery (perhaps not of a “natural” sex but an innately sensed one) remains
politically active in any tableau enacted between these fields:
 JOURNAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY 393

Feminist queer theory affirms: Transsexuality affirms:

The body as effect
The body as surface
Seeing; the visible body
Sex1 as language
Nature as law (to be subverted)
Homosexual affirmativity
“Social construction”
Deconstructions of literality and
referentiality
Deconstruction of monolithic
signifiers
The unraveling of identity
Iteration, performance
Trouble
Performance
Affirmation of the perversions
Domesticity as law (to be resisted)
Differentiation
The body as material
The body as interior
Feeling; the sensible body
Sex1 as ground
Nature as object of desire (to be sought)
Rehabilitation of heterosexuality
“Sexed realness. . . embodied sex” (49)
Literality and referentiality (13, 58)
Reconstruction of bodily integrity as the aim of transition (6)
The consolidation of identity (6)
Narrative (beginning, middle, and desired end) (29)
Safety
Passing
Affirmation of the normal
Domesticity as object of desire (to be sought) (“territory, belonging,
creating homes” [56])
Assimilation (pp. 269-270)

It is here, at the site of what we once referred to as “transsexuality,” that

trans* studies may most require a break from feminist queer studies to state
but gender is real like this. Without a legitimizing context for the claims
trans* studies makes to the importance of the body as determinative and
gender as known, the a priori propositions of feminist queer studies threaten
to render transsexuality politically suspect and retrograde. Transsexuality
thus “reveals queer theory’s own limits: what lies beyond or beneath its
favored terrain of gender performativity” (Prosser, 1998, p. 6). If feminist
queer studies thinks this exclusion is a problem (which it does not always
think), it might move to defuse the situation by drawing lines between sex
and gender or between desire and the body—claiming, for example, that
queer is about “nonnormative desires and sexual practices,” and trans is
about “nonnormative gender identifications and embodiments,” (Love,
2014, p. 173). However, such a move cannot account for how sexuality and
desire both depend on gender and the materiality of the sexed body for their
legibility. Moreover, feminist queer studies’ emphasis on antinormativity (i.e.,
“perversion”) as a kind of disciplinary political impetus overlooks the pro-
blem that many transgender people seek to live their lives as “real” and
“normal” men and women. Because it wants to tell a story about there
being no materially fixed difference between M and F, feminist queer studies
might seek to cite trans* studies in its narratives of deconstruction and
performativity, but it has not been able to imagine an end to that story
without throwing the categories of M and/or F away, and, along with them,
the realness of trans desires to have both sex and gender like this. To such a
story, trans* studies must say but—you are forgetting me.
394 C. M. KEEGAN

Conclusion: Giving each other a break

It is important, then, to conclude: To do its work, trans* studies needs to be
permitted “radically interdisciplinary, indeed trans disciplinary” (Noble, 2012, p.
50) breaks from the established epistemological frameworks of women’s studies
and queer studies. While such breaks may have been accomplished in a few
leading departments and programs, it is unclear whether similar openings will
become possible across the many and varied academic spaces seeking to include
or now struggling to acknowledge trans* studies. To open such breaks, these
spaces will need to handle the tensions trans* studies introduces to their
epistemic structures “better than feminism has handled its relationship with
queer theory” (Halley, 2006, p. 270). As women’s studies and queer studies fall
under increasing institutional pressure to defend themselves as disciplines with
proper objects and defined methods, they may find themselves compelled to tell
stories that discipline trans* studies in turn. If trans* studies wants to say more
than but, it is important for it to get a break from these stories. This would
require women’s studies and queer studies to consider how the university may
coerce them into the same disciplinary shapes they decry, thus (re)generating
“much of the political tyranny they claim belongs (over there)” (Wiegman &
Wilson, 2015, p. 13).
In the meantime, trans* studies belongs exclusively to no one and
nowhere, and perhaps this condition is the hidden advantage of but. To be
except; apart from; other than is a condition of mourning only for those who
value and expect arrival. To wait for invitation into someone else’s story
about you on other terms may be nothing but a “cruel optimism,” in which
the thing you desire is “actually an obstacle to (y)our flourishing” (Berlant,
2011, p. 10). Perhaps trans* studies, with its investments in flex and stretch,
need not say anything more legible right now than but to those framing the
story—to be fixed as nothing more than a reminder of what exceeds the
implicit disciplinary frame. Trans* studies, now, is at least partially a practice
of marking where these other stories break, even for only a moment, to offer
others a break from themselves. As Prosser noted in 1998, to resist the
incorporation of trans* studies into other fields such as queer studies is not
to refuse the value of alliance but to practice how an alliance, unlike a
corporation, is “a provisional or strategic union between parties whose
different interests ought not to be—indeed cannot totally be—merged” (p.
60). If one side of trans* studies saying but marks an exclusion, the other
might be a pedagogy: The but is how both women’s studies and queer studies
might still find where they break—where their stories now fail to find
alliance.
Who or what really is broken in such a break?
 JOURNAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY 395

Notes
1. In what follows, I use trans to indicate a set of resistantly gendered/sexed identifica-
tions that includes both transgender and transsexual, while I use trans* to indicate a
broader formation including the theories, cultural productions, political imaginaries,
bodies, and material praxes historically created by trans populations. My usage of the
asterisk here is consistent with the entry for “asterisk” in the inaugural issue of
Transgender Studies Quarterly, in which Avery Tompkins (2014) described the func-
tion of the asterisk as “to open up transgender or trans to a greater range of meanings”
beyond a set of discrete identities (p. 26). The asterisk also indicates that the presumed
referent of trans is not settled: While the older fields of WGS and LGBTQ/queer
studies have developed more entrenched, centralized referents (e.g., something called
“women” and something called “gay and lesbian”) that each field has struggled to
deconstruct/displace, there is no clear field-specific consensus on the referred object of
trans. Trans* thus indicates an unsettled condition that reflects historically racialized,
classed, and gendered intracommunity politics about who counts as a trans subject,
while simultaneously pointing at a range of undetermined potentials for interdisciplin-
ary theoretical elaboration.
2. I use “discipline” throughout this piece to indicate a number of interrelated effects:
First, I use it in reference to Foucault’s theory of discipline in Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison as a primary mode of modern power conducted by and within
institutions, most notably carceral and educational spaces, to achieve self-regulation of
the body’s movements and affects. Second, I use it to indicate the many “disciplinary
measures” arrayed at trans bodies within the academy. In his recent award-winning
study, Being and Becoming Professionally Other: The Lives, Voices, and Experiences of U.
S. Trans* Academics, Erich N. Pitcher found broadly punitive measures directed at
trans academics, who are largely perceived as “in but not of” the university and who are
exposed to a wide range of exclusionary and hostile interpersonal, management, and
policy practices. Pitcher described the positionality of trans academics as “always
already within a series of interstices: possible and impossible, real and imagined, inside
and outside, visible and invisible” (2018, p. 1), a “betwixt” state that defies the
categorical and methodological imperatives of disciplinarity. Third, I use “disciplinary
position” in suggestive reference to the erotic practices of BDSM, which ironically
require more consent than the regulatory and punitive schemas carried out within the
academy. Lastly and most obviously, I use “discipline” to refer to the expectation that
knowledge production be conducted in rigidly determinative ways that allow certain
bodies to attain the privilege of professing status, while others are subjugated beneath
or moved outside the borders of the resulting discourse.
3. We might describe this double-bind, to use Sara Ahmed’s phrase, as an “affinity of
hammers” (2016, p. 22): a situation in which the disciplinary aspects of both women’s
and queer studies can result in a dual “hammering” that chips away at trans lives
simultaneously and from several different directions. Ahmed noted that such a ham-
mering can be turned back on its sources as a tool—a goal I seek here.
4. For an unfolding account of this trajectory, see the 2002 collection Women’s Studies on
Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change (R. Weigman [Ed.], Durham,
NC: Duke University Press) as well as the 2008 reader Women’s Studies on the Edge (J.
Wallach Scott [Ed.], Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
5. In Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break From Feminism, Halley (2006)
described sexual subordination feminism as the dominant form of feminism in the
United States, which is “persistently a subordination theory set by default to seek the
396 C. M. KEEGAN

social welfare of women, femininity, and/or female/feminine gender by undoing some

part or all of their subordination to men, masculinity, and/or male or masculine
gender” (p. 4). Halley wrote that this subordination model has three main components:
“A distinction between something m and something f; a commitment to be a theory
about, and a practice about, the subordination of f to m; and a commitment to work
against that subordination on behalf of f” (pp. 4–5). Later, Halley observed how gay
identity politics have borrowed aspects of this subordination formula from feminism
(p. 28, 109–111), asserting a model in which homosexuality is subordinated to hetero-
sexuality as F is subordinated to M.
6. Bettcher described the situation of the trans subject within the story of social con-
struction like this: “Consider: If all the world’s a stage on which we all play a part, trans
individuals play actors. For somebody frustrated at being constructed as an actor, the
mere claim that everybody is actually an actor would, by itself, erase the distinctive and
oppressive way in which one was specifically constructed as an actor; it would provide
no help in undermining being specifically constructed as an actor; and it would
reinforce the claim that one was indeed an actor while obscuring the fact that such a
reinforcement was being made” (p. 398).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

References
Ahmed, S. (2014). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2016). An affinity of hammers. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3(1–2), 22–34.
doi:10.1215/23289252-3334151
Ahmed, S. (2017, August 9). A complaint biography [blog post]. Retrieved from https://
feministkilljoys.com/2017/08/09/a-complaint-biography/
Awkward-Rich, C. (2017). Trans, feminism: Or, reading like a depressed transsexual. Signs, 42
(4), 819–841. doi:10.1086/690914
Barthes, R. (1972). Jeunes chercheurs. Communications, 19, 1–5. doi:10.3406/
comm.1972.1276
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bettcher, T. M. (2013). Trapped in the wrong theory: Rethinking trans oppression and
resistance. Signs, 39(2), 383–406. doi:10.1086/673088
Brown, W. (2005). Edgework: Critical essays on knowledge and politics. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Butler, J. (1994). Against proper objects. Differences: A Journal of Feminist and Cultural
Studies, 6(2–3), 1–26.
Eng, D. L., Halberstam, H., & Munoz, J. E. (2005). Introduction: What’s queer about queer
studies now? Social Text, 23(3–4), 2–18. doi:10.1215/01642472-23-3-4_84-85-1
Hale, J. (1997). Suggested rules for non-transsexuals writing about transsexuals, transsexu-
ality, transsexualism, or trans [blog post]. Retrieved from www.sandystone.com/hale.
rules.html
Halley, J. (2006). Split decisions: How and why to take a break from feminism. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
 JOURNAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY 397

Jeffreys, S. (2014). Gender hurts: A feminist analysis of the politics of transgenderism. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Love, H. (2014). Queer. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1(1–2), 172–176. doi:10.1215/
23289252-2399938
Malatino, H. (2015). Pedagogies of becoming: Trans inclusivity and the crafting of being.
Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2(3), 395–410. doi:10.1215/23289252-2926387
Namaste, V. (2000). Invisible lives: The erasure of transgendered and transsexual people.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Nicolazzo, Z. (2017). Introduction: What’s transgressive about trans* studies in education
now? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(3), 211–216.
doi:10.1080/09518398.2016.1274063
Noble, B. (2012). Trans. Panic. Some thoughts toward a theory of feminist fundamentalism.
In F. Enke (Ed.), Transfeminist perspectives in and beyond transgender and gender studies
(pp. 45–59). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Pitcher, E. N. (2018). Being and becoming professionally other: Identities, voices, and experi-
ences of U.S. trans* academics. New York, NY: Peter Lang, Inc.
Prosser, J. (1998). Second skins: The body narratives of transsexuality. New York, NY:
Columbia University Press.
Salamon, G. (2010). Assuming a body: Transgender and rhetorics of materiality. New York,
NY: Columbia University Press.
Schor, N., & Weed, E. (Eds.). (1997). Feminism meets queer theory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.
Shraya, V. (2016). Even this page is white. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Spade, D. (2006). Mutilating gender. In S. Stryker & S. Whittle (Eds.), The transgender studies
reader (Vol. 1, pp. 315–332). New York, NY: Routledge.
Spivak, G. (1996). Bonding in difference: An interview with Alfred Arteaga (1993-94). In D.
Landry & G. MacLean (Eds.), The Spivak reader (pp. 15–28).New York, NY: Routledge.
Steinbock, E. (2017). Framing stigma in trans* mediascapes: How does it feel to be a
problem? Spectator, 37(2), 48–57.
Steinmetz, K. (2014, May 29). The transgender tipping point [web article]. Time. Retrieved
from http://time.com/135480/transgender-tipping-point/
Stryker, S. (2004). Transgender studies: Queer theory’s evil twin. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian
and Gay Studies, 10(2), 211–215. doi:10.1215/10642684-10-2-212
Stryker, S., & Bettcher, T. M. (2016). Introduction: Trans/feminisms. Transgender Studies
Quarterly, 3(1–2), 5–14. doi:10.1215/23289252-3334127
Tompkins, A. (2014). Asterisk. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1(1–2), 26–27. doi:10.1215/
23289252-2399497
Wallach Scott, J. (Ed.). (2008). Women’s studies on the edge. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Weigman, R. (Ed.). (2002). Women’s studies on its own: A next wave reader in institutional
change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wiegman, R., & Wilson, E. A. (2015). Introduction: Antinormativity’s queer conventions.
Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 26(1), 1–25. doi:10.1215/10407391-
2880582
Wilchins, R. A. (2006). What does it cost to tell the truth? In S. Stryker & S. Whittle (Eds.),
The Transgender studies reader (Vol. 1, pp. 547–551). New York, NY: Routledge.