About this item
This title is part of American Studies Now and available as an e-book first. Visit ucpress.edu/go/americanstudiesnow to learn more. In the last decade, public discussions of transgender issues have increased exponentially. However, with this increased visibility has come not just power, but regulation, both in favor of and against trans people. What was once regarded as an unusual or even unfortunate disorder has become an accepted articulation of gendered embodiment as well as a new site for political activism and political recognition. What happened in the last few decades to prompt such an extensive rethinking of our understanding of gendered embodiment? How did a stigmatized identity become so central to U.S. and European articulations of self? And how have people responded to the new definitions and understanding of sex and the gendered body? In Trans*, Jack Halberstam explores these recent shifts in the meaning of the gendered body and representation, and explores the possibilities of a nongendered, gender-optional, or gender-queer future.
About the Author
Judith Halberstam, also Jack Halberstam, (born 15 December 1961) is Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California. Halberstam was an Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego before working at USC. She (also sometimes using pronouns 'he', 'him', 'his') has made contributions as a gender and queer theorist and author. Halberstam primarily focuses on the topics of tomboys and female masculinity and has published a book titled after the concept. In this work, she famously discusses a common by-product of gender binarism, termed "the bathroom problem". This outlines the dangerous and awkward dilemma of a perceived gender deviant's justification of presence in a gender-policed zone, such as a public bathroom, and the identity implications of "passing" therein. Halberstam…
