Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities

by Rogers Brubaker

Overview

How the transgender experience opens up new possibilities for thinking about gender and race

In the summer of 2015, shortly after Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender, the NAACP official and political activist Rachel Dolezal was "outed" by her parents as white, touching off a heated debate in the media about the fluidity of gender and race. If Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman, could Dolezal legitimately identify as black?

Taking the controversial pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” as his starting point, Rogers Brubaker shows how gender and race, long understood as stable, inborn, and unambiguous, have in the past few decades opened up—in different ways and to different degrees—to the forces of change and choice. Transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream with dizzying speed, and ethnoracial boundaries have blurred. Paradoxically, while sex has a much deeper biological basis than race, choosing or changing one's sex or gender is more widely accepted than choosing or changing one’s race. Yet while few accepted Dolezal’s claim to be black, racial identities are becoming more fluid as ancestry—increasingly understood as mixed—loses its authority over identity, and as race and ethnicity, like gender, come to be understood as something we do, not just something we have. By rethinking race and ethnicity through the multifaceted lens of the transgender experience—encompassing not just a movement from one category to another but positions between and beyond existing categories—Brubaker underscores the malleability, contingency, and arbitrariness of racial categories.

At a critical time when gender and race are being reimagined and reconstructed, Trans explores fruitful new paths for thinking about identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691181189
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/29/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Rogers Brubaker is professor of sociology and UCLA Foundation Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction 1

Part One: The Trans Moment

1 Transgender, Transracial? 15

"Transgender" and "Transracial" before the Dolezal Affair 17

The Field of Argument 21

"If Jenner, Then Dolezal": The Argument from Similarity 22

Boundary Work: The Argument from Difference 31

2 Categories in Flux 40

Unsettled Identities 41

The Empire of Choice 50

The Policing of Identity Claims 56

The New Objectivism 64

Part Two: Thinking with Trans

3 The Trans of Migration 71

Unidirectional Transgender Trajectories 74

Reconsidering "Transracial" 80

Transracial Trajectories, Past and Present 82

4 The Trans of Between 92

Transgender Betweenness: Oscillation, Recombination, Gradation 94

Racial and Gender Betweenness 101

Recombinatory Racial Betweenness: Classification and Identification 104

Performing Betweenness 108

5 The Trans of Beyond 113

Beyond Gender? 114

Beyond Race? 122

Conclusion 131

Notes 153

Bibliography 183

Index 229

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Smart and timely, Trans examines the conjoining of 'transgender' and 'transracial' categories in the popular and scholarly discussions about Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal during the summer of 2015. A lucid, wide-ranging exploration of tensions between givenness and chosenness in contemporary identity discourse, this is a must-read for anybody interested in the questions 'Who am I?' and 'Who are you?'"—Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History

"At a time when American culture is transfixed by ‘trans,' Rogers Brubaker urges us to think with trans—to use the space that transgender reveals between culture and biology to understand how we experience race and ethnicity. Brubaker's thoughtful, humane, and conceptually elegant book provides a feast of insights about the varieties of identity that Americans today can experience and the ways that old categories continue to function in an unsettled world."—Daniel J. Sharfstein, author of The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America

"This wonderful book exemplifies sociological analysis at its very best, deploying sharp distinctions that elucidate the complexities of the current unsettling of identities regarding sex and gender, and race and ethnicity. Discussing these together, each in light of the other, Trans brightly illuminates where and why they differ."—Steven Lukes, New York University

"Rogers Brubaker's exploration of changing conceptions of gender and race is deeply informed, intellectually rigorous, and profoundly insightful. I learned a great deal from his careful description of the politics surrounding those who choose racial and gender identities at odds with widespread expectations. I admire this accessible book and am grateful for it."—Randall Kennedy, author of For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law

"Trans is an intellectual investigation giving clarity to an incompletely charted arena. Brubaker asks key questions, like why racial and ethnic categories seem to be thought as more biological and less legitimately variable than sex and gender. In a field dominated by accounts of experience, he offers an inquiry into systems of classification that is characteristically insightful."—Craig Calhoun, director of the London School of Economics and Political Science

"This provocative and perceptive book argues that the current 'trans moment' presents an unparalleled opportunity for exploring vernacular classification systems and political claims about identities. Transposing and generalizing to the arena of race and ethnicity insights developed by transgender and feminist analysts, Trans reveals the paradoxical deployment of social construction, contingency, and biology."—Ann Shola Orloff, Northwestern University

"Taking up Caitlyn Jenner's gender transition and Rachel Dolezal's status as a self-proclaimed black person, Brubaker sheds light on the paradoxes of choice and constraint that swirl around conceptions of identity at a time when our cultural understandings of gender and race are very much in flux. This is a timely, judicious, and tremendously thoughtful and learned investigation into present-day debates. Everyone will want to read this book."—Steven Epstein, author of Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research

"Trans offers an exceptionally lucid, insightful account of the contemporary discussion on ‘trans' and an extremely useful investigation of the directions that ‘transgenderism' and ‘transracialism' might take. Offering original thinking about gender to prod us to consider race in new ways, this dauntingly good book will garner a great deal of attention."—Ann Morning, author of The Nature of Race

"Trans provides a strong, nuanced perspective on the rapidly shifting cultural imaginary of transgender identities and the emerging questions about possibilities for transracial identification. In its analysis of how popular thinking on race aligns and diverges from beliefs about gender, this timely book will engender much discussion and perhaps some controversy—but it will definitely be read."—Kristen Schilt, University of Chicago

Editorial Reviews

"While the first part of Trans compares Dolezal and Jenner, the second leverages the concept of transgender to examine transracial differences. Ultimately, Brubaker would like us to recognize transracial identities in the same way we accept transgender ones. In his analysis, transracial identities generate uneasy resonances with not only the dark histories of racial passing, but also the contemporary realities of racial oppression. Still, he prods us to reflect on the new kinds of racial identities being created through interracial relations, multiracial movements and generational change. While the mainstream recognizes transgender, it remains wary of transracial. The controversy over trans identities is far from settled."

Macleans

08/29/2016
Sociologist Brubaker (Grounds for Difference), a sociology professor at UCLA, seeks insight into the contemporary politics of belonging through his analysis of two high-profile cases of individual identity, both of which made headlines in 2015. Expanding on an article published in the academic journal Ethnic and Racial Studies, Brubaker examines the media narratives about Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, and Rachel Dolezal, who claimed to be black, and suggests (not entirely successfully) that together these cases of publicly contested gender and ethnoracial identities are an “intellectual opportunity.” The author argues that the concept of transness has particular salience today, and that the way people think about transgender experiences could be fruitfully used to think about race as well. The book is organized into two sections: part one describes public perceptions of race and gender identity in reaction to the Jenner and Dolezal narratives, and part two argues for the usefulness of “thinking with trans” with regard to race. Such interdisciplinary efforts are welcome, but the execution in this case is hasty. Brubaker is reasonably well versed on the history and politics of transgender identity, but he nevertheless accepts Time magazine’s declaration of a “transgender tipping point” or a “trans moment” narrative of mainstream acceptance. Meanwhile, shifting notions of ethnoracial identity remain disappointingly underexplored. As a whole, the work leaves much room for further reflection and analysis. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Pacy and stimulating."—-Marina Benjamin, New Statesman

"The value in [Trans] is not in readjudicating old internet battles, but in laying out current conflicts of identity in a public, accessible way."—-Emma Green, The Atlantic

"Lucid, sophisticated, and judicious,Transis an important and timely exploration of the increasingly uncertain and unsettled boundaries of identity."—-Glenn Altschuler, Florida Courier

From the Publisher