Foundational Texts

The texts in this section are ones with which anyone teaching or writing in transgender studies should be intimately familiar.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an ‘Intersexed’ Person, Part One. In Studies in Ethnomethodology. Oxford: Polity Press, pp. 116-185. In this groundbreaking ethnomethodological essay, Garfinkel uses his case study of a male-to-female transsexual presenting for help obtaining genital sex reassignment surgery at UCLA in 1958 to examine the normative beliefs about gender held by non-transgendered individuals in the United States. John Heritage’s exposition of Garfinkel (see below) is illuminating for readers not familiar with ethnomethodology.

GLQ Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 42 (1998) "The Transgender Issue." Edited by Susan Stryker, this is the first issue of a scholarly journal devoted entirely to transgender studies. Stryker’s introduction (pp. 145-158), while difficult reading for my undergraduate students, provides a useful, though controversial, overview of the field. (Other individual articles are listed below.)

Stone, Sandy. 1992. The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto. Camera Obscura 29 (May) 151-176. This essay, first published in 1991 and revised for 1992 publication, marks the foundation of transgender studies; it is the first scholarly writing in which an openly transgendered author breaks complicity with the ideologies that have regulated and produced transgendered, especially transsexual, embodiment and subjectivity. Stone’s rich essay sets many of the problematics for transgender studies to this day.

Stryker, Susan. 1994. My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage. GLQ 13, pp. 237-254. Stryker explores themes of regulation, production, colonization, embodiment, and subjectivity in this extremely rich essay.

Bibliography—Academic Articles and Chapters

Appiah, Anthony. "‘But Would That Still Be Me?’ Notes on Gender, ‘Race,’ Ethnicity, as Sources of ‘Identity.’ In Naomi Zack, ed., Race/Sex: Their Sameness, Difference, and Interplay. 1997. New York: Routledge, pp. 75-81. Undergraduate students might find it instructive to read this remarkable example of an accomplished philosopher making a simple mistake. Appiah concludes that metaphysical identity of persons does not obtain across change of sex on the basis of his non-transgendered intuition that he would not be the same person were he to become a woman by having a "sex change operation." For instructors wishing to combine transgender studies material with material on ethnic identities in their courses, this might be a good first article.

Bolin, Anne. 1996. Traversing Gender: Cultural Context and Gender Practices. In Sabrina Petra Ramet, ed., Gender Reversals & Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. New York: Routledge, pp. 22-51. A concise introduction to cross-cultural perspectives on gender (and transgender) systems and paradigms, including but not limited to European, European American, Native American systems.

Chase, Cheryl. 1998. Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism. GLQ 42, pp. 189-211. An examination of the renegotiation of cultural meanings of genitals among intersexed subjects and the formation of intersex political activism aimed, minimally, at ending the contemporary practice of nonconsensual surgical alteration of the genitals of intersexed children and infants. Chase, the founder of the Intersex Society of North America, compares intersex genital mutilation and female genital mutilation and interrogates feminist silence about the former.

Cromwell, Jason. 1997. Traditions of Gender Diversity and Sexualities: A Female-to-Male Transgendered Perspective. In Sue-Ellen Jacobs et al., eds.(see below), pp. 119-142. An anthropological discussion of contemporary European American ftm disidentifications with Native American two-spirit statuses occupied by female-bodied persons.

Devor, Holly. 1989. Where It All Begins: The Biological Bases of Gender. In: Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, pp. 1-22. Useful for helping undergraduate students to understand, and in some cases question their assumptions, about the biological bases of gender, despite Devor’s falsely generalized assertions about transsexuals and her citations of non-replicated research about the genesis of transsexuality.

Gamson, Joshua. 1998. I Want to Be Miss Understood. In Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 138-169. Sociologist Gamson examines the structures and functions of talk shows featuring transgendered, especially transsexual guests. Undergraduate students find his analysis difficult but many are sufficiently engaged by the topic that they profitably engage his analysis. A paper assignment that produced excellent results from my students had them compare and contrast two talk shows with transgendered guests in light of Gamson’s chapter.

Halberstam, Judith. 1997. Mackdaddy, Superfly, RapperGender, Race, and Masculinity in the Drag King Scene. Social Text 52/53 153/4 (Fall/Winter) 104-131. An ethnographic interrogation of the relations between masculinity and race within both drag king theatrical performances and nontheatrical drag king competitions in New York City. This essay, revised, has appeared in Halberstam’s book (see below).

Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Transgender ButchButch/FTM Border Wars and the Masculine Continuum. GLQ 42, pp. 287-310. An examination of the model of masculinity at stake in anxieties about butches and ftms about how to define these two categories, and a development of the notion of transgender butch as a transgendered, non-transsexual self-identification. This essay, revised, has appeared in Halberstam’s book (see below).

Halberstam, Judith, and C. Jacob Hale. Butch/FTM Border Wars: A Note on Collaboration. 1998. GLQ 42, pp. 283-285. Introduction to companion essays ("Transgender Butch" and "Consuming the Living") that set the problematic for the two essays.

Hale, Jacob. 1996. Are Lesbians Women? Hypatia 112 (Spring) 94-121. Although not explicitly focused on a transgender topic, this article uses transgendered perspectives and experiences to analyze the dominant definition of the category woman in the contemporary United States.

Hale, C. Jacob. 1997. Leatherdyke Boys and Their Daddies: How to Have Sex without Women or Men. Social Text 52/53 153/4 (Fall/Winter) 223-236. An auto-ethnographic analysis of leatherdyke genderplay as a system for the production of gendered meaning, illuminating a subcultural sex/gender/sexuality system different from the dominant system in the contemporary United States and facilitating ftm identity formation.

Hale, C. Jacob. 1997. Tracing a Ghostly Memory in My Throat: Reflections on Ftm Feminist Voice and Agency. In Tom Digby, ed., Men Doing Feminism. New York: Routledge, pp. 99-129. An ontological, epistemological, and political exploration of the tense yet potentially productive relationships between feminist and transgender theory and practice. Drawing on Maria Lugones’ work, I attempt to chart one epistemological subject position from which ftms can usefully engage in feminist theory and practice, and I explore both advantages that ftms may have over non-transsexual men as well as problems that ftms face in such projects.

Hale, C. Jacob. 1998. Consuming the Living, Dis(re)membering the Dead in the Butch/FTM Borderlands. GLQ 42, pp. 311-348. An examination of the political and definitional stakes in the anxieties about how to mark the difference between butches and ftms.

Lang, Sabine. 1996. There Is More Than Just Women and Men: Gender Variance in North American Indian Cultures. In Sabrina Petra Ramet, ed., Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. London Routledge, pp. 183-196. An overview and analysis of the anthropological literature on Native American sex/gender/sexuality systems.

Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California. 1998. MTF Transgender Activism in the Tenderloin and Beyond, 1966-1975. Commentary and Interview with Elliot Blackstone. GLQ 42, pp. 349-372. This interview and the extensive commentary which frames it begin the crucial project of uncovering the buried history of transgender community formation and of reclaiming from exclusively medicalized contexts and ideologies one geographically-specific history of transgender identity formation.

Meyerowitz, Joanne. Sex Change and the Popular Press: Historical Notes on Transsexuality in the United States, 1930-1955. GLQ 42, pp. 159-187. Locating the 1952-53 press frenzy about Christine Jorgensen in its historical context, historian Meyerowitz draws from archival sources to trace the formation of contemporary transsexual identities in the United States prior to the emergence of the sexological category of transsexualism.

Munoz, Jose Esteban. 1997. "The White to Be Angry: Vaginal Davis’ Terrorist Drag." Social Text 52/53 153/4 (Fall/Winter) 80-103. A brilliant examination of the intentional tactical uses of misrecognition, disidentification and partial identification in the racialized performances of Los Angeles drag superstar Vaginal Davis, as they illuminate the ways in which minoritarian subjects more generally use these tactics to resist oppressive, normalizing ideologies.

Namaste, Ki. 1996. Genderbashing: Sexuality, Gender, and the Regulation of Public Space. Environment and Planning. Society and Space 14, pp. 221-240. Examination of the ways in which regulations of public space promote erasure, including violent erasure, of transgendered subjects and subjectivity.

Namaste, Ki. 1996. "Tragic Misreadings: Queer Theory’s Erasure of Transgender Subjectivity." In Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason, eds., Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology. New York: New York University Press, pp. 183-203. Focusing her cautionary critique on Judith Butler’s essay about the film "Paris Is Burning," Namaste argues that queer theory’s use of transgendered subjects and subjectivity is appropriative and distorting.

Nelson, James L. 1998. The Silence of the Bioethicists: Ethical and Political Aspects of Managing Gender Dysphoria. GLQ 42, pp. 213-230. Bioethicist Nelson argues that the lack of bioethical analysis about transsexuality arises from inattention to the extent to which our sex and our subjectivity are affected by social institutions. He attempts to begin to end bioethical silence about transsexuality by analyzing the ethical and political issues arising from two competing standards for transsexual access to medically regulated technologies.

Parlee, Mary Brown. 1996. Situated Knowledges of Personal Embodiment: Transgender Activists’ and Psychological Theorists’ Perspectives on ‘Sex’ and ‘Gender’. Theory & Psychology 64, pp. 625-645. Academic psychological treatment of ‘sex’ as an historical, pretheoretical notion in theories of ‘gender’ is compared and contrasted with theories produced by transgendered subjects whose gendered embodiments and moral agency is erased by such psychological scholarship.

Rubin, Gayle. 1992. Of Catamites and Kings: Reflections on Butch, Gender, and Boundaries. In Joan Nestle, ed., The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader. Boston: Alyson, pp. 466-482. A brilliant examination of the multiple layered meanings of butch embodiment and subjectivity in lesbian communities.

Rubin, Henry S. 1997. Reading Like a (Transsexual) Man. In Tom Digby, ed., Men Doing Feminism. New York: Routledge, pp. 305-324. Sociologist Rubin explores the tensions that both female-to-male transsexual men and non-transsexual men face between their manhood and their feminist beliefs, arguing that it can provide a fertile ground for engendering perverse identities that can be employed for feminist purposes. Rubin’s essay and Hale 1997, in the same volume, are almost diametrically opposed on many issues, so teaching the two in tandem can dislodge students’ tendencies to totalize transsexual subjectivity.

Scheman, Naomi. 1996. Queering the Center by Centering the Queer. In Diane Tietjiens Meyers, ed., Feminists Rethink the Self. Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 124-162. Scheman compares and contrasts Jewish identities and the identities of transsexual women to displace the normalizing apparatuses of Christian-normativity and heteronormativity.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofky. 1997. A Response to C. Jacob Hale. Social Text 52/53 153/4 (Fall/Winter) 237-239. In this short commentary, literary theorist Sedgwick illuminates some of the main themes about selfhood implicit in the original essay.

Bibliography—Academic Books

Dreger, Alice Domurat. 1998. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Historian and philosopher of science Dreger provides a carefully argued analysis of the medical conceptions of hermaphroditism, and thus of sex in general, in late 19th and early 20th-century Great Britain and France.

Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press. Literary and film theorist Halberstam argues that centering female, and other non-male, masculinities in masculinity studies is crucial to progress in the field. To begin this project, she explores a variety of texts and topics, including pre-twentieth century female masculinities, John Radclyffe Hall’s writings, stone butch identities, transgender butch identities and the masculine continuum, butches on film, drag kings, and female boxing.

Heritage, John. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Oxford: Polity Press. A very helpful secondary text for readers interested in ethnomethodology in general, including ethnomethodological contributions, such as those of Garfinkel and Kessler and McKenna, to trans/gender studies.

Herdt, Gilbert, ed. 1994. Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books. A rich anthropological and historical collection covering sex/gender statuses alternative to male man and female woman in a variety of periods of European history and in Polynesia, Native America, India, New Guinea, and contemporary North America.

Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. 1997. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. This anthology juxtaposes essays by Native American and non-Indian authors, anthropological and other forms, to provide a wealth of material on Native American constructions of gender and sexuality. It is the most current book of readings on these topics.

Kessler, Suzanne J. 1998. Learning from the Intersexed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Ethnomethodologist Kessler examines contemporary social institutions surgical and hormonal normalization of intersexed bodies. Beyond the medical sphere, she evaluates intersexed and transgendered political activism aimed at ended practices of nonconsensual bodily normalization by physicians and gaining wider cultural acceptance of intersexed identities.

Kessler, Suzanne J., and Wendy McKenna. 1978. Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Following in Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological footsteps, Kessler and McKenna examine gender attribution, cross-cultural perspectives on gender, biological and developmental aspects of gender, and transsexuality considered as a mundane construction of gender. The material on transsexuality is outdated, but their work on gender attribution is especially valuable.

Kulick, Don. 1998. Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. An ethnographic study based on living among travesti prostitutes in Salvador. Kulick’s conclusions from tape recorded conversations about travesti and larger Brazilian sex/gender/sexuality constructions do not always appear to be fully warranted, and his contrasts between Brazilian travesti and European/European American transsexuals caricature European and European American transsexuals. Despite these flaws, Kulick’s Salvadoran research is thorough, his analyses are often subtle, and this book importantly inserts non-European/European American transgendered identifications and subjectivities into transgender studies.

Newton, Esther. 1979. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Based on two years of field work among drag queens in Chicago and Kansas City, Newton’s classic text remains a standard of rigorous scholarship in its study of the material contexts of drag and camp.

Prosser, Jay. 1998. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Literary critic Prosser has produced a theoretically sophisticated text that engages profitably some queer theoretical and feminist theoretical misuses of transsexual subjectivity. Although philosophers will be rightly annoyed at some of Prosser’s logical lapses and transsexuals will object correctly to Prosser’s totalizations of transsexual subjectivities, this is a rich text that is particularly insightful in its analysis of the role of autobiography in the formation and constitution of transsexual subjectivity.

Williams, Walter L. 1992. The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Cultures. Boston: Beacon Press. Although Williams’ homocentric analyses elide the significance of gender in the cultural formations he examines, this book played a large part in inspiring scholarly and community interest in Native American two-spirit statuses and contains a wealth of ethnographic information.

Bibliography—Non-Academic Books

Bornstein, Kate. 1994. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York: Vintage. An enormously rich text which is easy for undergraduate students to read. Some of the best undergraduate papers I have ever read have been written in response to thought experiment questions I drew, and reformulated to add structural connections to other course material, from this book.

Bornstein, Kate. 1998. My Gender Workbook. New York: Routledge. Bornstein is not as gentle with her audience in this recent book as she was in Gender Outlaw. Some sections, especially the quizzes and list of "101 Gender Outlaws," worked well with my students, however, this was not as successful pedagogically as Gender Outlaw.

Wilchins, Riki Anne. 1997. Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand. A collection of provocative essays from a leading North American transgender activist. Wilchins’ pieces on the uses of erotics and on the notion of "gender identity" are especially interesting intellectually.