Abstract
Many feminist academic programs find themselves in a point of tension as they embrace emerging scholars in trans studies for their contributions to the heart of feminist scholarship while simultaneously continuing to resist the ways that trans and nonbinary scholarship and persons challenge (and have always challenged) the paradigms of day-to-day interaction and institutional epistemologies. In this chapter, Finn Enke calls for a more mixed up, expansive and dynamic past, a feminist genealogy long critical of binary attachments, a feminist foundation willing to morph with additional perspective. Enke considers their own path as a transfeminist historian by considering the intellectual sources that illuminated larger debates within feminist scholarship and encouraged the emergence of trans methodologies.
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Notes
- 1.
Sara Ahmed offers trenchant analysis of the ways diversity offices and climate conversations in academic contexts are structured to make it nearly impossible for women of color to have a hand in shaping their institutions even as they are often asked to serve as the face of diversity offices. Her discussion is not versed in queer and trans analyses and thus misses a significant dimension of institutional power. Sara Ahmed (2017).
- 2.
Martha Vicinus (1994), Judith Butler (1991).
Judith Bennett (2000), Jay Prosser (1998), Jack Halberstam (1998), Gayle Rubin (1992), Evelyn Hammonds (1994), Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia Wieringa (1999), Kendall (1999), Gloria Wekker (1996); In addition to Michel Foucault’s A History of Sexuality (1978), the move to historicize sexuality and sexual identity owes much to John D’Emilio’s suggestive 1983 article.
- 3.
The protracted struggle about whether The Berkshire Conference on the History of Women might change its name to reflect a broader lens of gender analysis is a case in point. “The Berks,” as the conference has been affectionately known for many decades, changed its name to The Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities for its 2017 triennial conference. As has been the case with name changes in gender studies departments, the conversation was marked by dismissal of “gender and sexuality” as worthy, valid avenues of inquiry and the belief that critical gender lenses and acknowledgement of sexual diversities undermined the study of women as an unmarked universal subject (“just women”); by distress over the loss of an era of energy around the establishment of an exciting, generative field; by the perception that this loss is due to the uncritical incursion of men, trans, and queer into women’s hard-won territory; and disagreement about what it means to take critical perspectives on misogyny and transmisogyny, sexism, racism, and settler colonialism.
- 4.
I emphasize that this is not meant to characterize or provide a history of the field but rather an autobiographic exploration of some things that centrally stood out to me as a scholar emerging in the field of feminist history. I value the fact that others will have a very different perspective on the field and its purview.
- 5.
“The Combahee River Collective Statement,” 1977, primary authors Demita Frazier, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith circulated largely by hand and feminist networks until Kitchen Table Press published it in 1986 as The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties. New York: Kitchen Table Press Women of Color Press.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
Bernice Johnson Reagon (1983).
- 10.
- 11.
Gayle Rubin (1984).
- 12.
Barbara Christian (1987).
- 13.
Judith Butler (1990).
- 14.
- 15.
Luce Irigaray (1985)
- 16.
- 17.
Trinh Minh-ha (1989).
- 18.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty and M. Jacqui Alexander (1996).
- 19.
Cathy Cohen (1997).
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Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (1992).
- 21.
Evelynn Hammonds (1994).
- 22.
Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s recent work provides a striking example of what becomes possible when we suspend reigning academic discernments of queer theory, queer politics, and feminism and instead start with Afro-Caribbean meaning-making. Among other things, Tinsley articulates gender multiplicity without reinscribing dimorphic sex essentialisms as the starting place of gender. See Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (2018). On efforts to theorize outside of hegemonic (Western) feminisms, see for example, Obioma Nnaemeka (2004).
- 23.
Quite possibly the most widely cited and influential article in gender and women’s history, Joan Wallach Scott (1986).
- 24.
For perspective on these orientations and the significance of Scott’s article, see the AHR Forum, “Revisiting ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” and Joanne Meyerowitz (2008).
- 25.
Judith Bennett (1989).
- 26.
It is worth noting that the very same Judith Bennett who expressed concern that Joan Scott’s historicization of gender would undermine the study of “women qua women” was so tired of the persistent assumption that women were straight unless somehow proven otherwise that she made a strong claim for understanding and historicizing many varieties of women’s intimacies (e.g. cloistered life) as “lesbian-like” (Bennett 2000). A glance at conference programs of the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, and Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, as well as less formal venues such as departmental colloquia even in women’s, comparative women’s, and gender history, reflect the structural exceptionalism (non-integration) of queer, indigenous, and critical race analysis. The documentary, The Edge of Each Other’s Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde (Jennifer Abod 2002), captures the tensions of the “status quo” in feminist venues and the insights that came of intervening in structurally replicated racism, homophobia, and classism, during the organizing and unfolding of a 1990 global conference in honor of Audre Lorde. “Home video” distributed by Women Make Movies.
- 27.
Historians in the 1990s were paving the way for these inquiries, including Nell Painter (1997), Evelynn Brooks Higgenbotham (1994), Jacqueline Dowd Hall (1993), Glenda Gilmore (1996), Martha Hodes (1999), Hazel Carby (1987); and others. Subsequent unfolding includes Siobhan Sommerville’s suggestive 1994 article; Peggy Pascoe (2010), Danielle McGuire (2010), Qwo-Li Driskill (2016), Sheryll Cashin (2017), April Haynes (2015).
- 28.
This is precisely Evelynn Hammonds’ question in “Black (W)holes.”
- 29.
- 30.
From the 1970s on, countless feminist periodicals and journals have taken up the age-old question of what constitutes a “woman” within the question of whether butch lesbians, all lesbians, trans men, and trans women, might or might not be women. While the conversation has often proceeded through taxonomical debates about the essential markers, at every moment in the last six decades, people have resisted by asserting the exceptions, blurriness, and mixed-upness of every taxonomy and identity category while asserting their right to self-definition. Analysis led to theorizations of the articulation, utilization, momentariness, performance, and situatedness of gender and its legibility or illegibility across time. A few of many various approaches include, Sandy Stone (1991), Minnie Bruce Pratt (1995); Gayle Rubin, “Of Catamites and Kings;” Roey Thorpe (2013), Finn Enke (2007).
- 31.
Scholars of indigeneity have provided a little acknowledged springboard for trans heuristics in historical gender analyses. See, for example, Anguksuar (1997), Evan Towle and Lynn Morgan (2002), Qwo-Li Driskill (2010); A sampling of works using trans as an heuristic include Greta LaFluer (2014), Scott Larson (2013), Aniruddha Dutta and Raina Roy (2014), Simon Fisher, Rasheeda Phillips and Ido H. Katri (2017). See also the Trans*historicities special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly guest edited by Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici; in particular, Kadji Amin (2018) and Kai Pyle (2018).
- 32.
Histories of intersex also provide ample basis for deconstructing conflations of social gender and stereotypically sexed body parts, not least by soundly refuting physiological dimorphism and the existence of any biologically determinative sex characteristic distinguishing “male” from “female.” For example, it is simply a fact observed across all of human history that not all women have vaginas. See Alice Domurat Dreger (1998), Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000), Elizabeth Reis (2012).
- 33.
Barbara Smith (2014). Bernice Johnson Reagon. “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century;” Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” Sister Outsider. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Also see Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life.
- 34.
In doing so, I reflect on the impact that our stories have on the present. For example, what compels us to reduce 1970s feminism to a transphobic monolith, and what do we lose when we do so? Finn Enke (2018a).
- 35.
Finn Enke (2018b).
- 36.
Recent work includes Davey Shlasko (2017), is a practical and pedagogical workbook that grows out of the very accessible workshops provided by Think Again Training, thinkagaintraining.com. Concerning classrooms specifically, see Dean Spade, “We Still Need Pronoun Go-rounds,” http://www.deanspade.net/2018/12/01. Finn Enke (2016).
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Enke, F. (2020). Stuck in the Paradigm with You: Transfeminist Reflections on the Uses of History and the Spaces of Contradiction. In: Fenstermaker, S., Stewart, A.J. (eds) Gender, Considered. Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48501-6_3
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