The Affective Structure of Global Trans* Politics
This research seminar takes as its point of departure this specific moment in recent transgender politics in the Global North and West, a politics that rapidly grew strong, expanding from its predominantly local dimension to an increasingly global movement with transnational and global impacts. This version of transgender politics is pervaded by ideals of success and goal-orientation, and considered as progress for an assumed transgender community. However, as trans* activists and scholars aptly caution, this politics need not only be celebrated as progressive achievement for gender-variant people. On the contrary, this version of transgender politics should also be seen as assimilatory professionalisation that normalises and flattens out the differences amongst the divergent needs of various trans* people.
Building on this critique, Yv Nay explores the questions: How can trans* politics particularly global and transnational transgender politics from the Global North and West address current injustices without falling prey to the ultimately counterproductive accommodation associated with neoliberal notions of equality? How can these injustices be contested without perpetuating colonising violence in the process of constructing a seemingly legitimate subject called transgender/trans* that is bound up with questions of nation, geographical position, and citizenship and is thus intertwined with racism, xenophobia, and class privilege?
Presenter - Dr Yv E. Nay is SNSF Postdoctoral Fellow of the Department of Gender Studies at LSE. Prior to joining LSE, Nay was a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University, a Doctoral Research Fellow of the University of Zurich and the University of Basel, and a Stipendiary Postdoc Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry ICI Berlin.
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