Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-n9wrp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-19T15:42:21.990Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

22 - Ontological Sex-Genders

from Part Five - Recursivities and Futures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2023

By
EJ Gonzalez-Polledo
Edited by
Cecilia McCallum ,
Silvia Posocco  and
Martin Fotta
Cecilia McCallum
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil
Silvia Posocco
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
Martin Fotta
Affiliation:
Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences
Get access

Summary

This chapter aims to trace some of the relations between anthropology and trans studies around the definition of the category “transgender.” Doubling as a category of analysis and a lived experience, the transgender category opens up long-standing conceptual, critical, and methodological tensions between trans studies and anthropology, producing aligned and yet divergent understandings of gender, representation, identity, and cultural production. Yet drawing on the connections between these disciplines, the chapter also describes how, through ethnography, both are becoming increasingly proximate, particularly as transitioning comes to be understood to fundamentally challenge deterministic models of gender experience.

Keywords

transgendergender ontologiesautoethnographyrepresentationcultural production
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality , pp. 603 - 623
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahmed, S. (2010). Happy objects. In Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G. J., eds., The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 29–51.Google Scholar
Aizura, A., Ochoa, M., Vidal-Ortiz, S., Cotton, T., Balzer, C., and LaGata, C., eds. (2014). Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary, a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1(3). https://www.dukeupress.edu/decolonizing-the-transgender-imaginary-1Google Scholar
Aizura, A. Z. (2018). Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Andrucki, M. J., and Kaplan, D. J. (2018). Trans objects: materializing queer time in US transmasculine homes. Gender, Place & Culture, 25(6), 781–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1457014.Google Scholar
Barbosa, B. C. (2015). Imaginando trans: saberes e ativismos em torno das regulações das transformações corporais do sexo. PhD thesis, Universidade de São Paulo.Google Scholar
Barry, A. (2006). Pharmaceutical matters: the invention of informed materials. In Fraser, M., ed., Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Beemyn, G. (2013). A presence in the past: a transgender historiography. Journal of Women’s History, 25(4), 113–21.Google Scholar
Berlant, L. G., and Edelman, L. (2014). Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Besnier, N., and Alexeyeff, K. (2014). Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press.Google Scholar
Bolin, A. (1988). In Search of Eve: Transsexual Rites of Passage. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey.Google Scholar
Brown, E. H., and Davidmann, S. (2015). “Queering the trans* family album”: Elspeth H. Brown and Sara Davidmann, in conversation. Radical History Review, 122, 188–200.Google Scholar
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campt, T. M. (2017). Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Cotten, T. T., ed. (2012). Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Crawford, L. (2015). Transgender Architectonics: The Shape of Change in Modernist Space. Farnham: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Cromwell, J. (1999). Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Csordas, T. J. (2002). Body/Meaning/Healing. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
David, E. (2017). Capital T: trans visibility, corporate capitalism, and commodity culture. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 4(1), 28–44. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3711517.Google Scholar
Descola, P. (2014). Modes of being and forms of predication. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1), 271–80. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edelman, E. A. (2020). Trans Vitalities: Mapping Ethnographies of Trans Social and Political Coalitions. Abingdon: Routledge; New York: Taylor & Francis Group.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellison, T. (2017). The labor of werqing it: the performance and protest of Sir Lady Java. In Gossett, R., Stanley, E. A., and Burton, J., eds., Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibilty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–21.Google Scholar
Feinberg, L. (1996). Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Franklin, S. (2006). The cyborg embryo: our path to transbiology. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(7–8), 167–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gill-Peterson, J. (2017). Implanting plasticity into sex and trans/gender. Angelaki, 22(2), 47–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1322818.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gonzalez-Polledo, EJ. (2017). Transitioning: Matter, Gender, Thought. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.Google Scholar
Gonzalez-Polledo, EJ. (2018). Experiments in living: the value of indeterminacy in trans art. In Alexander, C. and Sanchez, A., eds., Indeterminacy: Essays on Waste, Value and the Imagination. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 50–67.Google Scholar
Gossett, R., Stanley, E. A., and Burton, J. (2017). Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibilty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Green, S. F. (1997). Urban Amazons: Lesbian Feminism and beyond in the Gender, Sexuality, and Identity Battles of London. Basingstoke: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Gutai, M. (2014). Trans Structures: Fluid Architecture and Liquid Engineering: Response-Able Innovative Structures. New York: Actar.Google Scholar
Haritaworn, J. (2008). Shifting positionalities: reflections on a queer/trans of colour methodology. Sociological Research Online, 13(1), 162–73. doi:10.5153/sro.1631.Google Scholar
Haritaworn, J., Kuntsman, A., and Posocco, S. (2014). Queer Necropolitics. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hausman, B. L. (1995). Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Hayward, E., and Gossett, C. (2017). Impossibility of that. Angelaki, 22(2), 15–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1322814.Google Scholar
Hayward, E., and Weinstein, J. (2015). Introduction: tranimalities in the age of trans* life. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2(2), 195–208.Google Scholar
Henare, A. J. M., Holbraad, M., and Wastell, S., eds. (2007). Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.Google Scholar
Herdt, G. H. (1981). Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Herdt, G. H. (1994a). Introduction: third sexes and third genders. In Herdt, G. H., ed., Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books, pp. 21–81.Google Scholar
Herdt, G. H. (1994b). Mistaken sex: culture, biology and the third sex in New Guinea. In Herdt, G. H., ed., Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books, pp. 419–45.Google Scholar
Herdt, G. H. (1997). Mistaken sex: culture, biology and the third sex in New Guinea. In Herdt, G., ed., Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Hines, S. (2013). Gender Diversity, Recognition and Citizenship: Towards a Politics of Difference. Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Hird, M. J. (2009). The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution after Science Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Ingold, T. (2017). The Life of Lines. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Johnson, M. (1997). Beauty and Power: Transgendering and Cultural Transformation in the Southern Philippines. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Kulick, D. (1998). Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacCormack, C. P., and Strathern, M. (1980). Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mackenzie, A. (2010). Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Mattingly, C. (1998). Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Meloni, M. (2016). Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meyerowitz, J. J. (2002). How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Missé, M. (2015). Transexualidades: otras miradas posibles. Madrid: Egales Editorial.Google Scholar
Missé, M. (2018). A la conquista del cuerpo equivocado. Madrid: Egales Editorial.Google Scholar
Money, J., and Ehrhardt, A. A. (1972). Man and Woman, Boy and Girl: The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Moore, H., ed. (1996). The Future of Anthropological Knowledge. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Moore, H. L. (1999). Whatever happened to women and men? Gender and other crises in anthropology. In Moore, H. L., ed., Anthropological Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 17–36.Google Scholar
Najmabadi, A. (1993). Veiled discourse-unveiled bodies. Feminist Studies, 19(3), 487–518. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178098.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Najmabadi, A. (2014). Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Namaste, V. K. (2000). Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Namaste, V. K. (2005). Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Institutions and Imperialism. Toronto: Women’s Press.Google Scholar
Newton, E. (2014). Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Ochoa, M. (2008). Perverse citizenship: divas, marginality, and participation in “loca-lization.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36(3–4), 146–69.Google Scholar
Ochoa, M. (2014). Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Ortner, S. B., and Whitehead, H., eds. (1981). Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Palsson, G. (2015). Nature, Culture, and Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Palsson, G. (2016). Unstable bodies: biosocial perspectives on human variation. The Sociological Review Monographs, 64(1), 100–16. https://doi.org/10.1002/2059-7932.12015.Google Scholar
Pandian, A. (2019). A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Posocco, S. (2014). Secrecy and Insurgency: Socialities and Knowledge Practices in Guatemala. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Proctor, R., and Schiebinger, L. L. (2008). Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Rheinberger, H.-J. (2010). On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Rosaldo, M. Z., and Lamphere, L., eds. (1976). Woman, Culture, and Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Roscoe, W. (1998). Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: St. Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Roughgarden, J. (2004). Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Rubin, G. (2007 [1984]). Thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In Parker, R. and Aggleton, P., eds., Culture, Society and Sexuality. London: Routledge, pp. 143–79.Google Scholar
Rubin, G. (2011). Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Rubin, H. (2003). Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.Google Scholar
Schilt, K. (2010). Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Shakhsari, S. (2014). The queer time of death: temporality, geopolitics, and refugee rights. Sexualities, 17(8), 998–1015. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460714552261.Google Scholar
Sharpe, C. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Snorton, C. R. (2017). Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Spade, D. (2003). Resisting medicine, re/modeling gender. Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, 18, 15–37.Google Scholar
Spade, D. (2015). Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Stanley, E. A., and Smith, N. (2015). Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. Edinburgh: AK Press.Google Scholar
Steinbock, E. (2014). Generative negativities: Del Lagrace Volcano’s herm body photographs. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1(4), 539–51. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2815111.Google Scholar
Steinbock, E., Szczygielska, M., and Wagner, A. (2017). Thinking linking. Angelaki, 22(2), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1322801.Google Scholar
Strathern, M. (1987). An awkward relationship: the case of feminism and anthropology. Signs, 12(2), 276–92.Google Scholar
Strathern, M. (2013). Learning to See in Melanesia. Manchester: HAU Books.Google Scholar
Strathern, M. (2016). Before and after Gender. Chicago: HAU Books.Google Scholar
Stryker, S. (1994). My words to Victor Frankenstein above the village of Chamounix: performing transgender rage. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1(3), 237–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stryker, S. (2006). (De)subjugated knowledges: an introduction to transgender studies. In Stryker, S. and Whittle, S., eds., The Transgender Studies Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 1–17.Google Scholar
Stryker, S. (2008). Transgender History. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press.Google Scholar
Stryker, S. (2017). Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press.Google Scholar
Stryker, S., and Whittle, S., eds. (2006). The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Towle, E. B., and Morgan, L. M. (2002). Romancing the transgender native: rethinking the use of the “third gender” concept. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 8(4), 469–97.Google Scholar
Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Vaccaro, J. (2015). Feelings and fractals. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2–3). 273–93. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2843347.Google Scholar
Valentine, D. (2007). Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Westbrook, L., and Schilt, K. (2014). Doing gender, determining gender: transgender people, gender panics, and the maintenance of the sex/gender/sexuality system. Gender & Society, 28(1), 32–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243213503203.Google Scholar
Weston, K. (2002). Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wilchins, R. A. (1997). Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books.Google Scholar
WPATH. (2012). Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming People, Version 7. World Professional Association of Transgender Health. www.wpath.org.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×