In Trans Exploits Jian Neo Chen explores the cultural practices created by trans and gender-nonconforming artists and activists of color. They argue for a radical rethinking of the policies and technologies of racial gendering and assimilative social programming that have divided LGBT communities and communities of color along the lines of gender, sexuality, class, immigration status, and ability. Focusing on performance, film/video, literature, digital media, and other forms of cultural expression and activism that track the displaced emergences of trans people of color, Chen highlights the complex and varied responses by trans communities to their social dispossession. Through these responses, trans of color cultural workers such as performance artist Yozmit, writer Janet Mock, and organizer Jennicet Gutiérrez challenge dominating perceptions and institutions that kill, confine, police, and discipline trans people.

In Trans Exploits Jian Neo Chen explores the cultural practices created by trans and gender-nonconforming artists and activists of color. They argue for a radical rethinking of the policies and technologies of racial gendering and assimilative social programming that have divided LGBT communities and communities of color along the lines of gender, sexuality, class, immigration status, and ability. Focusing on performance, film/video, literature, digital media, and other forms of cultural expression and activism that track the displaced emergences of trans people of color, Chen highlights the complex and varied responses by trans communities to their social dispossession. Through these responses, trans of color cultural workers such as performance artist Yozmit, writer Janet Mock, and organizer Jennicet Gutiérrez challenge dominating perceptions and institutions that kill, confine, police, and discipline trans people.

How indolent practices in Latinx LGBTQ culture challenge capitalist imperatives to be productive. Revolting Indolence makes a case for laziness as an aesthetic-political strategy for countering the oppressive logics of cisheteronormative racial capitalism. Focusing on ways in which queer and trans Latinx people demonstrate the unwillingness of their participation in “productivist” ethics and allied respectability politics, Marcos Gonsalez argues that slacking off, lounging, daydreaming, and partying are liberatory practices—revolts that in turn are treated as revolting. Gonsalez explores how queer and trans Latinx artists refute discourses in which work is a moral good. In Paris Is Burning, RuPaul's Drag Race, documentary photography of queer and trans Latinx life in Los Angeles, and other sources, Gonsalez identifies two lazy styles: first, flagrant refusals of work that critique capitalist reason; and second, the invention of alternative aesthetic worlds beyond racial capitalism and violence targeting queer and trans people, whose rejection of the cisgender nuclear family paradigm is rightly seen as threatening the stability of a functioning capitalist system. Reclaiming laziness as a resource for radical imagining, Revolting Indolence asks us to do that which we want most and which capitalist exploitation can least tolerate: to slow down.

This volume offers a rigorous yet accessible overview of the key questions and intersectional approaches pertaining to American literature and the body. The chapters have been written in an accessible style, making them useful for undergraduates as well as for more experienced researchers.

In Cistem Failure Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks, What does it mean to have a gender that “matches” one’s sex---that is, to be cisgender---when decades of feminist theory have destroyed the belief that there is some natural way to be a sex? Moving from the The Powerpuff Girls to the greeting “How ya mama’n’em?” to their own gender identity, Bey finds that cisgender is too flat as a category to hold the myriad ways that people who may or may not have undergone gender-affirmative interventions depart from gender alignment. At the same time, blackness, they contend, strikes at the heart of cisgender’s invariable coding as white: just as transness names a non-cis space, blackness implies a non-cis space. By showing how blackness opens up a way to subvert the hegemonic power of the gender binary, Bey makes a case for an antiracist gender abolition project that rejects cisgender as a regulatory apparatus.

Trans Historical explores the plurality of gender experiences that flourished before the modern era, from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century, across a broad geographic range, from Spain to Poland and Byzantium to Boston. Refuting arguments that transgender people, experiences, and identities were non-existent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume focuses on archives—literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts—that denaturalize gender as a category. The volume historicizes the many different social lives of sexual differentiation, exploring what gender might have been before modern medicine, the anatomical sciences, and the sedimentation of gender difference into its putatively binary form. The volume's multidisciplinary group of contributors consider how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience distinct from the assignment of sex at birth. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, Trans Historical also offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal. Contributors: Abdulhamit Arvas, University of Pennsylvania; Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine; M. W. Bychowski, Case Western Reserve University; Emma Campbell, Warwick University; Igor H. de Souza, Yale University; Leah DeVun, Rutgers University; Micah James Goodrich, University of Connecticut; Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University; Anna Kłosowska; Greta LaFleur; Scott Larson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University; Robert Mills, University College London; Masha Raskolnikov; Zrinka Stahuljak, UCLA.

The increased visibility of transgender people in mainstream media, exemplified by Time magazine’s declaration that 2014 marked a “transgender tipping point,” was widely believed to signal a civil rights breakthrough for trans communities in the United States. In Terrorizing Gender Mia Fischer challenges this narrative of progress, bringing together transgender, queer, critical race, legal, surveillance, and media studies to analyze the cases of Chelsea Manning, CeCe McDonald, and Monica Jones. Tracing how media and state actors collude in the violent disciplining of these trans women, Fischer exposes the traps of visibility by illustrating that dominant representations of trans people as deceptive, deviant, and threatening are integral to justifying, normalizing, and reinforcing the state-sanctioned violence enacted against them. The heightened visibility of transgender people, Fischer argues, has actually occasioned a conservative backlash characterized by the increased surveillance of trans people by the security state, evident in debates over bathroom access laws, the trans military ban, and the rescission of federal protections for transgender students and workers. Terrorizing Gender concludes that the current moment of trans visibility constitutes a contingent cultural and national belonging, given the gendered and racialized violence that the state continues to enact against trans communities, particularly those of color.

Drawn from Sullivan's meticulously kept journals, this landmark book records the life of arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives.

An inspiring and timely debut novel from Lisa Williamson, The Art of Being Normal is about two transgender friends who figure out how to navigate teen life with help from each other. David Piper has always been an outsider. His parents think he's gay. The school bully thinks he's a freak. Only his two best friends know the real truth: David wants to be a girl. On the first day at his new school Leo Denton has one goal: to be invisible. Attracting the attention of the most beautiful girl in his class is definitely not part of that plan. When Leo stands up for David in a fight, an unlikely friendship forms. But things are about to get messy. Because at Eden Park School secrets have a funny habit of not staying secret for long , and soon everyone knows that Leo used to be a girl. As David prepares to come out to his family and transition into life as a girl and Leo wrestles with figuring out how to deal with people who try to define him through his history, they find in each other the friendship and support they need to navigate life as transgender teens as well as the courage to decide for themselves what normal really means.

This is a guide to contemporary debates and theatre practices at a time when gender paradigms are both in flux and at the centre of explosive political battlegrounds. The confluence of gender and theatre has long created intense debate about representation, identification, social conditioning, desire, embodiment, and lived experience. As this handbook demonstrates, from the conventions of early modern English, Chinese, Japanese and Hispanic theatres to the subversion of racialized binaries of masculinity and femininity in recent North American, African, Asian, Caribbean and European productions, the matter of gender has consistently taken centre stage. This handbook examines how critical discourses on gender intersect with key debates in the field of theatre studies, as a lens to illuminate the practices of gender and theatre as well as the societies they inform and represent across space and time. Of interest to scholars in the interrelated areas of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, and globalization and diasporic studies, this book demonstrates how researchers are currently addressing theatre about gender issues and gendered theatre practices. While synthesizing and summarizing foundational and evolving debates from a contemporary perspective, this collection offers interpretations and analyses that do not simply look back at existing scholarship, but open up new possibilities and understandings. Featuring essential research tools, including a survey of keywords and an annotated play list, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance.