Deadline for receipt of manuscripts by guest editor Susan Stryker at the address below is October 15,1996. This is a firm deadline. Earlier submissions are strongly encouraged.
A working group of transgender scholars who are organizing a conference to help define transgender studies have offered the following as an initial description of field:
Transgender studies is devoted to the analysis of identities, collectivities, events, practices, and other phenomena that disrupt or denaturalize historically and culturally specific norms of gender. The term "gender" cannot be reduced to an unproblematized ontological status, an anatomical condition, an account of the psychical differences between masculine and feminine subjectivity, or an explanation for social differences between men and women. Rather, it is understood as the complex convergence of many cultural and material forces involving the intelligibility of the body and the communication of a sense of self to others. The analysis of these forces constitutes the work of the transgender studies field.
The subject matter of transgender studies is not limited to the experiences of individuals (primarily in North American and Western European contexts) who self-identify as "transgendered" or have been labelled as such by others. Although transsexuality, cross-dressing of various sorts, lesbian butch/femme, gay drag, and other related gender practices have been central topics in the development of the field to date, transgender studies is more broadly concerned with the mechanisms that produce and regulate embodied subjectivity in all its diversity, and with understanding the consequences of these productive and regulatory processes in various social, political, economic, and cultural domains. In this respect transgender studies intersects to a significant degree with ethnic studies, women's studies, lesbian/gay/bisexual studies, and queer theory. However, it represents a new configuration of the concerns it shares with these other more established fields and is intended to open up unanticipated lines of critical elaboration.
The emergence of transgender studies is in part a direct response to the marginalization of investigations into non-normative gender within established areas of study, however those gender norms are locally defined. It responds as well to the virtual exclusion from academic discourse of all voices that attempt to speak from self-identified transgender positions. As a field, transgender studies necessarily contest modern Western medico-juridical and psycho-therapeutic discourses that claim the ability to adequately address the entire range of transgender phenomena. It does not, however, seek to exclude any particular methodological approach or disciplinary grounding. Moreover, it actively encourages the interrogation of (and resistance to) the bases on which these concerns have been formulated--including the ways in which they incorporate unacknowledged dominations based on race, geographical location, class, education, or gender status.
All manuscripts will receive equal consideration for publication, but the following general topics seem especially timely: 1) Papers that investigate the racial, geographical, and historical constraints of "transgender" as an analytical category. 2) Work that serves to connect transgender discourses with other discourses on identity (lesbian/gay/bisexual, queer, intersexual, national/ethnic/religious identities, etc.). 3) Work that situates transgender topics within problems of much broader concern in established fields of study, and demonstrates how investigating transgender topics can offer a fresh perspective or greater insight into these problems (for example, a linguistic analysis of transgender use of singular personal pronouns). 4) "Transgender-sensitive" enthnographic work that observes existing gender behaviors, identities, and communities. 5) Work that elaborates critical or methodological problems unique to the field of transgender studies.
Work in any academic discipline will be considered, although the editor is biased in favor of interdisciplinary work. Any methodological or theoretical approach is welcome. Contributors are encouraged to pay attention to how their own subject position informs their approach to transgender subject matter. Contributors working from self-identified transgender subject positions are especially encouraged to submit manuscripts.
Because the expected number of publishable-quality manuscripts in this rapidly developing field will exceed the number that could be included in a single journal issue, the editor is planning a transgender studies anthology as a companion project to this special issue of GLQ.
Format: Please send three copies of the manuscipt, which should be between 25 and 50 pages double spaced (no more than 15,000 words), typed on one side of the page only, with standard margins. Contributors are also encouraged to submit the manuscript on computer disk (Mac MS Word preferred) in addition to the hard copies. Manuscript should conform to MLA Style Manual (1985). Please remember to include contact information for yourself: Name, s-mail/e-mail addresses, phone/fax.
Mailing address for submissions: TG/GLQ, 2708 Sunset Ave. Oakland, CA 94601.
For more information, contact Susan Stryker at mulebabyxx@aol.com.
Dallas Denny, M.A., Executive Director
American Educational Gender Information Service, Inc.
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