In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • On Gender Neutrality:Derrida and Transfeminism in Conversation
  • Marie Draz

There is already a long history of conversation between feminism and deconstruction, feminist theorists and Derrida or Derrideans. That conversation has been by turns fraught and constructive. While some of these interactions have occurred in queer feminism, to date little has been done to stage an engagement between deconstruction and transfeminism. Naysayers might think that transfeminism is too recent and too identitarian a discourse to meaningfully interact with Derrida's legacy. On the other hand, perhaps Derrida's work was too embedded in second wave feminism, and in some cases implicit misogyny and transphobia, to meet transfeminism on its own playing field. And yet, I think both suspicions shortchange these discourses. In what follows, I stage a conversation between Derrida and two writers working in the area of transfeminism: Paisley Currah and Julia Serano. I explore, in particular, how their conceptions of gender neutrality or gender pluralism are complementary and together change the so-called "question of woman" from a philosophical and political perspective.

In a recent blog post (2016), Paisley Currah reflects on the willingness of major corporations like Facebook and Apple to boycott states with anti-LGBT laws. He compares this to a relative lack of corporate interest in boycotting states with antiabortion laws. As a transgender studies scholar, Currah is especially interested in the role of trans politics in these respective debates over LGBT and women's rights. Trans politics often extends feminist insights about gender norms by more directly contesting the very necessity (and often violent effects) of assigned sex [End Page 91] in the first place. Accordingly, the term "transgender" has come to encompass multiple ways in which one might depart from the gendered expectations given at birth. Trans politics, therefore, takes the proliferation of gender difference, rather than the affirmation of a sexed essence, as a central goal. As Currah puts it, "For all those many kinds of people under the transgender umbrella, politics focuses now on all the ways in which gender can be remixed: from the now traditional male-to-female and female-to-male transition trajectories to genderqueer to non-binary." Nevertheless, Currah wonders, how has this emphasis on gender pluralism, or the expansion of possibilities for gendered identities and practices, affected the interplay between trans and feminist politics?

Currah hypothesizes that the gender pluralism pursued by some strands of transgender politics (including, he notes, his own earlier work) has resulted in the loss of an ability to diagnose the continued "subordination" of women (including trans women). This is tied to a residual gender "asymmetry." Such a politics, then, seems potentially unaccountable to the way in which "one's position toward the feminine end of the continuum (if not the binary) still has effects," effects of silencing, violence, and even death. As the proliferation of gender identities becomes an important political goal, Currah asks what has happened to the focus on misogyny and sexism. Has an emphasis on gender pluralism lessened our ability to analyze the differential effects of power and history depending on one's gender location? In other words, while the critique of an ahistorical, universalizing account of sexual difference was (and continues to be) necessary, it is also important to identify what else has been lost in this process. Currah, therefore, ends his reflective piece by calling for a "transgender feminist approach that is not gender-neutral—that dares to identify asymmetry when it sees it."

Derrida's work to deconstruct the notion of woman (and thereby, some have argued, the entire gender system) is largely consistent with this characterization of some threads of trans theory today, especially as such threads intertwine with queer theory. The two steps in the process of deconstruction are one way of telling this history: first, privilege the subordinate term and, second, upset the binary itself, thereby proliferating difference in its own right (Derrida 1971, 41). If we follow this process with the gender binary, at first we will privilege women. To take the example of choice from Derrida's "Women in the Beehive," women's studies departments will need to be founded in a context where academic pursuits related to women...

pdf

Share