Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment by Aren Z. Aizura (review)

Aren Z. Aizura's (2018) Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment is one of the best nonfiction books I have read recently. I was interested in Aizura's work because of the several ways in which this book's subjects resonated with my reflections on gender nonconforming subjects, gender reassignment, and the medical-industrial complex with a focus on interrogating the West/non-West binary. It focuses on trans and gender nonconforming people, issues of mobility, and access to various technologies for bodily modification. This book, divided in two parts, will be of interest to a variety of readers, especially scholars doing feminist studies, queer theory, feminist science and technology studies, and disability studies. In the first part of the book, Aizura discusses trans travel narratives, using transsexual autobiographies and documentaries on trans migration. The second part focuses on gender reassignment and somatechnologies for trans people discussing "entrepreneurialism" (24) of trans selves in accessing various medical technologies. Aizura discusses how access works differently for white and non-white trans subjects. Although this book focuses mostly on transwomen, the observations and learning could be applicable to other gender nonconforming, as well as transmasculine, people.

In the Introduction, Aizura establishes the need to discuss spatial politics within trans studies scholarship—not only in terms of the space occupied by and the migration between different sex and gender categories but also the geographical space that sometimes needs to be maneuvered in order for gender transitions to take place. Aizura introduces his own experiences of accessing gender reassignment technologies, acknowledging his located and relative white privilege in a country like Australia with state-funded healthcare. However, despite subsidized healthcare, this medico-industrial complex is also invested in framing people as patients within certain boundaries in order to limit access to technologies. He examines how ideas of travel and mobility are themselves not apolitical and are instead imbued with histories of colonialism and imperialism. He draws attention to mobility not only as a geographical or a spatial narrative but also pays attention to economic class and cultural background among other factors. Using the concept of "provincializing," Aizura examines transgender mobility, paying attention to specific contexts and interrogating the universality and homogeneity of different narratives (whether of the West or the non-West) (8–9).

In chapter one, Aizura discusses the narrative of Christine Jorgensen who was one of the first few openly out transwomen to have gone through gender reassignment surgery. In 1953, she returned to the United States after having gone through gender reassignment in Copenhagen. Aizura discusses what the figure of a person like Christine meant to numerous transpeople all over the world. While Christine's journey was from the United States to Copenhagen and back, Aizura traces, through other travel stories, the journeys that trans and gender nonconforming people may have had to make to live their lives in the bodies they wanted. He complicates this picture by bringing to the fore the historical, cultural, political and economic specificities people occupy and the implications those specificities might have on their lives. In his analyses, while these narratives are often brought forth through autobiographical telling, they also highlight a particular and possibly "proper" way in which this transition might and should take place, in order for the person to be accepted as an "ideal" transsexual subject. In this chapter, Aizura dwells on transsexuality as an assemblage that must be dealt with through various medical somatechnologies to take care of gender indeterminacy. He points out that these technologies are not so much (or not only) about the individual but also (or rather are used much more) to allow society the idea of gender as stable and nonmessy.

In chapter two Aizura examines a few transsexual memoirs, locating them within contexts of colonialism and race and the influences these may have on the transsexual person being viewed as a "proper" biopolitical citizen. He draws attention to the fact that the origins and the destinations of...