Sociology

Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities

How the transgender experience opens up new possibilities for thinking about gender and race

Paperback

Price:
$21.95/拢17.99
ISBN:
Published:
May 29, 2018
2018
Pages:
256
Size:
5.5 x 8.5 in.
Main_subject:
Sociology
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In the summer of 2015, shortly after Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender, the NAACP official and political activist Rachel Dolezal was 鈥渙uted鈥 by her parents as white, touching off a heated debate in the media about the fluidity of gender and race. If Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman, could Dolezal legitimately identify as black?

Taking the controversial pairing of 鈥渢ransgender鈥 and 鈥渢ransracial鈥 as his starting point, Rogers Brubaker shows how gender and race, long understood as stable, inborn, and unambiguous, have in the past few decades opened up鈥攊n different ways and to different degrees鈥攖o the forces of change and choice. Transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream with dizzying speed, and ethnoracial boundaries have blurred. Paradoxically, while sex has a much deeper biological basis than race, choosing or changing one’s sex or gender is more widely accepted than choosing or changing one鈥檚 race. Yet while few accepted Dolezal鈥檚 claim to be black, racial identities are becoming more fluid as ancestry鈥攊ncreasingly understood as mixed鈥攍oses its authority over identity, and as race and ethnicity, like gender, come to be understood as something we do, not just something we have. By rethinking race and ethnicity through the multifaceted lens of the transgender experience鈥攅ncompassing not just a movement from one category to another but positions between and beyond existing categories鈥擝rubaker underscores the malleability, contingency, and arbitrariness of racial categories.

At a critical time when gender and race are being reimagined and reconstructed, Trans explores fruitful new paths for thinking about identity.