Article

Sexualities
15(3/4) 336354
Global female ! The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1363460712436480
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Judith Halberstam
University of Southern California, USA

Abstract
In this essay, I discuss the subtle discursive shifts which have made transgenderism in the
USA and Europe into simultaneously a mark of the historically specific definitional
cleaving of homosexuality from gender variance, a trendy and stylistic shift from
gender androgyny within lesbian communities to gender variance within gender-queer
communities, a sign of an internal split within feminism between the stabilization of the
category of woman and the undermining of the coherence of the category within queer
theory. At the same time, I show how transgenderism has been installed within a global
gay system as part of the hegemony of US taxonomies the addition of T to the
acronym LGBT allows for the neat division and explanation of a very wide range of
translocal phenomena in terms of the US model. So, how are we to understand and
explain the impact of transgenderism upon not only traditional gendering but also upon
queer communities and even on the ebb and flow of sexual and gender definition
globally?

Keywords
Transgender politics, transgender films, female masculinities, global, LGBT, queer

This article is divided into three sections. In the rst, I survey the work of Judith
Butler, and in particular her theories of transgender identication, to consider the
parochial nature of discussions of gender variance in North America and in
Europe. My aim in this rst section is to show how contradictory the politics
of performativity can be and how much confusion there is in a US/European
context in relation to thinking about gender stability and gender exibility and
their relations to gender normativity. Having localized a set of debates about
gender variance in a US/European context, I turn to a global context and trace
the way that these very local debates about gender variance become stabilized and
universalized when they form the basis for studies of gender variance elsewhere.
In the nal section, I survey some recent lms that take the diversity of global

Corresponding author:
Judith Halberstam, University of Southern California, University Park, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA
Email: halberst@usc.edu
Halberstam 337

transgenderism seriously. Throughout the essay, I am hoping to establish links

between notions of proper identity, citizenship and global circulations of
labels, names and ideologies of gender.

Localizing transgender politics

Transgenderism has some contradictory functions in the USA. Sometimes trans-
genderism tests the limits of any given gay or lesbians communitys tolerance for
non-normative gendering and the divide between gay and lesbian politics and
transgender recognition might be a sign of new forms of homonormativity
(Duggan, 2004); but at other times, transgender claims for recognition (often pre-
sented to gay and lesbian communities rather than on heterosexuals or even the
state) resolve into new and counter-productive forms of identitarianism; at their
best, transgender politics are part of a larger form of queer critique that destabilizes
the foundations of heteronormativity and questions the relays of stability between
gender, family and nation. As a symptom of these very contradictory tendencies
within transgender politics, we can turn to the status of transgenderism within
Judith Butlers work and think through the provocations it has oered and the
contradictions it has produced.
Transgender/transsexual objections to Butlers work have had to do with a
recommitment to essentialism and realness within transsexual theory Jay
Prosser (Prosser, 1998), Ki Namaste (Namaste, 2000), Henry Rubin (Rubin,
2003) and even Stephen Whittle (Whittle, 2000) and others associate performativity
and constructivism with playfulness and abstract theory while they want to claim
serious and deep commitments to the gendered body. Obviously, there is a strong
disagreement between queer and trans activists about the meaning of the gendered
body that should not be glossed over trans activists, particularly in England, have
committed themselves to a reading of transsexuality that understands gender as an
ideological framework but also as a set of practices and behaviors that depend
upon the stability of the sexed body. Trans activists therefore tend to defer to an
almost empirical understanding of sex and the sexed body or else, in recent context,
there is a kind of neo-liberal model of gender queerness in which we are supposed
to see as many genders and sexes as there are bodies. In either case, whether we are
talking about a transsexuality that emerges from the mismatch of sex and gender or
a transgenderism that announces itself as an innite array of gendered bodies, we
are not really using a Butlerian framework.
Transgender suspicion of Butler also draws upon what is now a rather long
history of mutual distrust between transgender/transsexual people and academic
researchers. Jacob Hale at one point actually produced a rubric for non-transsexual
researchers writing about transsexuals to follow (Hale, 1997). Henry Rubin
changed his ethnography of transsexual men numerous times over the course of
writing and researching it in response to objections from his own informants
(Rubin, 2003). And numerous trans community forums have featured admonitions
338 Sexualities 15(3/4)

to researchers and theorists about the dangers of theorizing about and across
transgender bodies. More recent work on transgender bodies by Aren Aizura
(2009) and others, however, has side-stepped these proscriptive formulations and
has managed successfully to link questions of gender exibility to issues of migra-
tion, globalization and citizenship.
The most complex articulation of transsexual suspicion of Butlerian gender
theory occurs in the chapter in Jay Prossers book, Second Skins: Body
Narratives of Transsexuality, where he asks what the eect of a theory of gender
performativity has been upon our understanding of transsexuality; he also argues
that for all our talk about materiality and embodiment, it is precisely the body
that vanishes within ever more abstract theories of gender, sexuality and desire
(Prosser, 1998). Prosser comments specically upon the close relationship between
queerness and gender performativity and situates transsexuality as that which is at
odds with precisely such understandings of the body:

queers alignment of itself with transgender performativity represents queers sense of

its own higher purpose, in fact there are transgendered trajectories, in particular
transsexual trajectories, that aspire to what this scheme devalues. Namely, there are
transsexuals who seek very pointedly to be non-performative, to be constative, quite
simply to be. (Prosser, 1998: 32)

Since Prosser wrote this critique of Butler more than a decade ago, the much
contested relationship between transgender and transsexual and queer has lost
much of its rancor and the contemporary landscape of gender in US/European
gender-queer communities is immensely more complicated than the opposition
between real transsexuals and playful, performative queers can conjure.
Which is not to say that skirmishes do not continue to break out between trans
people who favor surgeries and medical interventions and gays and lesbians who
feel that transgenderism might be a capitulation to gender binarism. Indeed, at the
Frameline LGBT lm festival in 2007 a controversy broke out about a 20-minute
lm titled Gendercator. The lm, a dystopian fantasy, is described by director
Catherine Crouch on her website as: a short satirical take on female body modi-
cation and gender. The story uses the Rip van Winkle model to extrapolate from
the past into a possible future (Crouch, 2006). Crouch, unfortunately, merges two
rather distinct issues around body modication namely plastic surgery and sex
reassignment surgeries in her nightmare vision of a gender normative future. She
writes by way of explanation:

Things are getting very strange for women these days. More and more often we see
young heterosexual women carving their bodies into porno Barbie dolls and lesbian
women altering themselves into transmen. Our distorted cultural norms are making
women feel compelled to use medical advances to change themselves, instead of
working to change the world. This is one story, showing one possible scary future.
Halberstam 339

I am hopeful that this story will foster discussion about female body modication and
medical ethics. (Crouch, 2006)

Crouch also notes on her website that the lm is supposed to be satirical, and
that it imagines a world where [s]ex roles and gender expression are rigidly binary
and enforced by law and social custom . . . one where butch women and sissy boys
are no longer tolerated gender variants are allowed to choose their gender, but
they must choose one and follow its rigid constraints (Crouch, 2006).
Crouch hoped that her lm would provoke discussion, and so it did, but
probably not in the way she imagined. Blogs and chat sites quickly took up the
controversial lm and expressed dismay that LGBT lm festivals would program
such a trans-phobic lm. Frameline actually cancelled its screening of The
Gendercator in response to a petition signed by 150 people calling for the lms
removal from the program. Transgender historian Susan Stryker explained on a
public blog why she had signed the petition:

I decided to support this petition because Frameline, as an LGBT inclusive

organization, is not the appropriate venue for this sort of work. The lm
expresses a long-familiar anti-transgender polemic: the idea that transsexuals are
anti-gay, anti-feminist political reactionaries who collude with repressive social and
cultural power; furthermore, that transsexuals are complicit in the non-consensual
bodily violation of women. (Stryker, 2007)

Stryker goes on to refer to a history of anti-transgender feminism and to the

problem of projecting dangerous desires onto an alien other and then casting
that other as a threat to our way of life. In this case, Crouch makes transsexu-
ality complicit with a program of gender conformity (which in her lm is promoted
by Christian fundamentalists as well as transsexuals) and casts the gender variant
subject as a victim of new medical technologies within which the body always has a
gender and that gender must always be clearly expressed.
The Gendercator will doubtless prove to be a storm in a teacup given that it is
not a very good lm and it seems to have a premise that may well depend much
more on stupidity than malicious intent. Unlike Janice Raymonds well-received
diatribe against transsexuals, The Transsexual Empire, which was written in 1979
but continues to spark outrage today (Raymond, 1979), The Gendercator will prob-
ably not outlive its ve minutes of infamy. But the responses to the lm, ranging
from pure outrage to calls for censorship or counter demands for full engagement
with the issues the lm raises, reveal the confusion that persists within conversa-
tions about transsexuality in terms of its relationship to gender norms, victimiza-
tion, other forms of body modication, cosmetic surgery, marginalization, gender
transgression and so on. The controversy also reveals how important it is to have
complex, theoretical discussions about gender in circulation in queer communities
given the propensity for discussions to fall quickly into for or against modes of
argumentation. The impulse to tag various media as trans-friendly or trans-phobic
340 Sexualities 15(3/4)

also shuts down the possibility of more nuanced discussion, discussions within
which one might express uncertainty about the meaning of transgenderism or con-
cern about the circulation of hormonal therapies without being labeled trans-
phobic. And nally, the castigation of one short lm as the site of pernicious
trans-phobia might overlook other problems in the lm, namely the way it sub-
scribes to a kind of neo-liberal understanding of identity (one shared, by the way,
by countless lms in festivals like Framelines LGBT festival) as something that
one should be able to freely choose and cultivate and of gender as a set of free-
oating custom options for embodiment that must be protected and not submitted
to a regime of forced decision making.
The controversy over The Gendercator is a good place to examine the legacy of
Butlers work in relation to the vexed topic of gender transgression precisely
because it illuminates just how confused we are about gender xity and gender
exibility and the relation of each to normativity and transgression. For some,
gender xity is the sign of the stubbornness of identication and for others
gender exibility is the indication that discourse has its limits and that some
basic human instinct for variation always escapes gender ideologies. Indeed,
Butlers own opus is inconsistent about the question of limits, constraint, expres-
sion, and activation. In her early work in Gender Trouble, in 1990, Butler rewrote
liberal feminism and even parts of western philosophy by making the gender vari-
ant woman the subject of each. While the masculine woman, she claimed, was
unthinkable within French feminism because of its commitment to a gender
stable and unied conception of womanhood, masculinity was similarly unthink-
able as female for continental philosophy and for psychoanalysis. And in Gender
Trouble (1990), gender was a site of constraint not exibility. In the book that
followed, Bodies That Matter (1993), Butler responded to various misreadings of
her earlier work, precisely around the topic of exibility and attempted again to
emphasize the inexibility of the gendered condition, its resistance to voluntary
action, but its availability for only discrete re-signications. While in Gender
Trouble the butch body represented the trouble with a stable understanding of
woman, in Bodies That Matter the butch body represented the trouble with a
stable understanding of masculine power (the phallus) that could not conceive of
masculinity without men. In both books, however, gender was not exible, rather it
was the inexibility of a female commitment to masculinity in each case that
signied the thorn in the side of feminism and psychoanalytic conceptions of the
phallus. And nally, in Undoing Gender (2004), Butler returns to the entwined
interests of transgenderism, intersexuality and transsexuality to argue that gender
stability plays a crucial role in the production of the category of the human.
Indeed, many of our understandings of the human proceed from and presume
gender normativity as a foundation for other modes of being. In this book she
calls for recognition for trans modes of being.
Butlers work from the last 15 years presents us with a formidable archive of
writings on gender, myth, narrative, desire, embodiment, agency, structure,
kinship, materiality, disruption, disorder, action, reaction, unpredictability and
Halberstam 341

sexual melancholia. No one narrative about gender emerges from this archive, no
single theory of transgender, no singular pronouncement on identity, no unitary
position about gender transgression. In fact, in considering Butlers work as a
whole, we might learn from Lacans famous return to Freud and think about
what it means to contemplate the opus of a major thinker and how we might do so
without forcing the work into one narrative. In his return to Freuds work, one of
Lacans motivations was the disruption of the tendency to cast Freudian psych-
ology as a unied eld, as the statement of one consciousness, issued over time but
as a singular statement. Lacans contribution, in a way, was to refuse the repre-
sentation of the Freudian archive as a complete and total text and he sought,
through dense and complex interpretations, to make the archive uid again, to
free it from the inertia that often sets in once a complex body of work has been
consumed, absorbed and seemingly understood. Lacan wrote:

What such a return to Freud involves for me is not a return of the repressed, but
rather taking the antithesis constituted by the phase in the history of the psychoana-
lytic movement since the death of Freud, showing what psychoanalysis is not, and
seeking with you the means of revitalizing that which has continued to sustain it, even
in deviation. (Lacan, 1977: 116)

Because Butlers work is so widely read, so widely deployed, in her own time,
there is a tendency for readers to situate the work as a monumental set of writings
that are united in relation to her own existence as a living, writing, speaking sub-
ject. Indeed, the very insights that Butler works from in her own work insights
about the trouble of being, about the fragmentation of self, refusals of unied
identities and categories are discarded when it comes to the characterization of
her work as a whole. So, in place of the notion of a Butlerian text lled with
expressive moments that can be traced back to a unied subject, lets work instead
with its contradictions, its discontinuities and its inconsistencies. And lets do so
not to catch Butler out, within some model of intellectual labor which understands
phallic power to be the product of the lack of the other, but rather to recognize the
structure of the archive itself as always a eld of historically located speech that
means something dierent in its moment of utterance than it might mean later in
its moment of interpretation or circulation, now as opinion, now as truth, now as
consequence.
And so, it is important to recognize that Undoing Gender and the lexicon it has
produced for Butlers students and adherents is actually engaged in a theoretical
project that is quite at odds with the project she began in Gender Trouble and
Bodies That Matter and that the dierence between these rather dierent theoriza-
tions of gender has to do with her turn to ethics in the later work and particularly
her interest in the recognition of gender variance as an ethical project. As stated
earlier, Butler has sometimes been cast as the embodiment of a version of queer
theory that dismisses transsexuality as false consciousness while casting trans-
genderism as the apex of queer subjectivity, and she has often been positioned as
342 Sexualities 15(3/4)

a queer feminist with questionable views on trans politics. In Undoing Gender

Butler goes to great lengths to dispel this particular characterization of her work
and she places gender transitivity at the very heart of political life. She writes:

The suggestions that butch, femme, and transgendered lives are not essential referents
for a refashioning of political life, and for a more just and equitable society, fails to
acknowledge the violence that the otherwise gendered suer in the public world and
fails as well to recognize that embodiment denotes a contested set of norms governing
who will count as a viable subject within the sphere of politics. (Butler, 2004: 28)

In Undoing Gender, Butler returns to the topics of intersexuality and transsexu-

ality and transgenderism but, this time, her focus is not upon the ways in which the
transgender body represents a permanently troubled relationship to stable identity,
but rather she turns to the concept of livable lives and talks about the exclusion
of trans bodies from the category of the human. In Gender Trouble, the human
emerged as a bloody consequence of the abjection of non-normative bodies; in
Undoing Gender, the human is the category to which we all aspire and Butler
articulates a politics of survival and recognition and calls for us to think about
how to create a world in which those who understand their gender and their desire
to be non-normative can live and thrive not only without the threat of violence
from the outside but without the pervasive sense of their own unreality, which can
lead to suicide or suicidal life (Butler, 2004: 219). This linked for Butler to a
politics of freedom but all this also presumes the impossibility of living as an
unreal person without wanting to kill oneself of course, all kinds of people live
removed from the authenticating assurance of the real, many do much more than
survive, many refuse and resist the notion of the real. There is a sort of heroic and
liberal narrative at work here that really backs o from the earlier Butler work that
wanted to expose a kind of false expectation of liberation lurking in the project of
naming and recognition.
Recent debates between Butler and Rosi Braidotti perhaps highlight the tension
in Butlers own work between humanist and anti-humanist strands. When Butler
takes on a version of gender normative feminism in Gender Trouble, she, like
Braidotti, is arguing for a non-unied, non-teleological politics and subjectivity,
she recognizes the instability of the project woman; but, when she argues for
almost normative forms of justice and recognition in Undoing Gender, and when
the transgender subject becomes more unied than woman ever was in her theor-
etical schemas, or when she remains completely bound to psychoanalytic frames of
being and becoming and so can only see the mechanism of gender and ignores race
and class, an incipient humanism creeps into the discourse. Rosi Braidotti (2006) has
accused Butler of cultivating a theology of lack and of rejecting a Deleuzian
reading of psychoanalysis as the installation of the law of the father. But Butler
prefers to see herself as someone focused on the labor of the negative in
the Hegelian sense and as a philosopher who is deeply interested in questions of
survival (Butler, 2004: 195). And here, I think we see clearly the contradiction at
Halberstam 343

work in Butlers discourse on gender the labor of the negative pulls her thinking
in one direction and the ethical questions about survival and livability pull in a
very dierent direction. While Braidotti accuses her of a theology of lack, I would
say that the problem lies less in lack and more in the notion of restitution that
follows.
But, when Butler shifts out of the purely ethical reading of gender and inhabits
the position of what I would call a theorist of the counter-intuitive, this is when she
is at her best: when she theorizes the butch desire (the desire of the butch and for
the butch) that prevails despite the oppressive ideologies of sexual dierence, when
she theorizes in the spirit of what she calls critical ambivalence a tag she
applied recently to Hannah Arendt in a review of Arendts Jewish Writings,
(Butler, 2007). This critical ambivalence can be discerned in some of her work
when she casts queers and trans as surviving, and more than that as thriving; at
such moments, she becomes a theorist of the possible, not utopian, but ever
ambivalent about both the totality of power and the ability to resist.

Global transgenders
The critical ambivalence that underwrites most of Judith Butlers work is the feature
of her work that should be most inuential in a global discussion of gender. In other
words, rather than transposing notions of performativity or gender trouble, the
critical ambivalence that Butler models about identities and their fragile claims on
legitimacy could provide a method for the analysis of gender variance in a variety of
contexts. In a recent book on Womens Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing
Asia, editors Saski Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood and Abha Bhaiya propose to
decolonize global queer studies, by paying careful attention to the local forms
of gender and sexuality regimes in Asia and by resisting the tendency to cast Asian
sexualities as simply variations on the model of North American and European
queer formations (Wieringa et al., 2009). When we refuse to verify the seemingly
inevitable priorness of US/European sexual economies, the volume promises to
show, it becomes possible to recognize and learn from other modes of gender iden-
tication embedded in other kinds of sexual practice and productive of alternative
forms of sociality and community and identity. The goal is commendable to say the
least but the collection of essays itself has a hard time maintaining the localness of the
US/European forms and an even harder time imagining the potential globality of
Asian gender and sexual practices. While the editors of the collection and many of
the authors use the term female masculinities to describe some of the non-lesbian,
gender variant practices between women and transgender men that they study, the
US/European understanding of lesbian keeps creeping back into the framework
as a foundational term of liberated subjectivity against which all other sexual sub-
jectivities must be measured. In her own essay on Womens same-sex practices in
Japan, for example, Saskia Wieringa argues that the Japanese language does not
even have its own word for lesbian (Wieringa, 2009: 24). This notion that other
languages should have a word that signies female sexual variance in a way that
344 Sexualities 15(3/4)

corresponds to the English term lesbian, repeats the very global hierarchy that the
book says it wants to avoid by moving away from the term queer. As Gayatri
Gopinath shows in her work on South Asian same-sex sexualities, anthropologists
have been all too quick to scan South Asian languages for words that correspond to
lesbian, and, when they do not nd them, they quickly move to the ludicrous
proposal that same-sex sexualities do not exist there (Gopinath, 2005). But this is
not to say that anthropological work on sex and sexuality inevitably sustains global
hierarchies indeed, there is a wide archive of work available, particularly on male
same-sex relations, which is seriously attentive to questions of traveling theory and
categories (Boellstor, 2007; Manalansan, 2003).
Despite this anthologys failure to live up to its decolonizing promise, I want to
think with the work it showcases, about the true potential of the term female
masculinity (as opposed to lesbian) in a global frame and about the ways it can
be used to undo the hegemony of the global gay/lesbian and now, global trans-
genderism. What I mean by global LGBT, is the way that a set of categorizations
and the framing logics they imply have been circulated and exported around the
globe, at least in part by well-meaning anthropologists, and have subsequently
blotted out other logics, other names and other sexual economies. So, in this sec-
tion, I discuss the subtle discursive shifts which have made transgenderism in the
USA and Europe into simultaneously a mark of the historically specic denitional
cleaving of homosexuality from gender variance, a trendy and stylistic shift from
gender androgyny within lesbian communities to gender variance within gender-
queer communities, a sign of an internal split within feminism between the stabil-
ization of the category of woman and the undermining of the coherence of the
category within queer theory. At the same time, I show how transgenderism has
been installed within a global gay system as part of the hegemony of US taxo-
nomies the addition of T to the acronym LGBT allows for the neat division
and explanation of a very wide range of translocal phenomena in terms of the US
model. So, how are we to understand and explain the impact of transgenderism
upon not only traditional gendering but also upon queer communities and even on
the ebb and ow of sexual and gender denition globally?
Let me start by considering the function of transgenderism in relation to global
importations of US models of sexual and gender denition. As many queer anthro-
pologists have shown, cross-cultural models of sexuality and gender can be extre-
mely useful in denaturalizing Euro-American notions of embodiment, community
and relation but, unfortunately, as we all know, they are too often used to cast
Euro-American models as contemporary and liberated while registering queer
forms of desire elsewhere as anachronistic. In the liberal Euro-American context,
modern gay and lesbian history has favored a narrative about progressive enlight-
enment within which the same-sex couple emerged into liberation towards the end
of the 20th century by throwing o the tyranny of inversion (tyrannical because it
presumed heterosexual structures of desire) and by inhabiting normative gender
identities and refusing role play. When Euro-American medical discourse, under
the inuence of a psychoanalytic focus upon sexual aim and object choice, shifted
Halberstam 345

gender variance out of the category of homosexual and recognized a new subject
position in the transsexual, the continued link between gender variance and homo-
sexuality was cast as anachronistic and pre-political.
Today, in the USA and Europe, particularly in white gay and lesbian commu-
nities, same sex is a reassuring description of the happy stability of the sex-gender
system. And so, when US researchers nd evidence of cross-gendered
homosexualities elsewhere, they have a tendency to interpret it as wholly
dierent from Euro-American models and as pre-modern. This has the strange
eect of erasing the centrality of cross-gender identication within western
homosexualities and projecting it onto other sexual formations, local and global,
as a pre-political phenomena.
Much of the transnational discourse about gender variance has emerged within
anthropological studies of sexuality and gender denition. And much of this
discourse is indeed guilty of constructing some kind of global scale for the measure-
ment of sexual progress by using the US model as a gold standard for the inte-
gration of sexual minorities and as a mark of the level of liberal tolerance in any given
national context. For example, some researchers have explained female to male
transgender identications elsewhere as characteristic of the absence of a feminist
consciousness that supposedly limits the reproduction of conventional gender norms
(Blackwood, 2002) and others have cast same-sex desire itself as wholly absent from
non-western contexts (Seizer, 1995). At the same time, new work on toms in the
Phillippines (Fajardo, 2008), Thailand (Sinnott, 2004) and Taiwan (Martin, 2007),
onnabes in Japan, marimachas in Mexico and enforcers in Puerto Rico (some of
which can be found in the aforementioned anthology: Wieringa et al., 2009), provide
a rich and complex picture of alternative sex-gender systems.
In Womens Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia, the editors
sometimes also fall into the trap of comparing a standard of social and sexual
egalitarianism in Western gay and lesbian relationships to relationships in
Asian between masculine women and their partners which conform to the
dominant gender regimes in their societies (Wieringa et al., 2009: 9). Wieringa
and Blackwood elaborate: In this case gender regimes produce a gendered subject-
ivity that does not proer any explicit opposition to dominant ideologies; the lack of
opposition preserves these gender identities through outward compliance with
gender hierarchies (2009: 9). So, where we see masculine women partnered with
conventionally feminine women, apparently, we can speak of conformity to gender
hierarchies; but when we see two outwardly conventionally feminine or softly andro-
gynous women together, we should understand that we are witnessing social and
sexual egalitarianism. All kinds of work on butch/femme US and on gender vari-
ance under the inuence of Foucault, Butler and Rubin would strongly contest this
opposition of sameness/equality and dierence/hierarchy not to mention the ascrip-
tion of gender conformity to the couple who mimic dominant gender regimes.
Here the use of the term female masculinity may well steer us away from the
hegemonic imposition of the category of lesbian, but instead of signaling a
sexual arrangement that may elude conventional western liberal feminist wisdom,
346 Sexualities 15(3/4)

the authors merely read their own understandings of dominant gender regimes
through the couples they meet. All gendered behavior on the masculinefeminine
model, they imply, partakes in the continuation of conventional gender. And all
same-sex activity that lacks the masculinefeminine frame should be read as escaping
it. In an era when the image of two white, wealthy feminine lesbians raising a
designer baby can be deployed in nancial planning commercials among other
advertising, this kind of assumption requires some careful rethinking (Eng, 2003).
Some of the mistakes made by anthropologists of gender and sexuality when
studying gender and sexual variance in non-western contexts could be avoided by
using dierent methods and frameworks for gauging the similarity or dierences
between the various models; we could avoid being trapped by the area studies or
national model, for example, and might look for repeating logics across dierent
national scapes. For example, while we might want to be careful about reading
sameness into a range of tomboy or tomboi or boi or tom formations in
Asia and elsewhere, we should at least study the category cross-culturally to look for
both continuities and distinctions. If we use a standard for comparison other than
the national like, for example, urban gender variance or rural gender vari-
ance, tomboy forms we may nd that certain structural similarities do exist
outside a national framework. For example, a number of dierent studies show that
many rural communities in Russia, India as well as many in Eastern Europe feature
girls who get raised as boys when the labor of the farm or family business demands
male labor. These men or husbands should be studied in relation to each other,
or in relation to other roles that are produced of necessity rather than in relation to
trend stimulated roles such as urban transgender bois in the USA.
Anthropological studies have both over- and underemphasized gender variance
in their studies and this has, again, had the eect of rendering US models as more
stable and coherent than they really are and of both exoticizing and down-playing
transgenderism in other contexts. Let me amplify.

Anthropological fascination with gender deviance. This has had the eect of over-
representing and exoticizing gender variant individuals when researching minority
sexual identities or practices. The fascination with hijaras in India for example or
bakla in the Phillippines or onnabes in Japan or travestis in Brazil has had several
deleterious eects rst it has cast such gender variant groups as representative of
transgender practices in those places but second it has linked gender variance to sex
work making it unclear when a cross-gender identication has been made for the
purpose of selling sex and when it has other kinds of motivations. Anthropologists
seem to have been less interested in transgender identications outside of sex-work
contexts.

Anthropologists have often focused on gender variant women rather than female to male
transgenders. Again, the relationship between sex work and gender variance (which
really needs to be theorized in relation to how anthropologists nd their informants)
Halberstam 347

dominates the research eld. Sex workers are a little easier to nd than say passing
women or masculine women in any given community. Why has there been so little
research on female-bodied transgender subjects (Megan Sinnotts book Toms and
Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same Sex Relationships in Thailand (2004) is
a recent welcome addition to the eld). What is the connection between research
funds and sex work/AIDS research and so on and what kinds of funds have been and
are available for researching women where there is no connection to health con-
cerns per se or informal economic circuits? What are the particular problems faced
by queer female researchers studying queer sexual practices? Are there dierent
problems for diasporic researchers versus North American researchers? Antonia
Chao, for example, has written eloquently about her problems as a Taiwanese
anthropologist returning to Taipei to study T-Po relationships (Chao, 2001). As a
Taiwanese lesbian, Chao was expected both to be familiar with the T-Po system and
to t into it. When neither was true, her informants positioned her as a big sister in
order to resolve the dissonance between her identications and theirs. Here we might
think not just about the strategies used by the anthropologist to work with her
informants but also the strategies and deliberations of the informants who want
to and have to deal with the researcher. What happens when a context of suspicion
mediates between the informants and the researcher? What is the eect of an overly
structured methodological approach and how does it actually break down more
intuitive relations between any given community and a researcher trying to learn
about that community.
In the case of female masculinity, for example, it may make a dierence in the
ethnographic work if the USA/Europe-based researcher is butch. I know from my
own travels in Japan, Thailand and Taiwan that I was welcomed into certain
gender-stratied communities because I was recognizable as a masculine person
within those contexts. In all of these places, I was told of gender normative
researchers who had been met with suspicion because they had asked what were
taken to be stupid or patronizing questions about gender, questions which, by
the way, would also be heard as uninformed if they were posed to a USA/Europe-
based butch or transgender man. The gender identication of the researcher, in
these cases, matters; it matters greatly that a US butch can be read as a T or a
tomboy, and it matters greatly, as Antonia Chao was gracious enough to realize,
when her gender identication cannot be pinpointed.

The feminist problem. Has feminist anthropology impeded the work on gender-
variant female-bodied people by looking for lesbians? For example, when mas-
culine women and trans-men have entered the eld of research in contemporary
queer anthropology, they have often been cast as examples of pre-feminist lesbian
formations. Some researchers have read these queer contexts only through a North
American understanding of lesbian as feminist, same-sex and androgyn-
ous and have rendered them as dupes of patriarchy (Blackwood, 2002). In many
contexts, feminist networks actually facilitate the research on same-sex desire in any
given region and so access comes through an educated and politicized group rather
348 Sexualities 15(3/4)

than through contacts that lie outside of academic networks. Furthermore, in many
places, there is a loudly articulated set of conicts between feminists and cross-
gendered queers and so the gender-variant subjects are continually interpreted
through and by their recalcitrant relation to feminism. And so, the research that
emerges from looking for lesbians or constructing a feminist framework can be
and should be cast as a helpful record of the identications and commitments of the
researcher herself but it tells us very little about gender-variant subjects elsewhere.
And so, for example, Evie Blackwells fascinating work on Indonesian tombois is
a complex account not of the tombois but of Midwestern white lesbians.

Global transgenderism. While the tendency to read gender variance in non-western

contexts as a sign of anachronism has not been particularly productive, nor has the
new tendency to read all gender variance as transgenderism this practice, fairly
new given the very recent rise in popularity of the term TG has had an immediate
impact. When I was in Zagreb at a Gender Conference in October 2006, activists
from Slovenia and Croatia were complaining about having to use transgender in
their funding applications rather than any local terms for gender variance. One
presentation at the conference by activists from Kyrgystan was about the dierent
terms they use for gender-variant people. The terms were calibrated by age as well
as by class status and degree of gender variance and there were at least four terms
in use. These terms were explained by the activists but then promptly discarded in
favor of the term of transgender. In making the switch to transgender, the
local terms and specic referencing of pre-marriage age and post-marriage age
gender identities was lost. This is important because the post-marriage age cate-
gories implied a kind of free space for contrary gender and sexual identication.
Once a female-bodied person is past her reproductive prime, the social scrutiny of
her sexual activities and gender identication may lessen.

Transgender film in a global frame

By way of conclusion I want to draw together the two foregoing parts of this
article, the analysis of the multiple meanings of transgenderism in US/European
and beyond, and I will do so by thinking very briey about three recent lms, one a
German feature lm another a North American New York based documentary,
and the last a Swiss-Israeli documentary on Philipino transgender guest workers in
Tel Aviv. All these lms feature transgender material but treat transgenderism as
part of a complex matrix of identication rather than as a singular feature of
embodiment that can determine livability or unlivability by itself.

The Aggressives: Made by Daniel Peddle (2005)

Until very recently, representations of and research about and by transgenders and
gender-variant people in the USA has focused almost exclusively on white subjects.
What dierence does it make when we consider TG and its lived contexts in
Halberstam 349

relation to race and class and how does this allow us to challenge the hegemony of
US denitions and accounts of gender variance? One lm, The Aggressives, for
example, focuses upon a group of transgender/butch Puerto Rican and Black
studs in New York City and follows them for a period of ve years. As a
documentary, The Aggressives is not particularly interesting formally, but, as an
account of the very dierent experience of gender variance for women/men of
color, it is crucial. Calling themselves aggressives, these butches readily distin-
guish themselves from both women and transsexuals and they talk about their
sexual practices, their early childhood experiences, their relationships, their work
lives. But they also discuss their relation to the law, to drug cultures, to money,
poverty, hardship, their very negative experiences with the medical world and their
complete lack of social support.
Over the course of the ve years, one aggressive has an unexplained hysterec-
tomy, one goes to jail, one joins the army and then goes AWOL when commis-
sioned to go to Iraq, one struggles to keep a job and does drugs. Some have
children, some live with their parents. Being trans, this documentary shows, just
opens up another and dierent channel for punishment for the Black or brown
body. The Black aggressive who gets a hysterectomy, goes into the hospital
for some unusual bleeding and is not informed why she has had her uterus
removed this episode highlights a very dierent relationship between the
trans subject and medical technology than the one that is often highlighted in
relation to transsexuality. Here it is the history of the sterilization of Black
women that haunts the transgender body, not the history of sex changes.
Another subject ends up in jail and she remarks quickly upon the sex lives of
prisoners. As an aggressive, a jail term, she is placed high in the hierarchy of
sex/gender roles inside the jail but, she comments, sex means something dierent
in prison, as do prison genders. Unlike conventional transgender documentaries
in the USA that focus on the struggles of an individual with his gender issues and
the response to them by his family and friends, The Aggressives shows that
transgenderism cannot be separated out from the complex constellation of
social pressures that converge on the Black body in the USA. It reminds us of
the futility of discrete analysis, and of the importance of what Rod Ferguson calls
queer of color critiques (2003) which bind studies of sexuality and gender to
considerations of class and race. The documentary also marks the whiteness of
the category transgender and implies that other terms exist in other commu-
nities and that these other terms indicate the function of gender in relation to a
specic set of life experiences.

Fremde Haut/Unveiled: Directed by Angelina Maccarone

(Alles Wird Gut)
On the website for Angelina Maccarones independent lm Unveiled (2005), the
lms original German title, Fremde Haut, is explained with reference to the UN
term for asylum seekers. Asylum seekers are spoken about as fremde Haut or
350 Sexualities 15(3/4)

in orbit, the website explains, because they can actually nd legal domicile
nowhere at all. This lm, about an Iranian woman who leaves Iran and her
female lover upon fear of legal punishment and then passes as a male in order to
seek asylum in Germany, addresses a complex host of issues about gender, sexu-
ality, migration, labor, exile, language, culture, race and location. Literally trans-
lated, fremde Haut means foreign skin but this notion of asylum seekers as
in orbit, as lost in space or in perpetual motion frames the lm quite dierently
than the English title. While the English title Unveiled ts comfortably into hege-
monic US constructions of the closet and visibility it also links the discourse on
visibility to one of freedom by playing on western anxieties about the meaning of
various forms of head coverings for Muslim women. The German title, Fremde
Haut, in its metaphoric meaning, in orbit, refuses both the easy logic of visible/
invisible that is implied by the notion of veiling and the inside/outside logic that the
idea of being in a foreign skin prefers; instead, it places the emphasis upon
motion, transition, ight, precariousness and inbetweeness.
Fremde Haut tells the story of Fariba Tabrizi (Jasmin Tabatabai), a queer
Iranian who fears that she will be jailed or worse if her relationship with another
woman becomes public. Fariba arrives in Germany after a long plane ride and then
stays in a refugee center with other asylum seekers, among them Siamak (Navid
Akhaven), a young political activist. Siamaks application for asylum is granted but
he kills himself in despair over his family in Iran. Faribas application is denied
because lesbianism is not a valid excuse for leaving Iran and so, when she nds
Siamaks lifeless body, she makes a decision to take on his persona. Burying his
body respectfully, she now dresses as Siamak, takes his papers and assumes the
responsibility for writing to his family. As Siamak, Fariba nds work illegally in a
cabbage factory and begins a romance with a German woman, Anna (Anneke Kim
Surnau). The lms English title then, Unveiled, stresses the themes of disguise and
disclosure, deception and truth, body and performance but it misses the much more
active frameworks of labor and leisure, motion and connement, desire and space.
In the developing relationship between Fariba/Siamak and Anna, the lm manages
to address the queerness not only of the relationship but also the queerness of the
precarious life of the asylum seeker. Balanced as s/he is between nations, identities
and legibility, the asylum seeker traces a queer orbit as she passes back and forth
between legal and illegal, man and woman, citizen and foreigner. By naming this
space in between as queer, we begin to see the importance of mutual articulations
of race, nation, migration and sexuality.
The lm, on account of the way it weaves a story about veiling and unveiling
through a narrative of sexual otherness and transnational migration, pulls together
some of the most provocative topics in a European context. Addressing sexual
citizenship, queer Muslims, the new politics of visibility, sexuality and religion,
space/location and desire draw our attention to the radically transformed
European landscape of the late 20th and early 21st centuries where we nd new
forms of queer activism and queer identity and community arising in new immi-
grant communities and their relations to heteronormative demands of state and
Halberstam 351

family and in opposition to stable conceptions of nation, citizenship and identity.

As we see in Fremde Haut, Faribas decision to cross-dress and pass coincides with
her desire to seek asylum the fact that asylum depends literally upon her being
someone else implies the pressures to conform, assimilate and integrate that attend
to every eort to relocate for people moving from certain parts of the world to
Europe. And as we also see in that lm, the gender politics of crossing are inected
by new geometries of desire that become animated precisely by the coincidence of
cultural identity, gender performance, labor, and location. The specicity of the
desire that arcs back and forth between Siamak and Anna has everything to do
with Siamaks radical unlocatability, his foreignness, his non-German masculinity
and his quiet incongruence. That desire, signicantly, works quite dierently once
Siamak has been unveiled.
Since sexuality studies and queer theory in a European context has not often
addressed itself to issues of political economy, racial formation and the politics of
immigration, this lm actually directs attention to the limited framework for think-
ing sex in Europe. At a screening of the lm at the 2006 London LGBTQ Film
Festival, viewers had a hard time understanding the lms critique not of Iran but
of Europe. And so when the actress who plays Siamak stood up to take questions,
despite the fact that she is a German woman born to Iranian parents in Germany,
she was asked questions exclusively about how it is for queers in Iran. The lm is
about how dire it is to be a queer, passing immigrant in small-town Germany,
something the actress may actually know something about, and yet this was not
seen as a topic for conversation.
In his oft-quoted work on refugee status and the state of exception, Georgio
Agamben speaks of the contradiction whereby international human rights should
be crafted for those in orbit, asylum seekers, but which actually works by
excluding all such people from access to rights at all (Agamben, 1998). Agamben
is interested in naming and putting into relation all those people who lie outside
the representational capacities of the state and he identies Jews and Gypsies as
examples. Here we could advocate for a queer alliance of the dispossessed and the
precarious, the Jews and Gypsies in some historical moments, the Asian migrant
laborer in another, the Muslim activist in one moment, the diasporic queer
in another. We might argue for the queerness of the coming community or the
multitudes as Hardt and Negri term them (Hardt and Negri, 2005), the queer
outsiderness of those who are lost, those who will be lost and those who were
always already in orbit.

Paper Dolls: Directed by Tomer Heymann

Finally, the focus on race, immigration and labor has been addressed by Tomer
Heymann in an Israeli production about male-to-female transgendered Filipina
care-givers who travel from the Philippines to Israel to take work looking after
Orthodox Jewish men. While the lm addresses the role of the Philippines in
352 Sexualities 15(3/4)

providing nurses for First World countries, it also looks at the ways that Israel
recruits service workers after closing its borders to Palestinian workers. Paper
Dolls locates transgenderism as part of the shifting meaning of social identities in
the wake of globalization: the small but bonded community of male-to-female
transgender care-givers spend their free time performing in drag as the Paper
Dolls in Tel Aviv bars they receive mixed responses from the Israeli queer
clubs sometimes they are orientalized and asked to perform in drag as other
Asian exotics, like Geishas, other times they are warmly welcomed, but their
presence in Israelin the Israeli queer community, in the homes of elderly
Jewish menalways marks them as outsiders and as vulnerable not to transpho-
bia in particular but also to deportation, poverty, unemployment or incarcer-
ation. The transgender aspect of the lm, highlighted both in the drag
performances and in the performances of the TG women as care givers, illustrates
the complex expansion of the meaning of gender in these elaborate global econo-
mies (Manalansan, 2008). As a moving, intimate love relationship develops
between one of the workers, Sally, and her employer, an old Orthodox man
dying of cancer, these new congurations of gender, desire, intimacy and kinship
momentarily eclipse the more familiar arrangements of nation, home, family and
domesticity. By the end of the documentary, all of the Paper Dolls have had to
leave Israel and as they begin again in other global cities as care givers, per-
formers, transgender women and queer immigrants, they remind us of the limited
arenas within which transgender politics have been developed in the USA and
call for a wider transgender discourse, one that links transgender identications
temporary, partial, opportunistic ones as well as permanent and total forms to
globalization, transnational migration, poverty, prison politics and post-national
ethnography.

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Jack Halberstam is Professor of English, Gender Studies and American Studies

and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of
four books including Female Masculinity (Duke University Press 1998) and, most
recently, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press 2011) and has a new
book out in the Fall 2012 from Beacon press titled: Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender
and the End of Normal. Halberstam also blogs at bullybloggers.wordpress.com.