Resources

We Are Not Expected”: Trans* Educators (Re)Claiming Space and Voice in Higher Education and Student Affairs

author: T.J. Jourian, Symone L. Simmons, Kara C. Devaney

publication: Duke University Press

year published: 2015

T.J. Jourian, Symone L. Simmons, and Kara C. Devaney co-wrote “We Are Not Expected”: Trans* Educators (Re)Claiming Space and Voice in Higher Education and Student Affairs,” which documents a dialogue process that begins examining the lived experiences, identity processes, and needs of trans* educators in higher education and student affairs.

Some Very Basic Tips for Making Higher Education More Accessible to Trans Students and Rethinking How We Talk about Gendered Bodies

Dean Spade wrote “Some Very Basic Tips for Making Higher Education More Accessible to Trans Students and Rethinking How We Talk about Gendered Bodies” addressing tips for talking about names, pronouns, and bodies in the classroom and beyond.

Welcoming Trans Academics

Lisa Hager wrote “Welcoming Trans Academics” discussing trans* inclusivity in academic workplaces along with tips for making conferences more trans* inclusive.

Promoting Trans* Literacies

Graduate students, A.J. Lowik, Evan T. Taylor, Jen Sung, Kay Ho, Mary Bryson, at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ) have produced “Promoting Trans* Literacies.” This is a supplemental document for their Promoting Trans* Literacies Workshop and contains key terms, suggested practices, syllabi recommendations, and a further reading resources.

Being and Becoming Professionally Other: Identities, Voices, and Experiences of U.S. Trans* Academics

Erich N. Pitcher wrote Being and Becoming Professionally Other: Identities, Voices, and Experiences of U.S. Trans* Academics, which addresses the experiences of trans* academics. This books contains an analysis of the current context for trans* academics, recognition for trans* resistance and disruption, and recommendations for coalitional politics in the academy.

How do You Wish to be Cited? Citation Practices and a Scholarly Community of Care in Trans Studies Research Articles

Katja Thieme and Mary Ann S. Saunders explore fostering a scholarly community of care when citing within trans studies research in their article “How do You Wish to be Cited? Citation Practices and a Scholarly Community of Care in Trans Studies Research Articles.”

The Radical Copyeditor’s Style Guide for Writing About Transgender People

Alex Kapitan is a radical copyeditor that has put together “The Radical Copyeditor’s Style Guide for Writing About Transgender People.”

Suggested Rules for Non-Transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism, or Trans_____

C. Jacob Hale created, “Suggested Rules for Non-Transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism, or Trans_____.”

On the Job Market as a Transgender Candidate

Rachel McKinnon has published an article on some barriers faced by trans job candidates, “On the Job Market as a Transgender Candidate,” as well as an article on coming out experiences in the classroom, “Coming Out in Class.”

Learning Trans

Learning Trans provides access to online courses on trans-specific courses.

Bathrooms and Beyond: Expanding a Pedagogy of Access in Trans/Disability Studies.

author: Adair, Cassius

publication: TSQ 2, no. 3

year published: 2015

pages: 464–468

Drawing on personal teaching experiences, this pedagogical reflection asks whether a “pedagogy of access” might connect various strands of trans, disability, and critical race teaching methodologies. Such a pedagogical practice centers questions of nonnormative embodiment and histories of inclusion/exclusion from academic spaces within “trans” instructional praxis.

Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

author: Ahmed, Sara

publication: Durham, NC: Duke University Press

year published: 2006

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.

Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

Before Trans Studies

author: Adair, Cassius, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Amy Marvin.

publication: TSQ 7, no. 3

year published: 2020

pages: 306-320

In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu’s “After Trans Studies,” this collaborative essay also turns to questions of field formation and the ethos of trans studies. Situating the growth of the field in the material conditions of precarity under which trans knowledge-workers work, the authors argue that trans studies can’t be “over” because, in fact, it isn’t yet here. Rather than viewing this as only a dismal proposition, however, they insist that the tenuousness of trans studies provides us with the opportunity to envision and enact more sustaining ways of being “in the field.”

Licensing Citizenship: Anti-Blackness, Identification Documents, and Transgender Studies

author: Adair, Cassius

publication: American Quarterly 71, no. 2

year published: 2019

pages: 569-594

This essay argues that the use of racial categories on identification documents is a critical piece of transgender history. By tracing the development of driver’s licenses as part of a Progressive Era racial project, this essay contends that the discourse of licenses as measures of fitness and citizenship was constructed partly in response to the supposed recklessness of “Negro” drivers. Thus driver’s licenses as tools to regulate mobility are embedded in anti-Black criminalization projects. In addition, African Americans protested racial designations on driver’s licenses, correctly anticipating that licenses would take on extraordinary status as a racialized identification document. Therefore, when transgender people argue against gender designations on driver’s licenses and other identification papers, they build off work begun by Black activists in the 1930s. Without making a fallacious analogy between race and gender, this essay argues that transgender theories of administrative violence must be rearticulated in light of the anti-Black origins of these commonplace identification documents, a rearticulation that trans and antiracist activists have already begun.