Tag: trans

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Laws as Tactics

I wrote “Laws as Tactics” published in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law in 2011. You can read it here.

Abstract:

This symposium invites us to consider the impact of Judith Butler’s work on legal scholarship in the area of gender and sexuality. I am interested in reflecting particularly on trans politics and law for two reasons. First, because Butler’s work has had such a significant impact on the emergence of the current iteration of trans politics of the 1990s and 2000s. Second, because I believe there is a great deal more that Butler’s work can offer to significant questions facing trans resistance formations as the field of trans legal rights advocacy institutionalizes and as trans legal scholarship engages and responds to that institutionalization. In particular, I am interested in how Butler’s work has provided analytical models for considering the role that norms and normalization play in both disciplinary and biopolitical modes of governance relating to gender. This analysis is essential to understanding the limitations of certain legal rights frameworks for addressing harms created by racialized and gendered systems of meaning and control.

Full Text

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Guernica Interview and Books!

Meaghan Winter recently interviewed me for Guernica, have a look. In other news, I’m very excited that Nat Smith and Eric Stanley’s anthology, Captive Genders: Transembodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex is coming out in August.  Finally, I’m happy to report that, working with the editors at South End Press, I’ve finally settled on a title for my forthcoming book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law.

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Be Professional!

I wrote “Be Professional!, published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender in 2010 in response to Bob Chang and Adrienne Davis’ article, “Making Up Is Hard to Do: Race/Gender/Sexual Orientation in the Law School Classroom,” 33 Harv. J. L. & Gender 1 (2010). You can read it here. 

Abstract

In 2010, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender published a series of letters between Adrienne Davis and Bob Chang entitled, “Making Up Is Hard to Do: Race/Gender/Sexual Orientation in the Law School Classroom,” along with three response pieces by Adele Morrison, Darren Rosenblum and Dean Spade. “Be Professional!” is written in letter form like “Making Up Is Hard to Do” and discusses Spade’s experience becoming and being a trans law professor, as well as broader questions about activism, academia, professionalism and the neo-liberal academy.

Full Text

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New Writing in the Seattle Journal for Social Justice

The Seattle Journal for Social Justice just published a new issue that includes a cluster of articles and art on trans issues.  You can read the introduction I wrote for the cluster here. 

Here is an interview with advocates working on Medicaid access for trans people in three states. 

Here is an article by my colleagues at SRLP about the role of lawyers in trans resistance. 

Read all articles in the issue here.

We’re having a symposium featuring several articles from the cluster at Seattle University School of Law on October 20 from lunchtime until evening open to the public and free. Please come!

Cover art by Roan Boucher.

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Keynote Address: Trans Law and Politics on a Neoliberal Landscape

I wrote “Keynote Address: Trans Law and Politics on a Neoliberal Landscape” in Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review in 2009. You can read it here. 

Trans Law and Politics on a Neoliberal Landscape

Abstract

These edited Keynote remarks from the Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review Symposium on transgender law address how questions of law reform strategy relate to critical understandings of neoliberalism. The paper addresses questions of administrative governance, identity documentation, the relationship between law and social movements, and questions of economic and racial justice as applied to transgender politics.