My essay “Once More… With Feeling” was published in Inside Out: FTM and Beyond, edited by Morty Diamond, (2004).
Excerpt:
Transecting the Academy, with Sel Wahng
I co-authored with Sel Wahng “Transecting the Academy” in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies in 2004. You can read the full text online or download it here.
Abstract
This piece, co-authored with Sel Wahng, was part of a set of essays published together under the title “Thinking Sex/Thinking Gender.” In this article, we explore how identity politics that underwrite many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender discourses have proved limiting in regard to potential political alliances and social change. We address this concern by looking at the questions under consideration in this forum through a particular lens: how bodies and identities interact and intersect with modern formations of power. Through this mode of inquiry we seek to relate supposedly disparate elements for the purpose of making new social, political and scholarly connections.
Resisting Medicine/Remodeling Gender
I wrote “Resisting Medicine/Remodeling Gender” published in Berkeley Women’s Law Journal in 2003 and reprinted in Sexuality, Gender, and the Law, edited by William Eskridge and Nan Hunter in 2004. You can read it here.
Dress to Kill, Fight to Win
Confronting the Limits of Gay Hate Crimes Activism: A Radical Critique, with Craig Willse
I co-authored with Craig Willse “Confronting the Limits of Gay Hate Crimes Activism: A Radical Critique” in Chicano-Latino Law Review in 2000. You can read it here.
Abstract
Questioning the emancipatory potential of hate crimes activism for sexual and gender non-normative people, this paper outlines the limits of criminal justice remedies to problems of gender, race, economic and sexual subordination. The first section considers some of the positive impacts of hate crimes activism, focusing on the benefits of legal “naming” for disenfranchised constituencies seeking political recognition. In the next section the authors outline the political shortcomings and troubling consequences of hate crimes activism. First, they examine how hate crimes activism is situated within a “mainstream gay agenda,” a term they use to designate the set of projects prioritized by large, national gay rights organizations. The authors question the assimilationist drive of mainstream gay activism, and illustrate how such activism fails to reflect commitments to anti-racism, feminism, and economic redistribution. Second, they critique how the rhetoric of hate crimes activism isolates specific instances of violence against queer and transgender people, categorizing these as acts of individual prejudice, and obscures an understanding of the systemic, institutional nature of gender and sexuality subordination. Finally in this section, the authors interrogate hate crimes statutes as a practice of “identity politics” that, despite accomplishing certain goals, nonetheless dangerously reifies constructs of homosexual identity. In the third and final section, they look at how work on hate crimes occupies a place of “legitimacy” in the world of lesbian and gay activism. Preserving a sense of what hate crimes activism hopes to accomplish, they suggest other political strategies that pursue broader work for social and economic justice and build coalitions across identity categories.