Trans Bodies of Knowledge: Critical Pedagogy, Doing Philosophy, and Collective Agency

• In Event: Rethinking Transgender Scholarship: Critical Trans Organizing in Higher Education

Abstract

Given the conspicuous aperture between philosophy and transgender studies, unequivocally, transgender studies presents epistemological dispossession, nonconformity, and resistance to traditional confines of doing philosophy. The emergence of transgender studies in the 1990s engendered uncharted possibilities for thinking about transgender embodiment and life. Transgender studies and the field’s ever-abounding “iterations,” engages identity politics, militarized and state surveillance, and importantly, the intersections of transgender phenomena with race, class, sexuality, and economic and ecological crises. Further, transgender studies, similar to gothic studies, interrogates the obscure relation between science, modernity, the notion of the human, and indeed, the non-human. Tracing these flights of movement in seminal transgender texts, and importantly, the way in which trans bodies of knowledge bestow: i) new modes of thinking about gender, sex, and the body, ii) challenges to the limits and exclusiveness of queer studies and queer theory, iii) collective agency amidst the “disciplinary power or cruelty in academic life,” and iv) philosophies of becoming-trans, we ought to take seriously the pedagogic possibilities in the contemporary scholastic world. That is, this essay seeks to question and build upon existing perspectives and practices in transgender studies and philosophy, revealing their similarities, differences, and indeed, the lines of thought that transgender studies can bring to bear upon what it means to “do” philosophy. More specifically, deploying becoming-trans as an analytical framework throughout this essay, I will attempt to illustrate how trans bodies of knowledge—scholarship on trans identity and embodiment, critiques of narratives of gender, considerations of the future of queer studies/theory, and interrogations of transgender—ask the following: What can be studied, asked, and thought, and by whom? What does it mean to teach philosophy? Is it possible to be a transgender philosopher? Does becoming-trans, as a philosophic and pedagogic tool, undo not only coherencies of “transgender,” but also academic life? In response to these questions, the analytic of becoming-trans reveals collective modes of agency, survival, and resistance within transgender studies, and as such, evades bodily and epistemic confinement. Trans bodies of knowledge, then, proffer the pedagogical occasion of unstable and transcendent knowledge-making, speaking back to the excessive, long-lived, and traditional ways of “doing” philosophy.

Author

• Sage Perdue, University of California, Merced