Where Has Class Gone?: Midcentury Transfemininity and Class Mobility

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

To return to the archives of transfemininity in the mid-twentieth century US is to be struck by the centrality of class and employment to the distinctions of the transfeminine world. From Esther Newton’s ethnography of drag culture, Mother Camp, to the heterosexual crossdresser magazine, Transvestia, to the oral histories of former street queens and street transsexuals, to gender clinics designed to serve as routes to upward mobility for the deserving few, it is clear that that the transfeminine world was organized by striations of class and respectability. Transfeminine people’s location along these striations of class and respectability and chances at achieving upward mobility were themselves partially determined by their race and sexuality. How can scholars account for the centrality of such differences of class and respectability within midcentury transfeminine cultures? Due to its contemporary connotation of authentic, inner psychic identification, “identity” is a clumsy term with which to describe these differences. “Class” itself risks being too rigid of a rubric once transition is taken into account; for, living a transfeminine life was itself a vector of catastrophic downward mobility. Transfeminine life paths were shaped by strategies for mitigating the downward mobility of transfemininity and schemes for achieving upward mobility.

Given the centrality of upward and downwards mobility to transfemininity, why has trans theory engaged so little with class, labor, and the racialized and gendered political economy? This panel contends that the major analytics of trans and queer studies – (trans)normativity, anti-normativity, transing, and queering – work to distort rather than to analyze the class disparities and class longings of transfeminine people. It finds, by contrast, that scholarship in the midcentury social science of deviance studies is rich with analyses of class, labor, and respectability. Heather Love’s Underdogs has taught us to locate deviance studies as part of the genealogy of queer studies. Where has class gone in the transition from deviance studies to queer and trans studies and from the class-conscious midcentury sexual underground to class-blind contemporary LGBT+ culture? This panel mines midcentury deviance studies for analytics, terms, and methods with which to account for the fluid and intersectional ways that class – inflected by race and sexuality – shaped transfeminine identities and life paths at and after the mid-twentieth century. The panel will also seek to explain why and how class has been metaphorized, concealed, and disappeared in scholarship on LGBT cultures between the midcentury and the present. This panel is oriented by a will to make the desires, issues, and concerns of a range of transfeminine people – from young Black street queens to retired white heterosexual crossdressers – central within trans studies.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Retiring the Deviant Career - Joan Lubin, Yale University

• Transgender Shopkeepers: Passing and the Managed Achievement of Class Status at Midcentury - Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania

• Materialist Girls: The Transfeminine Career - Kadji Amin, Emory University

Chair

• Kadji Amin, Emory University

Biographical Information

Heather Love is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press) and Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press). She is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the co-editor (with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus) of a special issue of Representations ("Description Across Disciplines"). In 2023, she published Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, co-edited with James F. English (Oxford University Press). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. She is currently working on a new project ("To Be Real,” forthcoming at University of Chicago Press), which addresses the uses of the personal in queer criticism.

Joan Lubin is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Durham University in the UK. She received her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania with a concentration in Gender & Sexuality Studies, and was previously Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Science & Literature at Cornell University and Director of Research for special collections in the Cornell University Library. Lubin is currently finishing Pulp Sexology, a book project about the imprint of quantitative sexology on postwar literature and culture, and starting another about the pedagogical history of science fiction. Lubin is also at work on a critical edition of letters between queer sci-fi greats Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ. Her research has been supported by the John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology at the Kinsey Institute and the Ursula K. Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship at the University of Oregon Libraries and Special Collections. Lubin’s research-based arts writing has appeared in exhibition catalogues including Scientia Sexualis (ICA Los Angeles, 2024) and Sci-fi, Magick, Queer LA: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation (ONE Archives at USC Libraries, 2024). She is editor of “Sexology and Its Afterlives,” a 2021 special issue of Social Text, and her work has appeared in journals and books including Post45, New Literary History, American Literary History, Women & Performance, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU 2021), The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature (Cambridge UP, 2024), and elsewhere.

Kadji Amin is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University and Visiting Associate Research Professor in the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Johns Hopkins University. As a theorist, Amin focuses on genealogies of contemporary queer and trans political ideals and cultural values. Amin’s first book, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Duke 2017) won an Honorable Mention for best book in LGBT studies form the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association. His second book project, “Trans Materialism without Gender Identity.” argues in favor of abandoning gender identity as the core principle of transgender politics, culture, and medicine. The monograph uses “trans materialism” as a method for analyzing the life paths and transition methods of passing men, street queens, heterosexual crossdressers, and transsexual women in the US across the twentieth century. It demonstrates that material conditions played a larger role in the transitions of each group than gender identity. The lesson of this history is “trans materialism” as a materialist politics of class solidarity with poor and sex working trans women of color. Amin is the recipient of a Cornell Society for the Humanities fellowship, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship on “Sex” from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship from Stony Brook University.