What Would the Trans Epistemology Say to the Feminist Epistemology? Trans-Feminist Paradigms, Knowledges, Epistemologies, Methodologies

• In Event: 596 - Section on Sex and Gender Paper Session. (Re)Theorizing Gender

Abstract

According to trans people, what knowledge about gender can be known? How can this knowledge be known? In this paper, I unpack trans paradigms, epistemologies, methodologies, and knowledges by analyzing 21 interview transcripts, two Internet memes, and 50+ trans-authored texts. These data illustrate theories of knowledge that trans communities produce. Through thematic coding and content analysis, I elucidate the assumptions and paradigms that shape trans epistemologies, methodologies and knowledges. Trans epistemologies make important contributions that build on feminist epistemologies and sociologies of gender. I find that trans knowledges and ways of knowing incorporate feminist elements of multiple truths and collective and dialogical knowledge. They emphasize the epistemic authority of self-definition and emotion and create unique knowledge-producing and -validating methodologies, which are informed by poststructuralist feminist and queer approaches to gender and reality. For trans communities, all individuals are the ultimate epistemic authorities on their own genders, while they are also illegitimate knowers of others’ genders. Thus, trans people determine gender through self-knowledge (via feeling and choice) and linguistic communication, rather than interactionally “doing gender” through performing a gender and interpreting others’ gender performances. These epistemologies derive from trans knowers’ experiential gender transitions and their simultaneous multiple viewpoints that result. Trans people’s plural perspectives derive from their multiple embodied, affective experiences of social interaction as they are read and received in differently gendered ways, amounting to an epistemic privilege on gender knowledges. Thus, trans epistemologies push forward the edge of feminist standpoint epistemology.

Author

• Sonny M. Nordmarken, University of Massachusetts-Amherst