Transgender and Queer Embodiments

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

This session invites papers that examine how transgender and queer embodiments are being reshaped, regulated, and resisted amid escalating political attacks and institutional exclusions. In recent years, federal policies have prohibited “gender ideology” content, restricted access to gender-affirming care, banned transgender participation in sports, and curtailed trans people’s mobility through passport and documentation changes. These state-sanctioned assaults on bodily autonomy underscore how trans and queer bodies remain central to contemporary struggles over citizenship, belonging, and expertise. We welcome papers that engage the politics of exclusion in sports, schools and education, and bathrooms, as well as analyses of medicine, gender-affirming care, and the contested role of expertise in defining “legitimate” embodiment. We particularly encourage work centering trans youth, trans people of color, and community and solidarity networks that sustain access to medication, care, and collective survival across borders. All methodological approaches and research sites are welcome.

Sub Unit

• Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section / Transgender and Queer Embodiments

Presider

• Jinsun Yang, University of Oregon

Individual Presentations

• Extreme Male Brains and Impossible Women: Transmisogyny in Autism and Trans Research - Nic Rios, Barnard College

• Paying to reproduce the transgender body: Natalism and fertility preservation as social control - Carrie Sheehan, Boston University

• The social and political stakes of the body: biological sex - Merrily LeBlanc, Northeastern University

• Trans Health: Prioritizing The Cookie Cutter Patient and Denying Everyone Else - Lindsay Toman, Colgate University

Session Organizers

• Jinsun Yang, University of Oregon

• David J. Hutson, Pennsylvania State University-Abington