I’ve unfortunately never been able to read Namaste - one of the problems with being in Australia - or at least in Canberra - is that swathes of important feminist literature is simply unavailable, unless one purchases it from overseas - which I mostly lack the money to do.

I’ve been meaning to get hold of her stuff for ages, though, especially after reading what Serano had to say about her. I’ll be writing my honours thesis on precisely this topic in 2009, and the department head has promised to try and actually get some of the books I’ll be basing my thesis on into the ANU library, so hopefully Invisible Lives will be one of them.

thanks for dropping by, anyway!

i’ve read serano’s work although i think namaste’s is better in some ways. (serano bases a lot of her observations on namaste’s.) serano seems to hedge on the subject of sex work and sex positive trans identities… i don’t think her work comes to terms with that, but that’s just my feeling.

get hold of the piece called ‘tragic misreadings’ by namaste. i’m sure you’ll relate!!

However, I found her constant and deliberate mangling of gender identity and gender expression to be grossly cissexist. It may be fun to deconstruct as a philosophical question, but gender simply doesn’t work that way in this culture - and Butler’s work in that regard has driven a whole load of ignorant transphobia from segments of the supposedly progressive left. It runs into another of my major problems with Butler: the way she merges the why and the what: she’s all about whether something is constructed or not, but ignores the reality that something that is constructed is no less real in actuality.

I might make a couple of more detailed critiques of Butler later in the week, once I’ve gotten over the flu, stopped procrastinating, and finished my critique of Gender Trouble. I have to say though - reading the damned turgid thing has more than reaffirmed my opinion of Butler as “batshit-ignorant-denizen-of-the-ivory-tower”, even if she does bring some useful ideas to the table.

In short, the sex/gender divide is altogether a bit wishy-washy when you look at it closely and far too essentialist for my tastes.

That is basically the foundation of the way that I understand it now: people don’t have a single monolithic sex, but rather they have various characteristics which may individually be interpreted as masculine or feminine, and that interpretation interacts subjectively with gender presentation and identity. There’s a kind of freedom there, to change and re-interpret without any such re-interpretation being “delusional”. An understanding like that makes it easy to say that your body is not a male body now, and I for one would go nutty without HRT if I couldn’t do a little creative body image re-interpretation of my own.

That was one of the things I found disappointing about Whipping Girl, actually, that she mostly took the sex/gender dichotomy for granted. It was a good book overall but I couldn’t agree with it 100%.

You’re spot on about race in Australian gender studies, too - in my degree, it’s been a case of “race? what race?” I had two classes where it was seriously raised. Both were taught by WoC (and one of those was on Freudian film theory, which wasn’t the most insightful course in history). I think I learned as much in the other one of them as I did in the whole rest of my degree. We’re also doing a bit on Spivak at the moment, basically as a token postcolonialist feminist, but yeah - not much.

I hadn’t thought of there being a gatekeeper function in those terms before, but I think that might be right on. I can think of about ten WoC theorists off the top of my head with more current and more insightful work than Spivak, but it’s her that we’re studying on race. The only trans theorists I’ve ever studied directly were Susan Stryker and some transguy whose name I can’t remember but whose work resembled the product of a particularly wacky acid trip - both of which fit right into that theoretical trend. Really, I think you’ve actually hit on one of my main beefs with critical theory - that I don’t get the chance to study perspectives of marginalised groups - especially those that I’m a part of - that are more grounded in reality than the current theoretical fad.

I’ll have to see if I can get Whipping Girl onto reading lists at ANU, though. I’m fairly well known around the department, and I’m doing my honours thesis on the appropriation of trans lives and experiences by cissexual academics, so I’m hoping to cause a few waves - for I’m so sick of having to do trans 101 with lecturers who seem to feel qualified to teach about trans issues, but not, y’know, to know the most basic information about our experiences.

and Jefferies? Like Emily said, she’s a dinosaur. I’ve never seen her cited for anything outside of radfemwingnutland. More problematic these days is that other transphobic Australian women’s studies professor whose name escapes me. I’ve had bits of her work cited in various courses, and her work is pretty widely available in Borders, but the detail of it is pretty…special…it’s the bastard ideological child of Judith Butler and Fred Nile. Can you think of the woman I’m thinking of, Emily?

Oh, she’s a bloody dinosaur, out-dated by early 90s queer theory, let alone trans theory. Besides her coterie of adoring fan-girls on campus and on-line, she’s an irrelevancy in contemporary gender studies (if well-known). I have honestly never ever seen anyone quote her as an authority on anything.