Allegories of Gender: Transgender Autology versus Transracialism

  • Aniruddha Dutta University of Iowa
Keywords: transracialism, gender identity, autology

Abstract

This article explores how race and gender become distinguished from each other in contemporary scholarly and activist debates on the comparison between transracialism and transgender identities. The article argues that transracial-transgender distinctions often reinforce divides between autological (self-determined) and genealogical (inherited) aspects of subjectivity and obscure the constitution of this division through modern technologies of power.

Author Biography

Aniruddha Dutta, University of Iowa

Aniruddha Dutta is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies and Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Iowa. Dutta’s research interests lie in globalization, development, gender, and sexuality, particularly the institutionalization of gender and sexual identity politics in India. Their work has appeared in journals such as International Feminist Journal of Politics, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and South Asian History and Culture. Their current book project, Globalizing through the Vernacular: The Making of Gender and Sexual Minorities in Eastern India, explores the role of seemingly peripheral or “local” communities, networks, and subcultures in the globalizing expansion of liberal democratic discourses of gender/sexual identity and rights, studying how this process transforms, reconfigures, or reproduces structural hierarchies of language, class, caste, and citizenship.

Published
2018-11-23
Issue
Vol. 39 No. 2 (2018)
Section
39.2 Special Section

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