News

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Romantic Friendship, Palestine and California

A few recent things to share: Here is a link to a radio interview between me and the brilliant and inspiring activist-scholars Eric Stanley and Reina July about trans politics and prison abolition that took place in January on Romantic Friendship radio.  I also want to share this open letter created by activist from a recent LGBTQ delegation to Palestine that I participated in in January.  Please sign on!  Below is a photo from my trip–a mural on a part of the separation wall.  I’m working on creating some writing about my trip to share with photos that will hopefully be posted here soon.  Finally, Toshio Meronek recently interviewed Eric Stanley and I about Captive Genders and Normal Life in advance of our trip to speak at UC Davis. You can read Toshio’s article here.

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Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement With Everything We’ve Got

Captive GendersMorgan Bassichis, Alex Lee, and I co-authored “Building an Abolitionist Trans & Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got” in the anthology Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith. A Mandarin translation is available here: 全力打造一個以廢除為目標的跨性／酷兒運動).

Learn more about Captive Genders here. 

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Laws as Tactics

I wrote “Laws as Tactics” published in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law in 2011. You can read it here.

Abstract:

This symposium invites us to consider the impact of Judith Butler’s work on legal scholarship in the area of gender and sexuality. I am interested in reflecting particularly on trans politics and law for two reasons. First, because Butler’s work has had such a significant impact on the emergence of the current iteration of trans politics of the 1990s and 2000s. Second, because I believe there is a great deal more that Butler’s work can offer to significant questions facing trans resistance formations as the field of trans legal rights advocacy institutionalizes and as trans legal scholarship engages and responds to that institutionalization. In particular, I am interested in how Butler’s work has provided analytical models for considering the role that norms and normalization play in both disciplinary and biopolitical modes of governance relating to gender. This analysis is essential to understanding the limitations of certain legal rights frameworks for addressing harms created by racialized and gendered systems of meaning and control.

Full Text

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Guernica Interview and Books!

Meaghan Winter recently interviewed me for Guernica, have a look. In other news, I’m very excited that Nat Smith and Eric Stanley’s anthology, Captive Genders: Transembodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex is coming out in August.  Finally, I’m happy to report that, working with the editors at South End Press, I’ve finally settled on a title for my forthcoming book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law.