Taking the controversial pairing of transgender and transracial as his starting point, Rogers Brubaker shows how gender and race, long understood as stable, inborn, and unambiguous, have in the past few decades opened up - in different ways and to different degrees - to the forces of change and choice. Transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream with dizzying speed, and ethnoracial boundaries have blurred. Paradoxically, while sex has a much deeper biological basis than race, choosing or changing ones sex or gender is more widely accepted than choosing or changing ones race. Yet while few accepted Dolezals claim to be black, racial identities are becoming more fluid as ancestry - increasingly understood as mixed - loses its authority over identity, and as race and ethnicity, like gender, come to be understood as something we do, not just something we have. By rethinking race and ethnicity through the multifaceted lens of the transgender experience - encompassing not just a movement from one category to another but positions between and beyond existing categories - Brubaker underscores the malleability, contingency, and arbitrariness of racial categories.
"Trans offers an exceptionally lucid, insightful account of the contemporary discussion on trans' and an extremely useful investigation of the directions that transgenderism and transracialism might take. Offering original thinking about gender to prod us to consider race in new ways, this dauntingly good book will garner a great deal of attention."--Ann Morning, author of The Nature of Race
Rogers Brubaker is professor of sociology and UCLA Foundation Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles. His recent books include Ethnicity without Groups, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town, and Grounds for Difference.
Über den Autor
Rogers Brubaker is professor of sociology and UCLA Foundation Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles. His recent books include Ethnicity without Groups, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town, and Grounds for Difference.
Klappentext
Taking the controversial pairing of "transgender" and "transracial" as his starting point, Rogers Brubaker shows how gender and race, long understood as stable, inborn, and unambiguous, have in the past few decades opened up--in different ways and to different degrees--to the forces of change and choice. Transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream with dizzying speed, and ethnoracial boundaries have blurred. Paradoxically, while sex has a much deeper biological basis than race, choosing or changing one's sex or gender is more widely accepted than choosing or changing one's race. Yet while few accepted Dolezal's claim to be black, racial identities are becoming more fluid as ancestry--increasingly understood as mixed--loses its authority over identity, and as race and ethnicity, like gender, come to be understood as something we do, not just something we have. By rethinking race and ethnicity through the multifaceted lens of the transgender experience--encompassing not just a movement from one category to another but positions between and beyond existing categories--Brubaker underscores the malleability, contingency, and arbitrariness of racial categories.
