Papers by Treva C Ellison
We Got Issues: Towards a Black Trans*/Studies, 2017
W e are in a time labeled the "transgender tipping point," a period characterized by the scaling ... more W e are in a time labeled the "transgender tipping point," a period characterized by the scaling up of legal protections, visibility, rights, and politics centered on transgender people. The contemporary visual landscape is populated with the bodies of Black women. How does the language and discourse of the tipping point elide the presence of a saturation of Black bodies? In academia this elision has taken the shape of the expansion and institutionalization of transgender studies as a discipline. We are interested in what happens to the category of transgender as it becomes routed through the logics and power lines of institutionality and the metrics of administration. This special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is the product and process of our attempt to think through how the institutionalization of transgender studies as a discipline functions as a scene of subjection for blackness-for Black people and places. We have engaged multiple fields in this issue, and these various intellectual quandaries all signal the simultaneous institutionalization of transgender studies alongside the heightened visibility of transgender people in our current popular and political landscapes. We are interested in the ways that these two simultaneous occurrences affect one another. Black transwomen and transwomen of color have sparked the interests of many because of popular figures like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock; at the same time, there has also been a lot more awareness around Black transwomen's relationship to premature death. Though the popular representation of fabulousness and the crises of the trans subject are represented primarily by Black transwomen and transwomen of color, the field of transgender studies, like other fields, seems to use this Black subject as a springboard to move toward other things, presumably white things.
The Last Place They Thought Of, 2020
Swiss Pavillion Venice Biennale, 2019
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
Moving Backwards
This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TS... more This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, “Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies,” revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.
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Papers by Treva C Ellison