The Continuing Saga of Riki and Judith as they struggle to find their way through the morass of irrelevance.
Actually we were never “feared” more abused and held in contempt. Further outside of a few flamboyant “stars” most of us aren’t “celebrated” either. I believe the word is assimilated from the floors of big box stores to academe we have be come just another thread in the tapestry of diversity, almost as common as dirt.
From The Advocate: http://www.advocate.com/commentary/riki-wilchins/2013/03/05/op-ed-transgender-dinosaurs-part-deux-revenge-judith-butler
We’re in a changing-of-the-guard moment where being transgender is more celebrated than feared.
Riki Wilchins,
March 05 2013
It was Gender Trouble and other writing by Judith Butler that first ignited my thinking about gender and made me believe a transgender politics that transcended both the binary and the demands of cis-gendered people was possible. There was a period of about three years when I seemed helpless to do anything but discuss and analyze gender theory, even over the most casual luncheon dates. Being able to finally deconstruct the oppression with which I struggled and see all the moving parts ignited in me a new desire to confront, rather than conform to, the gender system and informed my trans-activism for the coming two decades.
So I looked forward to eagerly devouring her ideas on contesting gender oppression when her book, Undoing Gender, was published.
But her ideas of what passed for gender activism seemed strangely oblique and bloodless to me—small, individual acts of insubordinacy that parodied and upset gender norms, while celebrating genderqueerness. WTF?
In Martha Nussbaum’s well-publicized attack on Butler’s cosmology, she pinpointed the absence of such messy realities as organizing, policy change, and legislation — things to which I was now devoting my life. What was the point of being a happy gender warrior doing private acts of rebellion? How on earth was this going to be the big stick that would overturn a ubiquitous binary gender system?
The idea of embracing parody or celebration was in itself foreign to me. One of the primary attacks of radical feminists on trans-women like me was that we’re parodying “real women” by appropriating their body parts, clothing and gestures. At the same time, non-radical guys on the street attacked me for simply not being real, period. Parody seemed to be the very air I was forced to breathe, hardly a great foundation on which to build personal or political liberation.
Continue reading at: http://www.advocate.com/commentary/riki-wilchins/2013/03/05/op-ed-transgender-dinosaurs-part-deux-revenge-judith-butler
