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dimensions of transnationalism

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Feminist Review

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abstract

This article identifies and analyses links between conceptualisations of trans-gender and trans-national, and aims for a critical redefinition of political agency. Through an examination of theories on transing, passing and performativity in queer-, trans- and transnational feminist knowledge production—illustrated by discursive examples from transgender communities and Romanian migrant communities—I call for a conceptualisation of entangled power relations that does not rely on fixed, pre-established categories, but defines subjectivity through risk in political struggle. I suggest that ‘transing’ the nation and ‘transing’ gender could be thought as critical moves for a radical deconstruction of gendered and national belonging. Rather than provide a static definition of the term ‘transnationalism’, the article explores potentials and limits of going beyond ‘the national’ and ‘gender’, and intervenes in forms of minority nationalism that reproduce racism, sexism, heteronormativity and gender binary as the norm of Western national belonging. In particular, building on Jasbir Puar’s (2007) conceptualisation of homonationalism, the article shows how forms of nationalism in Western transgender and migrant communities rely on a combination of heteronormative binary gendering and the exertion of racism. While a conventionalised approach to transnationalism defines the term as a political strategy based on transnational politics, I play with suggesting different dimensions of transnationalism: it could mean ‘transgender nationalism’; the ‘assimilation of transgendered persons to the Western nation’; or ‘cross-border-nationalism’, a form of nationalism often established in migrant communities that constructs the diaspora as a nationalist extension of the homeland. My focus, therefore, is on analysing privilegings, contradictions and ambivalences in gendering, racialising and nationalising ascriptions of (non)belonging. Overall, and as an alternative to romanticised knowledge productions of crossing national and gendered borders, I suggest a power-sensitive epistemological and methodological shift in thinking entangled power relations, belonging and subjectivity in transnational feminist knowledge productions.

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Notes

  1. For a fuller range of usages of ‘transing’, see, for example, Stryker et al. (2008), Noble (2012) and Tudor (2014).

  2. With my usage of ‘intersectionality’, I refer to Kimberle Crenshaw’s (1991) original formulation, but also follow Gail Lewis (2013) who emphasises that the concept travels and has to be adapted to specific contexts. Lewis (ibid.) makes clear that the analysis of racism is not optional in intersectionality theories and criticises European adaptions of intersectionality that do not take racialisation and racism into account.

  3. Autobiographical approaches can be one way to access the complexity of politicising positioning within power dynamics. For other autobiographical accounts that reflect on complex constructions of gendering, racialisation, migratisation and belonging, see, for example, Ahmed (1999b), Haritaworn (2008) and Bhanji (2012).

  4. I suggest to differentiate between social positionings and critical positionings. While the former are processes of ascription and constructed by power relations, the latter are the politicisations of social positionings: politicised ways of making sense of processes of becoming through intersectional power relations. The possibility of inhabiting an intelligible social positioning is often fixed within rigid binary registers of belonging (man/woman, white/non-white, etc.). My argument is that although social positioning can be thought as non-essential—as constructed through performative processes and as effects of intersectional power relations—they should not be seen as the basis for political struggle. Rather it is the politicisation of social positionings—critical positionings—that allows for (temporal, fragile and contradictory) solidarities, alliances and shared struggles (see Tudor, 2014).

  5. Halberstam (1998, p.173) contextualises this statement later on and withdraws it partly. I do not want to suggest that all persons trans gender in the same way, but following Enke (2012c) I think it is relevant to think gender always in terms of transing, as complex process of becoming and ascription.

  6. ‘Migratised’ means being ascribed with migration, being constructed as migrant. The term was coined by Tudor (2014, 2017).

  7. Migratism is the power relation that constructs migrants and ascribes migration as deviant position, and non-migration as the norm of Western societies. Migratism often is a strategy of racism, but not all forms of migratism are racist. The term was coined and conceptualised by Tudor (2014, 2017).

  8. Gender and race do not work in analogous ways, and power relations that construct gender and race do not function in parallels. Therefore, deconstructions of gender and race can not be equated. For making sense of the ascription of in-betweeness in connection to racialisation, see, for example, Haritaworn’s (2012c) ‘mixed race’ approach.

  9. Aizura (2006) subsumes ‘transsexuals’ and ‘transgender’ under the umbrella-term ‘trans’. ‘Transsexuals’ is in his terminology an appellation for persons who undergo a physical transition with the goal to belong to one side of the binary gendering. However, it is also a juridical and pathologising category and usages are not self-evident or universal, warns Aizura (ibid., p. 291f).

  10. See Judith Butler’s (2012) critique of Zionist homecoming and dissolving the Jewish diasporic condition through creating new dispossessions and a situation of war, exile and persecution for the Palestinians.

  11. The term ‘cross-border nationalism’ has been used before; see, for example, Fitzgerald (2004) and Pavlásek (2013). For conceptualisations closest to my understanding, without necessarily using the term, see Gopinath (2003), Grewal (2005) and Puar (1998).

  12. See also Nicolae Vladu and Kleinschmidt (2009, p. 224) in relation to a TV spot that was launched by Noua Dreaptă in Italian TV.

  13. ‘Băsescu: Nouă români au fost ucişi în Italia în noiembrie’, video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTHglfLsySk [last accessed 18 October 2015].

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acknowledgements

Thanks to Clare Hemmings and Wendy Sigle for responses to earlier drafts and to the reviewers and editors of Feminist Review for their constructive engagement.

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  1. Planufer 80, 10967, Berlin, Germany

    Alyosxa Tudor

  2. Centre for Gender Studies, SOAS, University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London, WC1H 0XG, UK

    Alyosxa Tudor

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Tudor, A. dimensions of transnationalism. Fem Rev 117, 20–40 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-017-0092-5

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