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oa Trans*ing constructs
Towards a critical trans* methodology
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, Volume 20, Issue 4, Nov 2017, p. 415 - 434
Abstract
Presented through an intersectionally framed study investigating U.S.-based transmasculine college students’ conceptions of masculinity, this paper explores a myriad of methodological and analytical queries by examining trans*ing as method. How might trans*ing taken-for-granted constructs (such as masculinity) full of unnamed – and thus unchallenged – assumptions resist dominant narratives that drive theorising and practice and thus seek solutions and interventions that can improve everyone’s lives? What possibilities lie in the asterisk’s disruptive potential that can cause us to ‘pause in order to reach beyond’ (Patel, 2016, p. 88) hegemonic and settler colonial structures of masculinity? How might attending to the relationality of trans identities (Catalano, 2017; Jourian, 2017a; Nicolazzo, 2017), the relational nature of research (Patel, 2016), and the ‘process-oriented rather than end-oriented’ (Spade, 2015, p. 189) nature of critical trans politics allow us to resist normative and positivistic analytical practices that distill complex data and people into simplistic models and understandings? Divergent and disruptive thinking and arriving at these constructs from unexpected starting points exposes tensions and false binaries in them, points of excess that then have to be transformed to have meaning, driving scholarship and practice towards liberatory potentials.