Gender Studies

In "Homonationalism as Assemblage," Jasbir Puar situates her theory of 'homonormative nationalism' within Palestine/Israel to reveal how sexuality is "a crucial formation in the articulation of proper citizens." As an extension to previous work, Puar clarifies that the queers seen as 'proper' by the settler nation-state are not 'gender queer.' Rather, "trans and gender nonconforming queers are not welcome" in Israeli homonationalism. While Puar's dissection of trans people from homonationalism in 2013 is justified, the common exclusion of trans people from critiques of nationalist 'exception' calls for further interrogation in 2022. Through synthesis of historical and contemporary media, this paper configures a separate analytic of transnationalism to consider how certain trans bodies "pass" into the dominant U.S. body politic, not just by gender, but by investment in the nation. Informed by readings in Queer Indigenous Studies and Scott Lauria Morgensen's theory of settler homonationalism, I argue that trans passing in the U.S. is mediated by racialized gender norms accumulated through the colonial regulation of trans indigeneity over time. While white trans people in the U.S. may experience varying degrees of marginalization, we are also settlers on stolen land. As such, our efforts to pass into the national body politic must be theorized beyond a critique of the visual to consider how passing, as settlers, involves a specific set of nationalist convictions, gestures, and actions linked to the elimination of Indigenous peoples. Transnationalist politics-whether conservative or liberal-distance the trans movement from its anti-assimilationist roots, normalize the settler state's claims to Indigenous lands, and ultimately vacate the possibility for ever-necessary linkage between trans liberation and decolonization.

Traces of trans feminine pasts are scattered all across the colonial archive. In New Spain, glimpses of Indigenous trans women's lives can be found in the records of conquistadors as early as the sixteenth century. While such early colonial representations of trans femininity span myriad religious, imperial and literary contexts, they are all underpinned by one harrowing reality: the widespread, colonial pursuit of trans feminine death. To 're-member'-á la Saylesh Wesley-trans feminine pasts in the colonial archive, this article traces structures of, and resistance to, colonial trans misogyny in the sodomy criminal trials of Mexico (1604-1771) and the Catholic missions of California (1769-1821). Pushing against an extant 'cistoriography' that has simply archived these stories within the history of sexuality, I ask: What may be gleaned by centring trans femininity and womanhood as core to not only the lives of historical subjects, but the reason many of their lives were so violently taken? By remembering trans misogyny in this way, we may finally name and centre the long-erased trans feminine historical subject, illuminate the complex, changing structures of her past worlds and trace the oft-forgotten lineages of not just trans feminine death, but trans feminine survivance in its face. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

This paper asks to what extent does Canada’s New Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) represent a more transformational and intersectional approach to gender equality and neo-liberal international development? In other words, what is “new” about Canada’s international development policy when it comes to gender equality and women’s empowerment?  Through a critical examination of the discourses of economic development in the FIAP on poverty, trade, market citizenship, and the private sector, I argue that the FIAP embodies both neoliberal feminism as well as feminist neoliberalism, which limit the transformational potential and impact of the FIAP on gender and international development strategies.

This chapter analyses Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie in order to explore how the colonial working class of the subcontinent shared a dialogic relationship with the British working class during the late colonial period. The colonial, racial and imperial relationship between the Empire and its colony is shown to have influenced the nature and scope of working-class literature. In analyzing how, despite being assigned the nomenclature of the ‘native-informant’, Anand’s choice of writing about the subcontinental working-class in English emancipated his work from its regional boundaries and attained a true international character, this chapter situates Anand amongst authors of inter World War working-class literature, and considers how his fictional representation of the colonial working-class adds to our understanding of the British working-class tradition.