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For nearly twenty years, Anglo-American feminist theory has posed its own epi-
stemological questions by looking at the lives and bodies of transsexuals and
transvestites. This paper examines the impact of such scholarship on improving the
everyday lives of the people central to such feminist argumentation. Drawing on in-
digenous scholarship and activisms, I conclude with a consideration of some central
principles necessary to engage in feminist research and theoryto involve marginal
people in the production of knowledge and to transform the knowledge-production
process itself.
Since the early 1990s, Anglo-American feminist theory has articulated a pro-
ject of critical reflection in which the lives, bodies, and realities of transsexual
women are front and center.1 With the publication of Judith Butlers Gender
Trouble (1990), followed by Bodies That Matter (1993), feminist theory has
interrogated the ways in which categories of both sex and gender are con-
stituted.
Butlers argument, well known in academic circles, is that by looking at the
bodies of transsexual and transgender women, we can reflect on the ways in
which all manifestations of gender are secured through specific forms of speech,
dress, and mannerism. In this logic, gender is not something that exists prior to
a subject, but is something achieved in and through its repetition. In Butlers
project, transsexual women and transvestites are central objects of inquiry. The
epistemological questions Butler raises have been taken up with great interest
and enthusiasm within Anglo-American feminist theory. Course outlines and
conferences, for example, are incomplete without reference to her contribu-
tion. Prestigious feminist theory journals like Signs include recent contributions
that theorize the importance of transgender questions to feminist theory (Heyes
2003). For nearly twenty years, then, Anglo-American feminist theory has
been preoccupied with the Transgender Question. This phrasethe
Transgender Questionrefers to the ways in which feminist theory depends
on looking at transsexual and transgendered bodies in order to ask its own epi-
stemological questions. Current discussions within Anglo-American feminist
theorynotably the central question of considering how gender is consti-
tutedtake place primarily through citing transsexual and transvestite bodies.
Anglo-American feminist theory asks the Transgender Question in order to go
about its business.
Given that the field of Anglo-American feminist theory has relied on trans-
sexual women to ask theoretical questions since the early 1990s, it is perhaps
appropriate at this point in history to evaluate the extent to which transsexual
women themselves have been served by such an academic feminist project. If
feminist theory emerged as a way to explain womens lives so that we can better
intervene to improve our everyday worlds, then it is important to consider the
ways in which knowledge and action are connected. If one holds this particular
understanding of feminist theory, one might expect, given that so many fem-
inist theorists, teachers, and graduate students are speaking and writing about
transsexual women, that this knowledge is useful for the lives of the transsexual
women central to feminist argumentation and theory.
Yet such expectations arise only from a certain vision of feminist theory, a
certain understanding of the role of the intellectual. Because feminist theory has
made transsexual women central to its project over the past (nearly) twenty
years, the time is ripe to unpack not just what feminist theorists say about gender
or about transsexuals. Rather, the intellectual and political project at stake is to
examine the particular model of theory and politics espoused in Anglo-Amer-
ican feminist theory and to adequately theorize the political consequences of
such a framework. This article takes up this challenge through a detailed reading
of Butlers work. Given the importance and impact of her oeuvre within fem-
inist scholarship more generally, however, the questions that I raise are posed
with respect to the broader field of Anglo-American feminist theory.
LOST GENERATIONS
an overview of this question here (admittedly incomplete), set within the same
time parameters as the Anglo-American feminist theory discussed above (late
1980s/early 1990s to the present). This snapshot provides a different window
into questions of knowledge and action concerning transsexual women than
those posed by most Anglo-American feminist theorists.
To declare that HIV has had a significant impact on the lives, bodies, and
communities of transsexual women would be an understatement. Across the
globe, transsexual womenand transsexual prostitutes and drug users in par-
ticularindicate some of the highest rates of HIV seroprevalence of any
particular community. To those of us who have been in the milieu for some
time now, to those of us who have thought about these issues since the 1980s,
such information is hardly new. Already in the late 1980s, transsexuals began
organizing worldwide to study the impact of HIV in our worlds and to organize
a collective response. Diana Alan, an Australian activist, was one of the first
leaders in this area, noting that transsexuals indicated HIV seroprevalence rates
double that of other populations (Alan 1988; Alan et al. 1989). New Zealand
witnessed community organizing among transsexual and transvestite prostitutes
in the early 1990s and published a newsletter: ON TOP (Ongoing Network
Transsexual Outreach Project 1992). Also in the early 1990s, transsexual women
in Montreal organized a community-based HIV-prevention project that was
designed to produce information that was relevant and adapted to our lives,
and that respected the work of prostitution. In Paris, the project Prevention
Action Sante Travesti pour les Transgenres (PASTT) offered information, re-
sources, referral, and condom distribution to the large Parisian transsexual
communityin bars, associations, and, of course, the Bois de Boulogne. All of
these projectsand many others like them around the worldwere formed in
an attempt to stem the dramatic tide of HIV among transsexual women. This
history (admittedly brief, partial, and incomplete) reminds us that activists and
community leaders have known for more than twenty years the devastating
impacts of HIV on transsexual women.
Such knowledge has been present in certain circles and circumstances
for twenty years now: community leaders and everyday people have exchanged
information and resources internationallyin an era before the Internetas
a fundamental aspect of survival. Although it is true that certain key people
have understood the terrible consequences of HIV within transsexual commu-
nities since at least the late 1980s, it is also true that there was very little
scientific data to support such a claim. Epidemiological categories, organized
around distinct risk groups (for example, men who have sex with men,
intravenous drug users, people from a county where HIV is endemic), had
no place for transsexual women or transsexual men (Singer 2008). Unrecorded
in official statistics, the extent of the epidemic among transsexual women
remained hidden.
14 Hypatia
UNDOING GENDER?
The knowledge outlined in the previous section, which demonstrates the vul-
nerability of transsexual women and travestis to HIV, is of a different order than
most of the reflections offered on trans lives in the context of academic feminist
theory. This article, then, asks for some critical reflection on this disjuncture as
a way to begin to imagine different models for the production of theory.
Given the significance of Butlers oeuvre, it is useful to think critically about
the nature of the theory that she proposes, as well as how she arrives at her
particular model of theory. A more detailed reading of a recent text explicitly
concerned with genderindeed, with the Transgender Question itselfpro-
vides a useful point of entry for considering the limits of Butlers approach, and
for thinking through the weaknesses of the particular model of feminist theory
she advocates.
Undoing Gender (Butler 2004) is a collection of essays whose shared objec-
tive includes thinking about people who often remain excluded from the very
category human. It is both marked by, and in dialogue with, certain forms of
political organizing related to gender. In Butlers words,
my own thinking has been influenced by the New Gender Pol-
itics that has emerged in recent years, a combination of
movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex
and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory. (4)
This engagement with social movements informs, in part, the choice of an
object of study. Butler makes a compelling argument that, when considering
transsexual and transgender people, the question of violence is central. She
considers why violence against transgender subjects is not recognized as vio-
lence, and why this violence is sometimes inflicted by the very states that
should be offering such subjects protection from such violence (Butler 2004,
30). This focus on violence against transsexual and transgender people brings
into sharp relief the limits of the very category human. By examining how vi-
olence occurs, as well as how it may not be recognized, Butlers project seeks to
imagine the very challenge to individuals and communities survival (Butler
2004, 2067). Thinking about survival in relation to knowledge-production,
for Butler, illustrates the political import of feminist theory (Butler 2004, 207;
217).
To be sure, Butlers project holds the promise of creating knowledge useful
to victims of violence. In an explicit attempt to account for questions of race
and class in this question, Butler notes the inordinate amount of violence di-
rected against trans persons of color and locates that violence as part of a
continuum of the gender violence that took the lives of Brandon Teena, Mat-
thew Shephard, and Gwen Araujo (Butler 2004, 6). The substantive content
16 Hypatia
One last thing. Not only are most of the trans people murdered
sex workers but they are nearly 100 per cent male-to-females.
And that very crucial aspect is completely erased when people
frame the issue as one of violence against transgender people.
This is . . . an issue of violence against transsexual women and
against male-to-female transvestites who are mostly prostitutes.
. . . the fact that MTFs are the ones who are almost exclusively
attacked and killed is something that needs to be pointed out.
(cited in Namaste 2005b, 9293)
It is instructive to read Rosss comments alongside Butlers project. While
Butler would refer to a continuum of gender violence that took the lives of
Brandon Teena, Matthew Shephard and Gwen Araujo (Butler 2004, 6), Ross
is suspicious. Instead of a continuum of violence with regard to gender, Ross
advocates for a contextual analysis that does not, a priori, insist on the primacy
of gender as a category of analysis. Instead of establishing a metonymic relation
between transgender men and transgender women with respect to violence
(enacted by Butlers continuum and by concomitant references to Teena,
Shephard, and Araujo), Ross argues for the importance of examining the na-
ture and sheer volume of violence against transsexual women in comparison to
that against transgender men. In a brilliant theoretical and political move, she
illustrates the paucity of a feminist position thatsomehow!forgets entirely
to account for the specificity of womens bodies and womens lives in explain-
ing the question of violence. Rosss analysis of violence demonstrates the
manner in which framing violence against transsexual prostitutes as gender
violence is a radical recuperation of these events and their causal naturea
violence at the level of epistemology itself.
If violence against transsexual and transvestite bodies is central to current
feminist theory and politics, it remains imperative to recognize that there are
different explanations for how to conceptualize such violence, as well as how to
respond to it. Reflection on such explanations is useful, then, to begin to imag-
ine a vision of feminist theory that is both intellectually sophisticated and
politically useful.
sense, and (2) that traditional categories of Marxist analysis are inadequate for
explaining womens lives. Feminist theorists have made such arguments (and
eloquently so) as a way to reframe the theoretical and political questions. Fem-
inists have demonstrated how the problem raised by the Woman Question is a
problem of theory itself.
It is useful to consider this rich and engaged tradition of feminist thoughts
displacement of the Woman Question in our contemporary considerations of
the state of Anglo-American feminist theory. Just as feminist theorists have
challenged the epistemological and political presuppositions of the Woman
Question, the time is ripearguably, it is far overdueto question the theo-
retical cogency and political relevance of a field that structures itself on the
Transgender Question. Indeed, insofar as Anglo-American feminist theory
eclipses the social relations of labor in the realization of gender for (transsexual)
women, a move that de facto excludes most transgender women of color work-
ing as prostitutes, we can witness a philosophical question embedded in a
framework that is itself biased. Does the absence of labor at this moment in
Anglo-American feminist theory not reflect a broader ideological project, one
in which social theories have no need to account for labor and capital? How is
this version of Anglo-American feminist theory, then, complicit with broader
social relations of global capitalism?
If the Transgender Question in feminist theory is ideological, short-sighted,
and of limited political value, how might we theorists think about these issues
otherwise? What might be some key guiding principles for research, and what
are some useful models for knowledge-production? How might we reconceive
the work of feminist theory, beyond mere critique, to include action? The fol-
lowing section addresses these challenges.
EMPIRICISM
To invoke the notion of empiricism in an essay on feminist theory may seem to
be a contradiction. Theory, after all, is defined by properties of reflection and
abstract thought. It is often opposed to matters of empiricism in both subtle and
unsubtle ways.
A complicated and uneasy relation to empiricism is advanced in Butlers
work. Her project, of course, is committed to a kind of poststructuralist inquiry
that questions the taken-for-granted presuppositions of theoretical concepts.
Her interrogation of gender itself for feminist theory is to be read in this light.
Given such a commitment to an anti-foundationalist endeavor, Butler is nec-
essarily skeptical of facile appeals to evidence. In her reflections on gender
regulation, she makes her position clear:
But it would be a mistake, I believe, to understand all the ways
in which gender is regulated in terms of those empirical legal
instances because the norms that govern those regulations ex-
ceed the very instances in which they are embodied. (Butler
2004, 40)
Here, Butler enacts a typical poststructuralist move and asks that we think
about the unacknowledged presuppositions of regulatory norms. If Butler is
skeptical about basing her analysis exclusively on the empirical, she nonethe-
less recognizes its importance:
On the other hand, it would be equally problematic to speak of
the regulation of gender in the abstract, as if the empirical in-
stances only exemplified an operation of power that takes place
independently of those instances. (Butler 2004, 40)
This acknowledgment of the empirical can be found throughout Butlers
workher project is centrally concerned with social norms governing gender,
which obviously invoke specific empirical realities. In fact, bits and pieces of
empirical reality are necessary conditions for her theoretical ruminations.
In Gender Trouble (1990), Butler extrapolates from the case of a drag queen
in a gay bar to broader questions of feminist epistemology. In Bodies That Matter
(1993), she uses the documentary film Paris Is Burning, with its representation
of transvestite ball culture, to ask questions about gender and kinship. And in
Undoing Gender, she refers to a social movement and collective entity as the
New Gender Politics (Butler 2004, 4) that has influenced her reflections.
If her theoretical work relies upon and appeals to the empirical, it is appropri-
ateat least from the perspective of critical social science and social theoryto
consider the nature and extent of the empiricism offered. The weakness of Butlers
argument, in my view, is a function of an underdeveloped empirical approach.
Viviane Namaste 23
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
Empirical inquiry alone cannot, of course, solve all the problems feminist the-
ory faces. Nor can it provide an easy alibi for good politics or ethical
researchthere are certainly scores of empirical studies on transsexuals and
transvestites that are of questionable political import given their objectification
of the people under study.6 So the challenge is not just to engage in empirical
inquiry, but to think about different ways to achieve this. Here, my focus is less
24 Hypatia
RELEVANCE
Relevance is axiomatic to indigenous knowledge and to the practice of com-
munity-based research more broadly. In simple terms, it means being able to
demonstrate that the knowledge produced will be useful to the people and
communities under investigation. There are different approaches for determin-
ing relevance. Some projects may simply ask people to reflect on this question,
while others insist that the research question itself be identified by the people
concerned (Canadian Aboriginal AIDS Network, n.d.). The latter approach is
an attempt to ensure that a research agenda is not imposed from outside. Given
the devastating consequences of research on aboriginal people, an insistence
that knowledge be relevant is extraordinarily importantpolitically and intel-
lectually.
EQUITY IN PARTNERSHIP
The concept of relevance brings into sharp relief the difficulties in defining
what is, in fact, useful knowledge. Who gets to decide? Who has the last word
on this? Why? These questions call up another principle central to indigenous
knowledge: equity in partnership. This concept means that people about whom
one writes have an equal say and an equal voice in all aspects of empirical re-
search: defining the question, gathering the data, analyzing the results, and
presenting the conclusions. An insistence on equity radically transforms tradi-
tional relations between academics and the communities they study, where
partnership has too often meant a community providing access to a field so a
researcher can obtain data to answer the research question she has posed (Bars-
ley and Lewis 1996). Pragmatically, advisory committees are often used as one
means to ensure equity in community participation. While undoubtedly not
without problems (Cottrell 2001), the conduct of empirical research on mar-
ginalized populations in collaboration with an advisory committee is certainly
preferable to more traditional models of academic inquiry, in which people and
communities exist merely as objects of research.
Equity in participation, then, is axiomatic to helping establish a research
questions relevance. Consider Butlers project in light of these issues: she ar-
gues that her scholarship is politically useful because she helps to show how
gender violence dehumanizes trans people. She appeals to relevance, then,
both in terms of the substantive matter of violence as well as in a broader the-
oretical project that explores the limits of the human. But what if Butlers
analysis of this violence were to occur in dialogue with a community advisory
committee of transsexual prostitute activists like Mirha-Soleil Ross? What type
of data would be gathered? How would it be analyzed? What conclusions could
be drawn? If transsexual prostitutesthe very women so often invoked in the-
oretical and political discussions of violencehad equal voice and equal
26 Hypatia
OWNERSHIP
A third (but again, by no means final) criterion for empirical research and the-
ory is that of ownership. Ownership is key to indigenous knowledgeboth in
recognition of how aboriginal people historically have been divested of their
languages, traditions, and knowledge, and in appreciation of the ways in which
knowledge is so easily subject to appropriation, reification, and commodifica-
tion. Indeed, pharmaceutical companies are active in their attempts to patent
plant properties for the development of medications, which in effect means
they own this knowledge (Zerda-Sarmiento and Forero-Pineda 2002). Indige-
nous communities have responded by insisting on the right to ownershipthat
knowledge of the healing properties of plants comes from indigenous people
themselves. An insistence on ownership can have far-reaching consequences.
The Hopi nation, for instance, has developed a protocol agreement with re-
searchers (HCPO, n.d.), one clause of which underlines that the community
owns the knowledge generated, and that it reserves the right to keep knowledge
secret.
The importance of ownership is particularly relevant for transsexual women,
and notably for the most marginal transsexual women. In the context of Paris,
there has never been a large-scale epidemiological study that examines HIV
seroprevalence among transsexuals and transvestites (see, however, CRIPS-
CIRDD 2007a). Leaders among transsexual and transvestite communities have
expressed grave reservations about how the results of such a study could be
used, especially if the HIV seroprevalence rate is high. Would such results re-
inforce an association of HIV with prostitution? Would they, once released in
the media, conjoin transsexuals and transvestites (les travelos) with disease in
the popular imagination? How could such knowledge impact negatively on the
working conditions of transsexual and transvestite prostitutes? Would an asso-
ciation with disease put them at increased risk of violence? Moreover, given the
high proportion of transsexual and transvestite populations from migrant com-
munities in Paris (PASTT 1999), how could such data be used as evidence of
the need to deport such undesirable, illegal migrants? Such concerns are, of
course, more than abstract, as France effected a virtual expulsion of Brazilian
travestis in the mid-1980s (Tavares 2002). More recently, when Nicolas
Sarkozy was Frances Minister of the Interior, he proposed and enacted new
legislation on soliciting (racolage) designed to eliminate public prostitution and
whose central justification was the expulsion of migrant workers (ACT-UP
Paris 2003). The concerns expressed by community leaders are quite real.
While there is not necessarily unanimity on the need to reject HIV epidemi-
Viviane Namaste 27
ological surveillance of trans populations in Paris,7 the fact that serious reser-
vations are expressed is important. The invocation of a concept of ownership is
central to ensuring that the production of knowledge benefits, and does not
harm transsexual and transvestite prostitutes.
An insistence on empirical approaches to theory, and the integration of
principles of relevance, equity in participation, and ownership would radically
transform the production of academic feminist knowledge in the Anglo-Amer-
ican world. There are a myriad of models for engaging in such a transformative
intellectual practice; I have only briefly outlined a few examples here. Drawing
from scholarship and activism in indigenous knowledge, I wish to raise ques-
tions about some of the central tenets of how we go about producing
theoretical explanations of the world. If people are marginalized in and through
the production of knowledge, then a truly transformative intellectual practice
would collaborate with such individuals and communities to ensure that their
political and intellectual priorities are addressed. Simply put, Anglo-American
feminist theory would be well served by actually speaking with everyday
women about their lives.
CONCLUSION
Your theories are covered in our blood.Transsexual activist
button, Toronto, mid-1990s.
The Transgender Question in Anglo-American feminist theory has spawned a
plethora of reflection on the bodies, lives, and realities of transsexual women.
For nearly twenty years now, Anglo-American feminist theory has relied on
transsexual women to ask its own epistemological questions.
Yet the consequences of this knowledge are troubling indeed. Anglo-Amer-
ican feminist theory has provided an intellectual framework in which the
specificity of transsexual prostitutes lives is erased. Perhaps more disturbingly,
such theory authorizes political actions that recuperate the violence against
prostitutes into a generic violence against trans people. This evacuates the
analytical category of labor as central for feminist inquiry, and thus also man-
ages to exclude the realities of most transgender women of color who are
working as prostitutes. Moreover, this theoretical position paradoxically
neglects the specificity of womens lives, assuming that one can understand
violence against transsexual women and that against transsexual men on the
same gender continuum. As Mirha-Soleil Ross contends, it is ironic indeed
when feminist theory itself obscures the gendered dimensions of violence
against women.
Although Anglo-American feminist theory has focused on transvestites and
transsexual women for nearly twenty years now, it is clear that the knowledge
gained has been of little benefit to transsexual women ourselves. Indeed, in
28 Hypatia
certain respects feminist theory has worsened the situation: the Transgender
Question has written the prostitutes and grassroots community organizers out of
history, politics, and knowledge itself.
The conclusion of this essay includes the unsettling reality that the gap be-
tween transsexual womens everyday lives and the theoretical explanations of
those lives offered by Anglo-American feminist theory has only increased over
the past twenty years. While theorists have expounded the virtues and political
importance of reflection on gender, transsexual women themselves have con-
fronted realities outside the narrow scope of gender as a concept. For more than
twenty years, transsexuals who are somewhat older (forty and over) have wit-
nessed the horrific consequences of HIV in our communities, burying friends,
lovers, and co-workers over and over again. The past twenty years have seen
the loss of an entire generation of transsexual women, dead to AIDS, suicide,
overdose, or murder by a client (Namaste 2005a). Transsexual women age with
the unsettling knowledge that many of usoften, most of usdo not live to be
forty years old.8 Every day, transsexual women see our work, lives, community
organizing, and even personal relationships criminalized through an invocation
of prostitution laws. The details, substance, and concepts of these realities are
chillingly absent from Anglo-American feminist theory and its framing of the
Transgender Question.
The theoretical and political task at hand, then, is not one of undoing gen-
der. What is required is nothing short of undoing theory.
NOTES
1. The invocation of Anglo-American feminist theory does not designate the tra-
dition of Anglo-American analytic philosophy per se, but rather the writing and
production of theory that takes place in English, and that is primarily located in the
United States, Great Britain, English Canada, and Australia.
2. In keeping with the language used within the milieu in question, I use the term
travesti and not transgendered. Throughout the paper, I invoke different terms (trans-
sexual, transvestite, travesti) to designate different individuals born as male but living
and/or working and/or identifying as female. I also use the terms transgender and trans in
an umbrella sense, typical to current usage in Anglo-American contexts. That said,
since most of my own empirical research is not based in English-speaking contexts (see
Namaste 2005a), my own invocation of the term transgender always seems a bit foreign, a
misnomer of sorts.
3. The 1999 Annual Report of PASTT (Prevention Action Sante Travail pour les
Transgenres) notes that of the clients they serve (transvestites and transsexuals), only
13.3% were born in France: the rest come from other parts of the world, notably the
Maghreb, Africa, and South America (PASTT 1999, 19).
4. This is not, of course, to suggest that all Anglo-American feminist theorists
have ignored labor. Nevertheless, the centrality of Butlers work for the field means that
Viviane Namaste 29
questions of work and labor are increasingly absent from an analysis of womens every-
day lives.
5. On this matter, see also the astute comments by Vek Lewis (2006), who dem-
onstrates the ways in which analysis in Spanish of travesti lives focuses on matters of
prostitution, and differs markedly from those in Anglo-American queer and feminist
theories.
6. I have developed this argument in greater depth elsewhere (see Namaste 2000).
7. On this question, see CRIPS-CIRDD 2007b.
8. The statistics provided by Berkins and Fernandez document the situation in
Buenos Aires: 69% of the community of travestis and transsexuals had died by the age of
forty-one (Berkins and Fernandez 2005, 13).
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