Part-Time Genders: Identifying Homonationalist Logics in Transvestite Periodical Magazines

Keywords: Archives, Transgender, Transvestite, Trans, Queer, Feminist
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 29

Abstract

Archival research has taken a central position within transgender studies as a mode of knowledge production attesting to the presence of transgender people through history. Comparatively, transgender geographies have focused on contemporary experiences of transgender people primarily in urban, carceral, and digital spaces using ethnographic, mental mapping, and critical GIS methods. Both trans studies and trans geographies have only examined a limited range of trans identities, overlooking identity groups such as transvestites. This paper questions how archival study of transvestites informs the study of historical transgender identities. This paper examines transvestites as a historical identity group that maintained male gender expressions in the geographies of everyday life while embodying femme-gendered selves only in particular spaces of gendered escapism, with particular focus on the period between 1969 and 1980.


My archival study focuses on the transvestite periodical magazine Transvestia in the Digital Transgender Archives, examining the historical discourses which defined transvestite identity and their relationships with contemporaneous psycho-medical definitions of transsexual and homosexual identity. I argue that in the decade following the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn, transvestite discourses employed homonationalist logics to differentiate transvestites from other queer identities. As the authors and editors of Transvestia applied a regulatory script on the expression of transness through their writing, I argue they reproduced uneven, and sometimes violent, geographies of race, class, ability, and cis-heteronormativity. This trans contribution to critical human geographies expands the literature on transgender geographies and theorizations of the mutual production of gendered space and bodies.