Transgender Marxism is the first volume of its kind, offering a provocative and groundbreaking synthesis of transgender studies and Marxist theory. Reflecting on the relations between gender and labor, it shows how these linked phenomena structure antagonisms in particular social and historical situations. While no one is spared gendered conditioning, the contributors argue that transgender people nonetheless face particular pressures, oppressions and state persecution. The collection makes a particular contribution to Marxist feminism and social reproduction theory, through both personal and analytic examinations of the social activity demanded of trans people around the world. Exploring trans lives and movements through a Marxist lens, the book also assesses the particular experience of surviving as trans in light of the totality of gendered experience under capitalism. Twinning Marxism with other schools of thought - including psychoanalysis, phenomenology and Butlerian performativity - Transgender Marxism ultimately offers an insight into transgender experience, and an exciting renewal of Marxist theory itself.
Introduction - Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke
1. Social Reproduction and Social Cognition: Theorizing (Trans)gender Identity Development in Community Context - Noah Zazanis (reproductive health research assistant, New York)
2. Trans Work: Employment Trajectories, Labour Discipline and Gender Freedom - Michelle O'Brien (New York University)
3. Judith Butler's Scientific Revolution: Foundations for a Transsexual Marxism - Rosa Lee (editor at Viewpoint Magazine)
4. How Do Gender Transitions Happen? - Jules Joanne Gleeson
5. A Queer Marxist Transfeminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction - Nat Raha (University of Sussex)
6. Notes from Brazil - Virginia Guitzel (philosophy student, Federal University of ABC)
7. Queer Workerism Against Work: Strategising Transgender Labourers, Social Reproduction & Class Formation - Kate Doyle Griffiths (lecturer, Brooklyn College and editor of Spectre Journal)
8. The Bridge between Gender and Organizing - Farah Thompson (Black, bisexual trans woman who does tech while living in San Diego)
9. Encounters in Lancaster - J. N. Hoad (DIY transsexual in the North West of the UK)
10. Transgender and Disabled Bodies - Between Pain and the Imaginary - Zoe Belinsky (independent scholar)
11. A Dialogue on Deleuze and Gender Difference - The Conspiratorial Association for the Advancement of Cultural Degeneracy (Cultural Degeneracy and Sacrilege - a pseudonymous dialogue between friends)
12. Seizing the Means: Towards a Trans Epistemology - Nathaniel Dickinson (PhD candidate, University at Bufflalo)
13. 'Why Are We Like This?' The Primacy of Transsexuality - Xandra Metcalfe (psychoanalytic communist and noise artist based in Melbourne)
14. Cosmos Against Nature in the Class Struggle of Proletarian Trans Women - Anja Flower (artist living in San Francisco)
Afterword: One Utopia, One Dystopia - Jordy Rosenberg (Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Notes on Contributors
Index
Jules Joanne Gleeson is a historian with a focus on gender and intellectual history. Jules has published pieces on queer, transgender and intersex issues in a range of publications including Novara Media, VICE and the Hypocrite Reader. Elle O'Rourke is a political economist and gender theorist currently researching critical theories of financialisation. She is co-founder of New Socialist (UK), a magazine of left thought and commentary, where she serves as economics co-editor.
