
Transgender
Studies
TRANSGENDER STUDIES
Transgender Studies presents a field in Gender Studies that has gained strong influence onto the discipline. It participates in the ongoing project of rethinking gender binaries. As an academic field it started forming in the early 1970 and more solidly consolidated itself from up the early 1990s with pioneering publications leading up to founding in 2013 the field’s first academic peer-reviewed journal Transgender Studies Quarterly. From the beginning, Transgender Studies set out to intervene into objectifying theorisations of transgender embodiment and gender identity which has been dominant in hegemonic areas of sexology, psychology, and psychiatric medicine. Also within Gender Studies the idea of non-normative sex/gender positions was at first – and is sometimes still – regarded as controversial and not always welcomed. Within GEXcel, feminist and transgender research are perceived as inseparable. Being in the process of institutionalisation, Transgender Studies is a field in which multiple voices debate and sometimes problematise its foci and contents and its potentially euroamerican universalisation of terminologies and definitions. Understanding transgender as a non-linear and deterritorialising ‘movement away’ from birth assigned sex, the research theme of Transgender Studies in this platform encourages and works for a decolonialising understanding of the field in contemporary, futural, as well as historical terms. As an intersectional feminist project, Transgender Studies is theoretically as well as methodologically inspired by socio-cultural movements, grass root activism, academic and activist change-oriented processes. Furthermore, it is deeply committed to a transfeminist, intra-sectional, and interdependent epistemology. As a research field, Transgender Studies within GEXcel is determined by a non-essentialising and non-universalising approach towards corpo-materialities, gendered selves, and embodied sexualities and offers a platform for cutting-edge knowledge production.
Feminist posthumanties
03
Universities
12
Research Fields
35
Research Sub-Fields
