empire strikes back read

8/9/2019 Empire Strikes Back Read

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$ Sandy Stones classic essay confronts the ways in whichboth the medical complex and feminism had been used as a tool

for the regulation of gender/sex systems and the management

of trans bodies. While the essay is certainly dated in many ways,

we see a usefulness in making sure that it continues to be dis-tributed. Stone captures the paradox of the trans subjects will

to be recognized as the gender/sex of their choosing while at the

same time questioning the maintenance of gender/sex systems

on a systemic level. is raises questions about what an insur-

rectionary transfeminism might look like and how it might be

theoretically developed. Is the development of a speaking trans

subject already a failure, or is an armation of transgender bod-ies destabilizing to identity and gender/sex? How can we reconcile

self-abolition and desubjectication with the desire to be recog-

nized as the gender/sex of our choice? How can we reconcile the

lived experience of being trans with self-negation without falling

into a Trannsexual Empire-style critique of trans identity as more

ariticial? Can we use our trans positionality as the beginning of

an attack upon all systems of domination? ese questions arepotentially daunting ones, but must be answered if we choose to

engage with trans experience.

-mimi, not yr cister press


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