Ebook: Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility

Essays, conversations, and archival investigations explore the paradoxes, limitations, and social ramifications of trans representation within contemporary culture.

The increasing representation of trans identity throughout art and popular culture in recent years has been nothing if not paradoxical. Trans visibility is touted as a sign of a liberal society, but it has coincided with a political moment marked both by heightened violence against trans people (especially trans women of color) and by the suppression of trans rights under civil law. Trap Door grapples with these contradictions. The essays, conversations, and dossiers gathered here delve into themes as wide-ranging yet interconnected as beauty, performativity, activism, and police brutality. Collectively, they attest to how trans people are frequently offered “doors”—entrances to visibility and recognition—that are actually “traps,” accommodating trans bodies and communities only insofar as they cooperate with dominant norms. The volume speculates about a third term, perhaps uniquely suited for our time: the trapdoor, neither entrance nor exit, but a secret passageway leading elsewhere. Trap Door begins a conversation that extends through and beyond trans culture, showing how these issues have relevance for anyone invested in the ethics of visual culture.

Contributors Lexi Adsit, Sara Ahmed, Nicole Archer, Kai Lumumba Barrow, Johanna Burton, micha cárdenas, Mel Y. Chen, Grace Dunham, Treva Ellison, Sydney Freeland, Che Gossett, Reina Gossett, Stamatina Gregory, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Robert Hamblin, Eva Hayward, Juliana Huxtable, Yve Laris Cohen, Abram J. Lewis, Heather Love, Park McArthur, CeCe McDonald, Toshio Meronek, Fred Moten, Tavia Nyong'o, Morgan M. Page, Roy Pérez, Dean Spade, Eric A. Stanley, Jeannine Tang, Wu Tsang, Jeanne Vaccaro, Chris E. Vargas, Geo Wyeth, Kalaniopua Young, Constantina Zavitsanos

Trap Door is necessary for now, a collection of essays unafraid of the messy contradictions of capitalism and its deleterious effects on bodies, movement, and land. This collection anchors us in 'the paradox of this moment,' increased transgender visibility alongside proliferating violence and rejection of transgender people personally, socially, and politically. Transdisciplinary and trans-historical, this text not only allows us to think race, gender, sexuality, and the state, simultaneously; it also contends with the material, ideological, and epistemological ramifications of visibility. The book is not simply about knowing or seeing, or even feeling; it makes its readers conscious of how it is we have come to know, see, and feel. This collection is a model text, a must read that demonstrates the highest potential of Transgender Studies as a field.

Kai M. Green Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Williams College