Gender Skepticism, Trans Livability, and Feminist Critique

Abstract

This article discusses a recent argument made by a number of Foucauldian feminists that gender is a problematic concept for feminism. They argue that the self-evident status that gender enjoys in current feminist theory and politics is based on the concealment of its historical emergence as a pathologizing discourse in 1950s American psychiatric-sexology, which targeted intersex and trans populations. Claiming that the feminist redeployments of gender risk reinforcing its normalizing functions, they suggest that feminists should consider discarding it as a conceptual tool. Returning to Judith Butler’s account of gender, which also draws on the Foucauldian legacy, as well as developing the concept of trans livability, the article shows that gender skeptics not only downplay the possibility of a critical rearticulation of gender but also ignore the question of gender self-determination. My critical examination thus centers on the tension between the pathologizing history of gender and the possibilities for feminist redeployments of the concept. The aim of my defense of gender is to provide conceptual tools for feminist theorizing and politics that take seriously the normalizing history of gender but commit strongly to a trans-affirmative conception of feminist critique.

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