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N°1 | 2014 – Transfeminisms: Feminist Transitions Politics

N°2 | 2015 – Conversions: Religions, transmutations and politics

N°1 | 2014 – Transfeminisms: Feminist Transition Politics

Editors : Kira Ribeiro, Ian Zdanowicz

In this issue of Comment S’en Sortir ? we wish to map the alliances, common struggles and translations of concepts between trans, feminist, anti-racist and queer movements and theories that we collect under the concept of “transfeminisms”. Transfeminism has been defined as a movement for trans women, by trans women (Koyama, 2003), as a feminist project in which trans women fully belong to the political subject “women”. We wish to reflect on the concept of transfeminisms by moving away from the “women” category. Through the use of this term, we want, on the one hand, to reclaim feminist tools in order to consider trans subjectivities. On the other hand, we want to encourage feminism to revaluate its own critical tools. Therefore, we refer to the perspectives on transfeminism recently offered by Kristina Scott-Dixon (2006), Gayle Salamon (2010) or Anne Finn Enke (2012), for they question the critical, self-reflexive, interdisciplinary and unruly potential of this term. According to these authors, "transfeminism" is not a subdivision of feminism. Instead, it represents the possibility of a radical paradigm shift within Feminist Theory and Gender Studies ; an epistemological turn rendering the dichotomies upon which many theories took form (sex/gender; man/woman; biological/social; materiality/performativity) obsolete.
Through the term “transfeminism”, we wish, firstly, to think about theoretical practices introduced by trans subjects (of knowledge) in feminism. Secondly, we wish to address the multiple trans uses, ways, and arts of making regarding queer and feminist tools, as well as arts of making it involved in the fabrication of the bodies, subjectivities, engagement and languages of trans people.

We do not wish to recreate a global vision of the exchanges between Trans Theories and Feminist Theories, but rather to focus on a selected number of important issues in order to build theoretically and politically fructuous transfeminist convergences.

TOPICS
  • Sex, gender, and sexuality: definitions and boundaries

Taking trans issues into account, our task is not only to think about what it means to be or become a “man” or a “woman” and how it appears to be a problematic dichotomy in view of trans subjectivities, but also to think about how terms such as “cisgender”, “transgender”, “transsexual”, “trans”, “trans*”, “trans-” (to name only a few) renew the issue of boundaries between biology, culture, social, technology, and politics.

  • Materiality/performativity of the body : trans bodies phenomenology

Is gender only a performance? Is it a fantasy, game, psyche, or language, normative, legal, or administrative acts? Or is it exclusively material and prediscursive, a matter of pure flesh, anatomy, and biology? How and where do the boundaries between the bodies and identities of butch, FtM, queen, king, boi, MtF, fem, genderfucker, trans, tranny, and other queer identities stand, whether in Paris, Barcelona, New York, Berlin, Bombay, Tel Aviv, or São Paulo? What are the tensions, conflicts, and issues between trans communities and queer communities depending on geopolitical and economical contexts? Do queer thoughts help us to consider trans identities or do they “invisibilize” them, as Viviane Namaste says (2000)?

  • Psychiatric power and medical power

The diversity of trans politics and trans identities leads us to think about the plurality of relations in psychiatric power. We want to ask the following questions: How do psychiatric power and medical power produce “transsexualism” as a mental illness? Do they take place within the power apparatuses described by Michel Foucault – the production and management of the population, state appropriation of “sex”, and paradox of differential diagnostic (Dorlin, 2011)? Conversely, how did trans patients contribute to modifying the analytical frame of gender issues at work in sexual psychopathology, psychoanalysis, and psychology of gender? How did they contribute to renewing the critic of sexual binary and to reconsidering the legitimacy of normalization processes of bodies and subjectivities (Sennot and Smith, 2011)?

  • Subjectivation/objectivation: epistemological issues and the institutionalization of Trans Studies

The development of research on trans issues in francophone European universities urges us to reflect on the relation between objectivation and subjectivation, between neutrality and partiality, and between the political and the scientific, and doing so taking into consideration the specificities of trans issues and research on this topic. On the other side of the Atlantic, regarding Trans Studies as well as other fields, the institutionalization of knowledge raises several questions: how can we go beyond a discourse on ourselves? Should we look for a better discourse on ourselves? Does one have to be trans to do Trans Studies? Do Trans Studies lead to an inevitably militant knowledge limited to trans issues? How can we link trans issues to power relations of class, sexuality, race, age, religion, etc.?

DEADLINES and CONTACT
  • Deadline for submitting proposals: May 15, 2013
    Acceptance decisions will be communicated by May 31, 2013
  • Deadline for sending complete articles: November 15, 2013
    Definitive acceptance: December 15, 2013
  • Publication: Spring 2014

N°2 | 2015 – Conversions: Religions, transmutations and politics

Editors : Nadia Fadil, Guillaume Roucoux

According to the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (1694), conversion refers to “change”, “transmutation”, although it “also refers to matters of Religion and morals, and means a change of beliefs, feelings and morals from bad to good.” Even though the religious meaning has been relegated to a position of secondary importance in this dictionary and the following, it became of primary importance in conversion studies under the influence of theology. Throughout history, anthropology, sociology and social psychology or transdisciplinarity (Brandt et al. 2009, Baktouche et al., 2012), this meaning of conversion acquired a growing scientific interest during the 20th century despite the secularization of our societies and the decline of religion’s influence on individuals.

Drawing from a Christian culture, early studies of conversion understand it in the one-off and unpredictable mode of awakening, illumination, or even ecstasy (Starbuck, 1900; Clark, 1929). Conversion was redefined and conceptualized only in the course of the 20th century, first regarding heritage; and later on regarding seekership (Hervieu-Léger, 1999). The rise of new religious movements has given conversion phenomena an accrued size and visibility. Like the inaugural Lofland-Stark model (1965; Lofland, 1977; Snow et al., 1980), a plethora of models has emerged from the social sciences. The Lofland-Stark model and subsequent studies have radically changed the definition of conversion: it is no longer an one-off event, but a process or a career (Richardson et al., 1977; Richardson, 1978; Bankston et al., 1981). Studies aim to know its motives (Lofland et al., 1981) and its effects on personality (Travisano, 1975; Straus, 1976; Dawson, 1990; Barker, 1995). Scientific debates focus then on the “active” or “passive” role of the individual, leading to question conversion through recruitment (Richardson, 1985). Conversion is a meaningful word as well, as it is an opportunity to think about other notions and experiences, among which the notions of commitment (Lynch, 1977; Richardson, 1977; Stapples et al., 1987), addiction (Simmonds, 1977), or even infection (Laycock, 2010).

This outline of a genealogy of religious conversion reveals that, by dint of interrogations, analysis, refining, theoretical uses or attrition, conversion has become a classic theme of religious studies. Meanwhile, it has developed outside of those studies as a tool able to describe different phenomena. Conversion now exceeds the sole register of religion. By offering to work on it as it is, from its descriptive plurality, this issue aims to exhume, highlight, and possibly create other meanings in order to inject a critical power in it as well as reclaiming it as a concept (Baillé, 2007). By doing so, we also question the relation between conversion and what Michel Foucault described as the “care of the self”: the corporeal, affective and discursive work of the self as a way to transform oneself. By opening this concept to other realities, we also wish to examine the relevance of this signifier and its function in discourse. What happens when a social transformation (whatever it is) is labeled with the term “conversion”? What is the relationship between those phenomena and the daily work on the self of every subject? Can we affirm that conversion operates as a neutral analytical concept or does this concept have a specific role in the denaturalization process of certain (which ones?) practices of transformations of the self? This issue seeks to approach conversion as a useful category of analysis in the work on power relations that structure, limit and bound our lives, thoughts, desires, bodies and spaces. Authors are invited to write proposals that fit into one or several of the following themes.

THEMES
  1. Religious conversions, social categories and power relations.
  2. Body conversions and identity transmutations.
  3. Strategical conversions and political threats.
DEADLINES and CONTACT
  • Deadline for submitting proposals: April 15th, 2014
    Acceptance decisions will be communicated by the end of April 2014
  • Deadline for sending complete articles: October 1st, 2014
    Definitive acceptance: mid-October 2014
  • Publication: Spring 2015