Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: Just as a trans-woman isn’t a woman, trans-science isn’t science.
First, a little mood music:
Carrying on…
Apparently a “crip gut” refers to “non-normative digestive processing, nutritional disabilities or other disabilities related to the gut”. Oh, and apparently it’s even more special when it involves an autobiographical ranting of a queer feminist. The abstract:
“What is a feminist queer crip approach to the gut? How might we use feminist queer crip theory to make sense of non-normative guts? And how might crip guts help us make sense of the world? This paper is an autoethnographic reflection on my crip guts, specifically being diagnosed with ulcerative colitis (UC), a form of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and having a colectomy (surgery to remove my colon) to create an ileostomy (a type of stoma). I consider the epistemic complexities of being both patient and researcher and the importance of acknowledging multiple forms of expertise, putting my autoethnographic reflections into conversation with a variety of texts. I argue that my crip guts provide an embodied, if stigmatised, form of knowledge that complicates academic/lived experience and body/mind divisions, alongside necessitating more holistic responses to crip guts beyond individualising biomedical models. I examine the violence of discourses of normality around bodily difference and the complex temporalities of the gut through a focus three key moments in my crip gut experience – late diagnosis and (not) being believed; stoma representation and stigmatised imagined futures; and, the gut remembering colonial pasts – before arguing for queer stoma pride as a destigmatised collective refusal of normative gut discourse and valuation of crip gut knowing.”
Having a “different way of knowing” ain’t just for non-White people anymore. The abstract concerning “trans data epistemologies”:
Having a “different way of knowing” ain’t just for non-White people anymore. The abstract concerning “trans data epistemologies”:“Amidst proliferating threats to trans rights, transgender activists are using data and data activism to advocate for and to protect trans communities. This transgender-led study asks “How do trans activists use data in their activism?” We interviewed 16 activists engaged in trans community care: from community healthcare to media production to policy making, our participants are making and using data about trans people to serve and support trans communities. Our findings reveal that participants use tactical approaches to data and data science that were consistent with existing data activist literature and contemporary approaches to data refusal. However, what emerged were more than sets of tactics — our participants described ways of knowing with and about data that are grounded in their experiences of (racialized, disabled, aging, queer) transness. Taken together, we consider these ways of knowing to be a trans data epistemology. Drawing on literature from trans theory, data activism, critical data studies, philosophy, and critical social theory we offer a narrative of trans people as creators of knowledge, data-based and otherwise, undergirded by four pillars of a trans data epistemology: categories are provisional and productive, data can be a tool of community care, community well-being is more important than “accurate” data, and data makes us visible to institutions.”
And no review of queer feminist transgender studies would be complete without some transfeminist pregnancy! The abstract:
“In the explosion of abortion bills post Dobbs, anti-abortion language identifies women according to their reproductive potential: ‘Woman’ means […] an individual with a uterus, regardless of any gender identity.’ According to this definition pregnancy or the potential for pregnancy define womanhood. Women without uteruses (cis and trans) are excluded, and trans men with uteruses are absorbed into the category of woman. This reproductive language, tethering transgender and reproductive politics, requires a reassessment of how pregnancy is theorised in feminist and transgender studies. In the following article, I argue that pregnancy is not to be defined by biological phenomena but instead as a genre of political, aesthetic, and affective experience and expectation. As a multidimensional genre of experience, rather than merely a biological datum, pregnancy can potentially establish a shared ground between trans and cis women. Pregnancy is an existential experience involving birth and becoming in a larger sense. We need a more all-encompassing notion of pregnancy, which is nourished by the capacious social world of conception and giving new life. Such a definition of pregnancy supports the goal of feminists, who resist the reduction of womanhood to reproductive function. For transgender studies, a wider understanding of pregnancy helps to build a transsexual theory of reproduction on feminist grounds.”
TTFN.
