Still / Life: Trans Genre and the Politics of Anti-Development

Ava L.J. Kim
Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies
UC Davis

Still / Life analyzes two seemingly disparate uses of “transition”: first, to describe a person’s shift from one gender to another, and second, to narrate a nation’s political change through key terms like “democratization” and “development.” Rarely considered together, these invocations of transition form a unified history of state management from the 1970s to the present, masking neoliberal violence and promoting one “proper” path to prosperity for both individuals and nations. Through case studies on Argentina, Chile, the Philippines, and Vietnam, I demonstrate that the massive rise in discourse about trans people globally conceptualizes gender transition through the lens of national progress, whether from dictatorship to democracy in Argentina or civil war to peace in Vietnam. This transnational shift has made visible a transnormativity that gauges trans people’s rights by their ability to pass as cisgender in public while disclosing their trans status in private. Through close readings of novels, law, film, drama, and photography, I argue that gender transition and national transition are co-constitutive. Narratives of gender transition build on concepts of national autonomy while national transition narratives rely on the flexibility of gender to obfuscate changes in state discipline.