FEMINIST THEORY / LGBTQ STUDIES
Wildness
The Surgery Issue
a special issue of SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY
a special issue of TSQ: TR ANSGENDER STUDIES QUARTERLY
jack halberstam & tavia nyong ’o , editors
Kent Monkman, Cain and Abel, 2017.
eric plemons & chris str a ayer , editors
The concept of wildness
Trans* surgery has been
within queer studies has gen‑
an object of fantasy, deri‑
erated new vocabularies for
sion, refusal, and triumph.
historicizing and theorizing
Contributors to this issue
modes of embodiment and
explore the vital and contested
categories of experience that
place of surgical intervention
lie beyond the conventional,
in the making of trans* bodies,
institutionally produced, and
theories, and practices. For
modern classifications used to describe and explain gender and sexual variance. Wildness can refer to profusions of plant life, to animal worlds, to crazed and unscripted human behaviors, and to
decades, clinicians considered Juliana Curi, Pink Intervention #7, 2016.
a desire for reconstructive genital surgery to be the linch‑
the unknown and the uncharted, as well as to wandering and way‑
pin of the transsexual diagnosis. In the 1990s, new histories of trans*
ward sensibilities, alternative understandings of freedom and power,
clinical practice challenged the institutional claim that transsexuals
and to intense moods and unstable environments. Wildness has
all wanted genital surgery, and trans* authors began to argue
functioned as the Other to civilization and plays a distinct role in the
for their surgically altered bodies as sites of power rather than
racialized fantasies of violence and chaos that underpin white set‑
capitulation. Subsequent contestations of the medico-surgical
tler colonial imaginaries. It has also named a realm of activity that
framework helped mark the emergence of “transgender” as an
lies beyond the domestic and institutional, a realm that confronts
alternative, more inclusive term for gender-nonconforming subjects
medical, legal, and governmental efforts to order, catalogue, and
who were sometimes less concerned with surgical intervention.
know various forms of life. Contributors to this issue explore the
Contributors move beyond medical issues to engage “the surgical”
meaning, function, and challenges presented by the wild and
in its many forms, exploring how trans* surgery has been construed
wildness now and in the past, focusing on how wildness relates
and presented across different discursive forms and how these
to new directions in queer studies, animal studies, and the study
representations of trans* surgeries have helped and/or limited
of embodied difference.
understanding of trans* identities and bodies and shaped the
Contributors
evolution of trans* politics.
Vanessa Agard-Jones, Jayna Brown, Jodi A. Byrd, Mel Y. Chen, Jack Halberstam, Saidiya Hartman, Lamonda Horton-Stallings, Zakkiyyah Jackson, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, Julietta Singh, Riley Snorton, Wu Tsang, Dinesh Wadiwei
Jack Halberstam is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California and author of The Queer Art of Failure, Female Masculinity, and Skin Shows, all also published by Duke University Press. Tavia Nyong’o is Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater Studies at Yale University, coeditor of Social Text, and author of The Amalgamation Waltz:
Contributors Paisley Currah, Joshua Franklin, Cressida J. Heyes, Julia Horncastle, Riki Lane, J. R. Latham, Sandra Mesics, Eric Plemons, Katherine Rachlin, Chris Straayer, Susan Stryker
Eric Plemons is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and the author of The Look of a Woman: Facial Feminization Surgery and the Aims of Trans- Medicine, also published by Duke University Press.
Chris Straayer is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University and author of Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies.
Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory.
LGBTQ STUDIES/POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
TR ANS STUDIES/MEDICINE
July 210 pages Vol. 117, no. 3
May 200 pages Vol. 5, no. 2
paper, 978‑1‑4780‑0057‑0, $16.00/£12.99
paper, 978‑1‑4780‑0052‑5, $12.00/£9.99
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