[On November 12, 2019, Professor Toby Beauchamp (GWS) presented a talk on Queer Theory as part of the Modern and Critical Theory Lecture Series. Below is a response by Nadia Hoppe (Slavic Languages and Literatures)] Written by Nadia Hoppe (Slavic Languages and Literatures) On November 12th, 2019, Professor Toby Beauchamp delivered a lecture on Queer and Trans Theory as part of the Fall 2019 Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series. Toby Beauchamp is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and affiliate faculty in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His first books, Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices (Duke University Press, 2019), shows how the scrutinizing of gender nonconformity is motivated less by explicit transgender identities than by the perceived threat that gender nonconformity poses to the U.S. racial and security state. In his lecture, Professor Beauchamp aimed to provide one trajectory of queer theory, noting that there are many genealogies of how queer theory came to its contingent state. He also illuminated the relationship between queer theory and trans theory, including the problematic way in which trans theory is often categorized as a subset of Gender and Women’s Studies departments, and how trans people are often used only as metaphors of gender disruption, undercutting their lived experiences as a result. Professor Beauchamp noted an important distinction between early gay and lesbian studies and queer theory as is has developed today. While early gay and lesbian studies asked questions such as, “Who is homosexual?” and “What does it mean to be homosexual?,” the early writings of queer theory moved away from the idea that homosexuality is easily definable. Instead, queer theory explored how we understand sexuality and how this enhances our understanding of the social. Thus, the term “queer” can be understood to have two basic definitions. The first being an identity category and umbrella term for any non-straight individual. The second being a theoretical and political term that destabilizes and denaturalizes ideas about sexuality and beyond. Professor Beauchamp identified Michel Foucault as an important influence in queer studies, nothing his concept of incitement to discourse as a catalyst for important scholarship that shows research on the body produces sexuality and how sexuality studies narratives are linked to race (Such as Siobhan Somerville’s 2002 Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture). Beauchamp asserted that queer theory at its best talks about the social, and not only the sexual. It rejects assimilation, and instead advocates for broad transformative change. Thus, the term “heteronormativity” is important in understanding the goals of queer theory. Heteronormativity (not always equivalent to heterosexuality, but related) assumes that heterosexuality is natural and ideal, and everyone should be striving for it. Cathy Cohen defines this term as “both those localized practices and centralized institutions that legitimize and privilege heterosexuality as fundamental and ‘natural’ within society.” (Cohen, 1997: 440) Professor Beauchamp noted how activists and scholars used this concept well before it was regularly named as a theoretical concept. For example, the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) illustrated that the group was concerned with any situation that impinges on the lives of women, the third world, and working people, rather that issues that are limited to the experiences of black, lesbian feminists. Thus, as Professor Beauchamp asserted, the collective thought broadly about what it means to be a black, lesbian feminist, and how one cannot take up the idea of queer without addressing race and class. Furthermore, Gayle Rubin also engages with heteronormativity without explicitly calling it so in her article, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of Politics of Sexuality” (1992). Gayle outlines multiple forms of heterosexuality that are categorized as “deviant,” including adultery, sodomy, and more, understanding heteronormativity to be beyond simply heterosexual, but rather a larger system of institutionalization of particular behaviors. As Professor Beauchamp noted, heteronormativity is also a racialized concept that is rooted in white-supremacist ideologies, as reflected by the Combahee River Collective Statement and also Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” (1997). In her article, Cohen argues that instead of destabilizing categories, queer politics have worked to restore the binary between queer and non-queer, thus casting sexuality as the primary concern. She sees this as a problem because it effaces difference in power, status, and privilege; because it assumes white, class-privileged queers; and because it demonizes all heterosexuals, discounting the relationships that exist between gays and straights, particularly those based on shared experiences of marginalization, such as in communities of color. As an example, she notes the ongoing stigmatization of single and poor mothers (welfare queens), who, although they are heterosexual, are heavily regulated and marginalized by heteronormative structures. As Professor Beauchamp asserted, Cohen wants us to understand the interconnectivity of our identities and how the idea of heteronormativity exceeds the category of queer and consider how we can cultivate broad social change. As Professor Beauchamp noted, this line of questioning gives us a window between queer studies and trans studies. For example, historian and key figure in trans studies, Susan Stryker, asserts that sexual orientation is not the only significant way to differ from heteronormative frameworks and require a binary gender idea with stable definitions of “man” and “woman,” explaining why trans is often taken up as another category or desire, rather than a deep challenge to the ideas of sexuality formation already in place. In her 1994 article, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” Stryker shifts the spectacle away from trans people onto non-trans people, who must account for their own constructed identities. By linking herself to Frankenstein’s monster, she critiques the medical field’s insistence that trans people must conform to the body of either a woman or a man. Professor Beauchamp asserted that writing in this way demands of non-trans readers to grapple with their own relationships to binary gender and their own assumed positions of “maker” rather than “monster.” Reflecting on witnessing the birth of her child and struck by the primacy of binary gender, Stryker notes the nonconsensual action of rendering a body meaningful by the speech act of calling out, “it’s a girl!” This experience produced what she calls a transgender rage, the notion that the world is organized to recognize a subject with a so-called “natural” gender, and by nonconforming, you have excluded yourself from subjecthood, and ultimately, survival. Similar to Stryker, Julian Gill-Peterson also looks for something other than legibility. They examine how the overexposure of medicine as an available archive of transgender history produced an incalculable deflation of trans of color intelligibility, especially black trans life. In their 2018 article “Trans of Color Critique before Transsexuality,” Gill-Peterson looks to medical archives to find that the recorded instances of trans people of color are extremely limited, and the only publicly available file found shows the inherent racialization of trans and intersex patients. This individual – called “Billy” by Gill-Peterson– prefers not to remove his vagina and construct a penis, despite the doctor’s insistent that he must in order to enter into the category of “man.” As Gill-Peterson theorizes, this case illustrates that the social heterogeneity of black trans life sought escape or intelligibility from the reaches of medical science. As Professor Beauchamp summarized, sex is understood to be malleable, however only when transitioning into perceived categories of man or woman. In this way, Gill-Peterson aligns with the queer politics that Cohen is asserting could have radical potential – a queer politics that is not about single issues, not about neatly bound identity categories or uncovering an essential truth about sexual categories, but rather it is about the shared marginalization within a heteronormative structure. They allows for the partial and the illegible as generative, not only for the individual, but the field itself.