ABSTRACT
Many contemporary explorations of transgender and transsexual identities are highly theoretical, often based on cultural, historical, or literary sources. Perhaps this is because “trans studies” is popular in the humanities, but not in the social sciences. Sometimes the humanities divine trans subjectivities through thought experiments or even imagined/hypothetical instances of crossgender presentations (i.e., what if we consider a drag queen?). No other illustration of this is more famous than Butler's (1990) analysis of drag in Gender Trouble. Others, like Marjorie Garber's (1992) Vested Interests, survey the history of cross-dressing, or in the case of Jill Prosser (1998) and Judith Halberstam (1998), analyze trans subjectivities through autobiography and cinema studies.
