ABSTRACT
In recent years, transgender studies have established themselves as an independent field of inquiry, programmatically so through the publication of a specific body of theory such as The Transgender Studies Reader , edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (2006). Although the relationship between transgender and queer studies has at times been fraught, 1 the two fields show significant overlaps that have come to be recognized and appreciated over time. Theoretical approaches to transgender owe much to queer theory’s dismantling of heteronormativity and its focus on subverting the binary gender order and the heterosexual matrix. This criticism was enabled by the shift from an essentialist view of sex as a biologically determined category to a constructivist perspective of both sex and gender as entities that are culturally prefigured and produced. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler argues that “perhaps […] ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all” (7). In Bodies That Matter, Butler is concerned with the way the body is made to materialize as a sexed body within the confines of a culturally determined discourse based on a heterosexual matrix, which allows her to understand the materiality of the body as a product of the materialization of a regulatory norm (2). This conceptual framework paves the way for a questioning of the duality of the sex/gender system itself and its subsequent transgression to explore the space between these two poles and the possibilities beyond this grid. This is where the postulation of a “third space” and/or attempts to pluralize genders and sexualities come into play; this is where the concept of transgender is situated.
