ABSTRACT
The former modes of transness were deployed to support a theory of gender performativity, while the latter was often held up as an example of an intellectually suspect “foundationalism” or “biological essentialism.” The critical visibility of transgender—“the reclamation and relegitimation of a courageous history of lesbian trans-gender role-playing and identification”—poses a challenge to lesbianism’s incorporation within feminism. Queer transgender’s function in gender trouble can be summarized as twofold: to parallel the process by which heterosexuality reproduces (and reproduces itself through) binarized gender identities and at the same time to contrast with heterosexuality’s naturalization of the process. In analyzing the way in which the sex/gender system is constructed through the naturalization of heterosexuality and vice versa, gender trouble performed its work in an interstitial space between feminism and lesbian and gay studies, producing a new methodological genre—hence term for this: queer feminism.
