ABSTRACT
While trans and gender non-conforming (GNC) people are gaining further visibility and legal protection in Western societies, there is also still resistance to their full social acceptance. They therefore experience disproportionate degrees of marginality and violence. I argue that such social inertia can, to an extent, be explained by the grounding of dominant discourse on trans and GNC subjectivities in post-structuralist approaches to feminism, queer and gender theory. This chapter critiques these approaches for their lack of attention to embodiment and the structure and agency problematic, as well as their voluntarist and methodological individualist assumptions. Drawing upon both critical realist philosophical tools and Gibson’s affordance theory, it conceptualises ‘doing gender’ at the individual level as a set of action possibilities which agents navigate, and which tend to be constrained or enabled by canonical affordances. It thus offers an alternative philosophical perspective on the body and gendered subjectivities that may be used to deepen our understanding of these contemporary empirical realities.
