Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Trans-Pedagogy

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/23289252-2926509

2328-9260

Cris Mayo,

African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues

The word pedagogy is derived from the Greek word for the slave who brings the student to school. In her new edition (a comprehensive reworking of the 1997 version), Kate Bornstein examines the same play of power between the social/political compulsion to conform to the gender binary and the emergent possibilities in all critical learners to explore and create beyond binaries. Her update, too, seeks to expand its attention to race, class, and other aspects of identity as they intersect with gender and trans identities and energetically delves more into how sexuality relates to trans identity—and how critical, conscious practice of all of the above can help to challenge political inequalities and unjust restrictions. Bornstein's attentive care and evident joy at encountering diverse audiences is reflected in her frequent encouragement to those in the audience already critically thinking gender and sexuality as well as those who are perhaps reading this in the midst of a course or at the behest of a friend. Indeed it is this hospitable approach to pedagogy that propels her project—she is an educator who facilitates change and a coexperiencer who is herself working and playing with gender/sex identity. Her pedagogy is dialectical, dialogical (as much as a text can be), and well aware of the importance of meeting all readers/students where they are and encouraging them to move beyond into new possibilities. In short, this is a workbook in the best tradition of workbooks—a riff on the stultifying standardized tests structuring public schooling and one that takes issue with the operations of normative regimes in their attempts to regularize an answer or regularize an identity.The invitational pedagogy is reflected through the vastness of its forms of welcome. Seriousness and whimsy sit side by side; there are pirates, robots, cartoons, and quotes from online chats and creative writers reflecting the broad variety of perspectives on new gender/sexual formations. Above all, there are ample opportunities for readers to see what they might take for granted about gender, sex, and sexuality, to reengage ideas they may have repressed, and to critically examine how their practices of gender, sex, and sexuality have also helped to, purposely or inadvertently, create oppressive conditions for themselves and others. Like any welcoming party, class, or discussion, there are multiple ways into the conversations, each of which is facilitated by the generosity of the author.In recent months there have been a number of blog posts and articles indicating trans “issue fatigue.” As understandable as it is for any marginalized group to be tired of educating those in the majority, Bornstein has a seemingly unending energy for such work, and her kind approach to the many levels of education about transgender lives and experiences, identities, and communities recognizes how diversely ignorant readers may be and also how deeply experienced and knowledgeable they already are. Her acknowledgment of and care about the common discomforts of those in the as-yet-uninterrogated normative positions give readers, whatever their identity, a meta-lesson in how to live, work, and teach in diverse contexts. With an easy-going manner about difficult issues related to key concepts in gender identity, sexual activities, and gender politics, Bornstein's work can be read at multiple levels and from divergent perspectives, all of which can take away that “Auntie Kate,” as she occasionally refers to herself, really does care about how they think, play, and work their genders. The text includes discussions about the various aspects of gender identity, community, and process from individual to political. The book also pushes against its own boundedness, with opportunities to write in the margins, and invitations to rethink what is already written and to challenge one's own thinking by examining the various potential answers to quizzes or excerpts from online discussions on trans issues. Each chapter shows many answers and ways of being; this is the point, and if we can manage to be kind to one another and advocate for just systems, all diversity is just fine. The juxtaposition of this pedagogy of generosity and her ability to make sure that all areas are explored, no matter how potentially jolting or surprising to the uninitiated (or as yet unacknowledged but interested or even disinterested but willing to become more interested, whatever), sets a tone in which it is easily imaginable that Bornstein will be willing to be a resource in a learner's exploration.Not for nothing was Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish interested in schooling, given the long history of institutionalization of bodily and other conformities associated with school. Bornstein stands the historical relationship between domination and schooling on its head, taking the practices of negotiating around and through power into her pedagogical mode. She urges readers to move into what they desire and to push themselves into further discomfort in their considerations of gender identity—but always careful to ensure that their critical play stays safe but acknowledging, too, the dangers of such play for one's attachment to conformist gender/sexuality. Like Martin Rochlin's “Heterosexual Questionnaire” (1972) but in a way that opens the category of trans to all critical thinkers, Bornstein demonstrates the continual and often disjointed way in which gender is negotiated through the day, the process of understanding identity, and the political context in which identities are recognized, evaded, and reworked. Going further than the somewhat passive aggressive approach to education taken by the “Heterosexual Questionnaire,” Bornstein assures all her students that she wants the best for them and that between fun and challenge, new possibilities will emerge from their consideration and practice. This is serious fun, and as she puts it, changing one's approach to gender “will be the death of you” (187). As such her work stands in a long tradition of challenging forms of learning. Education is a process of difficult change, from the pain of Meno's experience of Socrates's (n.d.) sting to Jacques Ranciere's (1991) critique of the stultifying process of following the teacher—Bornstein may painfully provoke, yes, but then opens space for readers to make the workbook and the work of gender their own and to recognize where they have already been gender outlaws and think further.The new edition goes into more detail about other forms of exclusion and community building, especially in one particular chapter, though there are references to intersectionality throughout. Attention to racialized genders and sexualities is still on the light side, and if I would want to change anything in the book it would be to have the different forms of identity/community distinguished a bit more in terms of those social and political categories. The new version, even more than the first, develops a robust incorporation of sexuality that strongly pushes back against notions that trans identity/theory/politics is disinterested in the implications of gender for sexuality. As to the cover's claim, “now with more high theory,” perhaps not so much. The occasional apparent exhaustion with theory and her turn to the practice and habits of gender and sexuality may mark a turn to pragmatism. Indeed, engaging this theoretical move in more detail, pushing either against the uses of trans in theories or the agonistic rather than invitational uses of theory, would have at least explained why theory seems irksome to Bornstein. Or perhaps more material analysis, for instance, Vivianne Namaste's (2009) critique of some theorys' apparent interest in trans identities without adequately attending to a grounded examination of the economic disparities experienced by trans women in particular, would add to the urgency about which gender identity is taught and learned. The way into this book is largely through a critical reexamination of subjectivity in relation to desires and practices; while the social grid remains present, the whimsical invitation sometimes moves so strongly to the foreground that those productive/constraining social contexts recede. But, to be clear, a materialist analysis is not the project of this book, and its absence or underplayed presence, in the midst of this energetic and kaleidoscopic discussion of what sex and gender can be, may be only an invitation to read this in concert with another kind of text. And by no means does the approach of this book indicate that it is the last word: its strength is that it opens the reader to continue onward.