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Strange Alchemies

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/23289252-3711493

2328-9260

Vek Lewis, Dan Irving,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

The Rebis, the early modern European alchemical symbol pictured on the cover of this issue, is a winged hermaphroditic figure—half woman, holding aloft a crown, half bearded man, brandishing a scepter—that stands on a dragon whose twin heads encircle the dual figure's legs. The Rebis represented the pinnacle of alchemical transformation: it conjoined the lower realms with the higher, the secular with the divine, the physical with the spiritual, mind with matter, and masculine with feminine to depict the perfect resolution of all dichotomies, dualities, and antinomies. The Rebis is also a figure of sovereignty; it bears symbols of authority, holds sway over the elements, and is capable of surveilling all directions simultaneously with its double-headed vision. As an emblem redolent of godlike mastery over the material transformations of bodies, lives, and worlds, the Rebis exemplifies a Eurocentric and implicitly colonizing fantasy about the nature of power. As such, it exemplifies as well the key vectors of analysis, central categories of thought, and principal forms of rhetoric and representation that we seek (in less mystical and magical modes) to explore, critique, and resist in this special issue of TSQ on trans- political economy.Our chief concern is with how contemporary “architectures” of power differentially and unequally affect trans and sex/gender-diverse people across the globe—and how we all, from our different social and political locations, become implicated in those architectures through our everyday interactions with a variety of coordinated and contradictory institutions and rationalities that order our lives across different local and global geopolitical spaces and scales. The arrangements of power that concern us here are often rendered synonymous with modernity, itself a shorthand for contemporary industrial civilization, which we understand as an enterprise emanating from the Global North and which we can characterize with a single term: capitalism.Capitalist modernity is a dynamic social order composed of multiple sociopolitical, economic, and cultural institutions. It is defined broadly by a philosophical approach to the physical world whereby human intervention transforms nature through a competitive market economy, industrial production, sovereign nation-states, and mass democracies (Giddens and Pierson 1998). It is characterized by rationalization, objectivism, mechanization, alienation, secularism, hierarchization, commodification, individualism, subjectification, and decontextualization. As a set of processes with global reach, modernity is inextricably tied up with colonialism: first in constructing a Eurocentric world-system (Wallerstein 1979) by expropriating foreign lands and enslaving and co-opting Indigenous and African labor and knowledge, and second in promulgating Eurocentric modernity as the most desired outcome of socioeconomic developmentalism the whole world over. Taken up by elites on the so-called periphery of the Eurocentric world-system, the push toward capitalist modernity interacts with local cultures, political structures, and socioeconomic processes, giving rise to differential and contradictory modernities and relations of dependency to the Eurocentric core. As such, modernity and its effects provide an indispensable schematic for social-scientific theorizations of the existing world order and constitute the chief preoccupations and problems confronted by political economy in its dominant form.En route to propounding what we are calling trans- political economy (TPE), it is first necessary to explain what we mean by “political economy” itself. Political economy is grounded on the premise that economic activities are not isolated from political and social processes. This broad framework problematizes the intertwined relationship between economic systems, political environments, social organizations, familial structures, and informal networks. Beyond technical economic debates, one major arena of analysis probes economic doctrines such as classical liberal models of free market competitive capitalism—which have inspired contemporary neoliberal formations—“to disclose their sociological and political premises” (Maier 1987: 4). State institutions and strategies to control resources—which often reflect corporate interests—represent another aspect of political economy. Key questions in this domain address the dynamic and often contradictory governmental processes of integrating free market logic into domestic and international policies, and of engaging in a social and environmental calculus of costs and benefits to cultivate the ground for continuous economic growth.Analysis of political economy can contribute to feminist, antiracist, and decolonial scholarship given the interconnectedness of capitalism with heteropatriarchy and colonialism. Feminist political economy (FPE) works to dislodge the “masculine mythology” (Ferber and Nelson 1993) underlying economic theorizations of modernity that devalue femininity by deploying objectivist, rationalist, and universalizing principles. Other FPE scholars emphasize the primacy for capital accumulation of women's unpaid work in the private sphere (e.g., child care, housework, and emotional labor) and the naturalization of this labor appropriation through gender- and sexuality-based subject formation and political mobilization (Bakker and Gill 2003; Bezanson and Luxton 2006; Brown 1995; Hennessy 2002). Antiracist FPE scholars in the North challenge the ways that white middle-class femininity can be privileged even within radical critiques of the gendered dimensions of social reproduction, while other debates shift focus to the implications for the Global South of the transnational circulation of Northern configurations of gender, sexuality, and race in neoliberal post-Fordist regimes of accumulation (Connell 1987). Still other scholars interrogate new demands for “immaterial” or “affective” work that supersedes conventional notions of labor and value, and that requires particular bodies to produce feelings of excitement, tranquility, hope, satisfaction, and legitimacy for themselves and others—work performed with increasing frequency by bodies designated as “transgender.” Such concerns, however, lie far from the heart of orthodox political economy.We take up a political economy analysis whose inspirations are found beyond the traditional reach of the field, in the deconstructive work of feminist, antiracist, and decolonial scholarship. A relatively new subfield in transgender studies, TPE is nevertheless a key area of scholarship and activism. From its inception in the early 1990s through the work of Sandy Stone (1991) and Susan Stryker (1994), transgender studies theorized sexed embodiment and gendered subjectivity as social phenomena. Especially influential was the concept of the de/construction of the sex/gender system through the instantiation of norms, and the generative in/coherencies in the production of sexed and gendered bodies. In contrast to this concern with sex/gender norms and the transgression of the sex/gender binary, TPE has highlighted the links between the exploitative logics of capitalism and trans/gender oppression (Feinberg 1992, 1996, 1998). TPE addressed issues such as employment discrimination (Broadus 2006; Namaste 2000; Schilt 2010), poverty (Gehi and Arkles 2007), and the lack of access to essential social services (Spade 2006a), as well as barriers to accessing shelters and housing, and the criminalization of trans women, particularly sex workers (Namaste 2011; Ross, c. 2005).TPE scholarship has been particularly prominent in Latin America. Josefina Fernández (2004) focuses on the sociopolitical and economic dimensions of travesti lives in Buenos Aires, and documents how these lives are regulated via discourses of abnormality, control, observation, and juridical interpellation. Leticia Sabsay (2011) shows how moral universes related to gender and sexuality impinge on notions of citizenship in Argentina, specifically in relation to the irruption of a travesti sex worker presence in the urban capital. Other social scientists—Daniel Hernández-Rosete Martínez (2008, Mexico), Joselí Maria Silva and Marcio Ornat (2015, Brazil), Antonio Agustín García García and Sara Oñate Martínez (2008, Ecuador), Katrin Vogel (2009, Venezuela)—focus on the matrix of violence, labor, and health care (particularly transition-related care and HIV/AIDS) for trans women and travestis. Giuseppe Campuzano (2009) in particular frames this violence as an inheritance of colonial legacies. Several of these scholars focus on trans migration, detailing the transnational economies of sex work through which many trans women and travestis both encounter and challenge local forms of racial discrimination and criminalization while managing to produce social and economic capital of benefit both to themselves and to their families back home. TPE work specifically on Latin American trans migration, together with other recent work on other parts of the Global South, gives us a newly sophisticated understanding of the transnational circuits of capital, labor, and consumption (David 2015; Aizura 2011), as well as the gendered politics of mobility and nation building within and across territorial and categorical borders.Neoliberalism as a specific regime of capitalist accumulation has captivated the attention of TPE scholars and activists in both the North and the South. Influenced by Michel Foucault's (1991, 2007) theories of governmentality and biopower, these scholars have focused on discourses of self-sufficiency, personal responsibility and productivity, investment in the self, and consumer activities to demonstrate the “psychic life” (Butler 1997) of neoliberalism. They argue that political economy always depends on particular forms of sexed embodiment and gender performance, and that “transgender” becomes somehow functional in transnational neoliberal regimes. Neoliberalism constructs certain forms of trans subjectivity as “proper,” “good,” and “deserving” of access to life chances, human rights protections, and national belonging (Spade 2006b; Irving 2008; Aizura 2006). Such subjectivities are rendered intelligible precisely through their interactions with the state and other instruments of governmentality. Critical TPE scholarship unveils how the recognition of trans people's economic value hinges on their relationships to whiteness, hegemonic masculinity or normative femininity, able-bodiedness, and citizenship status. Such queer and trans of color critiques challenge the deprioritization of white supremacy, racialization, and colonization in transgender studies itself (Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco 2014).TPE scholarship often reorients the focus of political economy away from biopolitics (the ways that neoliberal states, institutions, and organizations administer the lives of their populations) and, building on the work of Achille Mbembe, toward necropolitics (the ways certain categories of bodies are marked for premature death) to better understand the lives of racialized and colonized gender-nonconforming subjects, and to advance an interconnected analysis of the gender, sexual, capitalist, colonial, and national relations of power that can best be conceptualized as “a politics of war” waged against those deemed inimical to “life itself” in its privileged forms (Mbembe 2003). Queer and trans necropolitical analysis focuses, in part, on the ways that racialized trans* subjects are constructed as an enemy to be marginalized or cast out from heteronormative, homonormative, and trans-normative liberal capitalist, settler colonial, and seemingly postcolonial societies (Raha 2015).Contemporary forms of neoliberal policy and governance, like the rationalities of modernity and capitalism on which they depend, have given rise to various neoliberal regimes in different parts of the current global order (Connell and Dados 2014). If we turn to the issue of capital accumulation, however, we can see how heavily dependent all such regimes have become on precarious, low-wage, part-time, and informal employment with few or no benefits. Vulnerability is not an exception to neoliberal capitalism but an integral mechanism for exploitative processes of wealth accumulation. Trans people of color, two-spirit people, and travestis are overrepresented among the swelling ranks of those deemed “existentially surplus” (Hong 2006; Carreras Sendra 2009). The lives of so many racialized trans people, especially trans women, are conceptualized as worthless lives unfit for living; they are devalued as “bare life” devoid of political significance (Agamben 1998). The exclusion of such lives from the domain of lives worth living exceeds the symbolic realm and results in the literal deaths of trans subjects through imprisonment or immigration detention, interpersonal violence, and stigmatization related to HIV/AIDS—to name but a few ways to eliminate the racialized and colonized others that make up the bulk of the “surplus” population. In this vein, key work in TPE has emerged on trans subject-formation, neoliberal governance (De Angelis 2005; Santos 2009), and the ways that particular trans lives become imbued with (or stripped of) value in relation to race, as well as discourses and policy concerning ethnic “minorities” (Thomas 2006; Juang 2006; Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco 2014).TPE critiques a political economy orthodoxy that occupies a privileged position on the left, particularly in Northern-dominant spaces, such as world-systems approaches and singular Marxist approaches. TPE scholarship emphasizes “ghostly” phenomena (Roundtable, this issue) that are usually illegible within such orthodox approaches. TPE resists “additive” logics whereby trans*, two-spirit, gender-nonconforming, colonized, and racialized others are integrated into economic categories such as “the working class,” “the precariat,” “consumers,” or “reproductive labor(ers)” that are naturalized as preexisting classifications. It emphasizes instead the specificity of activities undertaken by trans* women and men and trans* communities as integral to contemporary regimes of wealth accumulation. TPE points, however, to a more fundamental necessity for reformulating political economic analysis entirely. While it is important to ensure that gender-nonconforming subjects are understood as vital albeit typically unrecognized parts of existing economies, it is equally important to expand the definition of “economy,” to move past imagining capitalism as the singular mode of production and reducing the entirety of the contemporary regime of wealth accumulation to neoliberalism. Such imaginative and critical failures may themselves become complicit in necropolitical devaluations of trans lives and actually existing strategies crafted for trans survival.Theorists of the decolonial turn contend that modernity and coloniality cannot be perceived as two different processes (Quintero 2010; Mignolo 2000; Escobar 2005; Quijano 1992). Most of the Global South has not entered into any kind of postcoloniality and still exists within an asymmetrical global division of labor and geopolitical power. Decolonial theorists critique Eurocentrism as an ostensibly universal frame of knowledge that propounds a system of hierarchical racial/ethnic and gender/sexual classifications with the values of democracy and individualism, a belief in “progress” and rationality of culture, and capitalist economic relations (Escobar 2005). Aníbal Quijano (2000: 368) introduced the counter-Eurocentric concept of colonialidad del poder to signal how, since the colonization of the Americas, people have been classified within a power structure based on labor, race, and gender to control both resources and the reproduction of life. Similarly, Ramón Grosfoguel proposes that we see the present world-system as entailing a “system of heterarchic power,” that is, a system compounded from multiple hierarchies of labor, ethnicity/race, gender, sex, epistemology, spirituality, aesthetics, pedagogy, and language (quoted in Montes Montoya and Busso 2007: 4–5).The “coloniality of power” framework underpins all the contributions to this special issue of TSQ. It creates a space for uncovering logics of domination that frequently operate under the guise of freedom, progress, modernization, or development that are discursively posited as being for the good of all but which typically result in ecological devastation and the exploitation of Southern lives. The closely related concept of a “colonial matrix” also comes into play here (Mignolo 2000: 6–11). The matrix encompasses four major registers of power—economic, political, civic, and epistemic or subjective/personal. Colonial dominance in the economic realm is exercised through the seizure and privatization of resources, and the control of finance and the distribution of wealth; the political component involves the exercise of authority, while colonial control over the forms of civil society influence the social organization of gender and sexuality; the fourth aspect involves the control of knowledge that informs the construction of individual subjectivity. María Lugones (2007) takes this analysis further by conceptualizing the “coloniality of gender,” which understands the gender orders inaugurated through colonialism as more than just an aspect of the coloniality of power. For Lugones, colonial gender systems installed new gender orders in colonized territories and transformed gender relations locally and translocally in ways every bit as substantive as transformations in the register of race. These racial and gender schema have histories that still affect the material and social conditions of human and nonhuman lives across the globe—including, significantly, sex/gender-diverse peoples. Emphasizing the coloniality of power and acknowledging the persistence of the colonial matrix lets us grapple with the complexity of trans/gender capitalist and colonial relations, including how the transgender paradigm itself, which is of US origin, can be epistemologically and politically complicit in the reiteration of capitalist/colonialist relations and effects.Although capitalist exploitation and the genocidal logics of colonialism continue to configure most of the world's societies, there are spaces where subaltern knowledges are re/produced and distributed but nevertheless remain marginalized. Approaching TPE through the coloniality of power illuminates spaces where “border thinking” (Mignolo 2000) already takes place or where it could become a possibility. Global capitalism, cultural and economic imperialism, and Western exceptionalism cannot be understood as wholesale impositions that totally obliterate existing societies. Understanding the coloniality of power enables us to comprehend each aspect of the colonial matrix as a set of contested territories. Because competing understandings and practices coexist, aspects of global capitalist relations can be resisted and sometimes rejected or ignored; they can be adopted or adapted in ways that integrate aspects of both subaltern and dominant knowledges or approaches to the social order.The first article, Emmanuel David's “Capital T: Trans Visibility, Corporate Capitalism, and Commodity Culture,” posits that a new value, symptomatic of the lures and maneuvers of neoliberal capital, is being generated at the threefold juncture of trans consumption, production, and labor. In this age of the “Transgender Tipping Point,” capital has become capable of the ultimate form of appropriation in the name of trans recognition: extending its sphere of influence into trans labor, desire, and political energy. David offers a “friendly critique” of Angelica Ross's TransTech Social Enterprises, which trains and hires trans and gender-diverse people as remote IT-support contract workers. Ross argues that her business model is community serving because it provides labor opportunities so often denied to trans people, promotes peer-to-peer empowerment, and offers a healthy workplace by distancing workers from immediate encounters with transphobia and racism. While the appeal of TransTech as social enterprise is clear, David argues that its workers are nevertheless exploited through the contractual burdens and conditions of dependence, surveillance, labor instability, and lower-economic-rung existence that typify the industry. He demonstrates how “trans value,” created precisely by the recognition of trans people as marginalized yet recuperable minority subjects, hence becomes “an important site of recruitment and extraction.” The point on capitalist value and extraction becomes more critical when considering TransTech's projections of contracting among sex/gender-diverse people in the Global South, on local wage scales, which could implicate its operations in economic imperialism.In “The Afterlife of Data: Identity, Surveillance, and Capitalism in Trans Credit Reporting,” Lars Mackenzie similarly explores the regulation of trans lives in the private sector. He details how the persistence of electronic records, particularly credit reports, creates an environment fraught with risk for trans people through the threat of inadvertent disclosure of their trans status and transition history, which can result in discrimination. However, to not link personal identity and financial information across a gender transition carries risks of its own, namely, becoming a person with no credit history in an economic system that uses debt and credit to regulate the life chances of a range of populations. These tensions, as well as the lack of standardization of electronic identity recognition practices across numerous institutional contexts, create a chaotic landscape that trans people must creatively navigate in a high-stakes game that could make or break the financial viability of their lives.In the third article, “Categories and Queues: The Structural Realities of Gender and the South African Asylum System,” B Camminga also focuses on the institutional creation and regulation of knowable gendered identities, through an ethnographic study of undocumented trans and nonbinary asylum seekers in South Africa—one of the few countries in the world that offers asylum to people based on their trans or gender-variant status. Camminga charts the problems encountered by refugees who seek to register with a Refugee Register Office by examining the risks of queuing in lines segregated by sex/gender. Gender-variant and trans refugees must perform a particular kind of gender labor to successfully navigate the asylum process, convince officers of their identities and experiences of persecution, and hence secure asylum. Visibility, once again, has two faces: it involves the risk of being seen as an incoherent subject, unworthy of asylum, as well as the potential benefit of accruing social capital as a recognized and recognizable trans refugee—and thus being able to work or study in South Africa.An ethnographic attention to questions of recognition, capital, and nation similarly characterizes Benjamin Hegarty's “Value of Transgender: Waria Affective Labor for Transnational Media Markets in Indonesia.” Waria is an Indonesian portmanteau term for people on the male-to-female spectrum, derived from the words wanita (woman) and pria (man); Hegarty builds on a concept of affective labor derived from Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and feminist affect theory scholars to stress the importance of understanding waria labor within Indonesian histories of gender and sexuality. Hegarty observes and analyzes how waria have responded to foreign filmmakers who perpetuate a trope of waria as particularly marginalized and oppressed transgender sex workers, a trope that serves necropolitical ends by folding waria into a decontextualized, transnationally circulating “transgender” status. The waria themselves, however, typically consider participation in such documentary films as a form of prestasi (morally worthy achievement or accomplishment) that reflects a desire to secure recognition as a good subject of the nation, and thus the rightfulness of their belonging to and value in Indonesian society. Waria affective labor in transnational media markets therefore constitutes a mode of resistance to the devaluation of waria lives while reproducing and circulating an image of waria as profoundly socially marginal.The fifth article, Anne Balay's “Sex and Surveillance on the Highway,” explores the world of self-styled “T-Girl” truck drivers working in the heart of global capitalism in the United States. Balay offers a vivid ethnographic account of T-Girls who imagine themselves as outlaws: gender outlaws who defy normative gender, sexual outlaws who seek pleasure outside the bounds of bourgeois conventions, and economic outlaws whose literal mobility promises to keep them one step ahead of the authorities. At the same time, she details the often brutal, increasingly regulated, and highly monitored life that most truckers endure. As the neoliberal state expands its surveillance practices, and the trucking industry finds creative new ways to extract ever-greater amounts of value from a workforce that has become predominantly composed of immigrants, people of color, and trans people, the vision of independent, well-paying, self-directed work that enticed many truck drivers to take up their trade in the first place is increasingly illusory. And yet, as Balay demonstrates, T-Girl truckers and their coworkers are nevertheless capable of resistance to what they view as government overreach in the management of their working lives.In the final article, “Staging the Trans Sex Worker,” Nihils Rev and Fiona Maeve Geist challenge the investment many radical and critical trans scholars and activists make in the figure of the “trans prostitute” as a metaphor for social death. Influenced by Marcia Ochoa's research on transformistas in Venezuela, Rev and Geist argue that trans individuals engaging in sex work economies are agents navigating complex identities amid violent assemblages of social power relations. Rev and Geist call for an analysis of the complex material conditions that shape the lives of trans individuals who do sex work and insist on the necessity of comprehending participation in this criminalized economy as a form of agency, of escape from even “more profoundly violating social conditions,” and as a site for the formation of vibrant and resistive social networks and communities.