Arts & Sciences Events

Location

Boswell Hall (formerly Morton Hall), Room 314
100 Ukrop Way
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location

Suddenly, gender-expansive and trans* kids are everywhere in the news, in photo exhibits and documentaries, on talk shows, Youtube, and reality TV. From the perspective of feminist and queer theory, even as the discourse about our kids begins from the assumption that gender is not biology, it often feels oddly essentialist: trans* kids are, in some respects, an updating of the 19th-century sexology that viewed gay men as being born with female souls in male bodies (and vice versa for lesbians). This paper will explore the conundrum of raising a transgirl while remaining committed to anti-essentialism by looking at the progressive self-help literature that's addressed to parents of gender-nonconforming children. It looks at two particularly problematic concepts - gender identity and proto-gay children- and uses them to think about how the relatively new focus on gender-expansive and trans* identities unsettles theoretical orthodoxies about the relationship between sex, gender, and sexual identity. In the process, it considers what theorists like Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Kathryn Bond Stockton can tell us about these kids, as well as what they can tell us in turn about our theories.