She's Over It
She's Over It
On Andrea Long Chu, Jack Halberstam, and theory-wars.
“Crouching Spider,” Louise Bourgeois at Dia: Beacon.
She’s over it. Andrea Long Chu’s infamous declaration in Transgender Studies Quarterly concluded “[t]rans studies is over. If it isn’t, it should be.” To Chu, trans studies is a bastard child of queer theory. She refutes Susan Stryker’s claim that trans studies is the evil twin queer theory ate in the womb. “The womb, as usual, was feminism,” Chu wryly declares. In her vision, trans studies is superfluous. “This is what happens when a massive offload of queer methods and concepts with the label TRANS hastily slapped over their expiration dates meets an influx of political capital courtesy of the current transgender identity politics.” Chu claims there are no internal debates in the field of Trans Studies. She wants a fight, a monograph to fight over. Well she got one.
Chu may not be seriously arguing for the annihilation of trans studies, but she’s definitely arguing it’s boring—and at a dead end. To Chu, the idea of trans-ness as a narrative is too invested in political optimism. So much of trans theory, or so Chu argues, is about demanding a better world. So she wrote Females. And “On Liking Women.” And “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy.” People revolted everywhere, taking her work as gospel without considering the polemical style they were written in. The very idea of bitterness was threatening to the project of Trans as a Genre. The project instead requires texts to be authentic/inauthentic, boundary-crossing, or simply across something. Trans as a genre must be productive, not merely discursive or destructive as Chu seems to desire. Trans-ing something has caught on in a similar, if not more effusive, way to the way that queering something has. Cis girls want buccal fat transplants, Gender Trouble, and SOPHIE’s musical influence on pop music. Trans people make jokes about egg theory, She’s the Man, microdosing T, and whether or not Miley Cyrus has trans boy swag. But trans-ing “does not a theory make,” according to Chu. Ultimately Chu thinks that the field of trans studies should expand to include the text messages transsexuals send each other, as if writing outside the academy is the only way forward. It makes sense then that Chu eventually turned towards book criticism for Vulture. There she can eviscerate Ottessa Moshfegh, Maggie Nelson, or Hanya Yanagihara. “Let’s try to be nice trannies for a second,” she says. Why?
On the other end of the spectrum (but also published in TSQ), Jack Halberstam launched a counter-attack in an essay facetiously titled “Nice Trannies.” Halberstam fears a return to the word “transsexual,” partly due to the term’s origins in the medical industrial complex. It’s true a younger generation, including Chu, has found the word a powerful way to differentiate between trans as a theoretical framework and trans as a materiality (hormones, surgeries, etc). This is a limited terminology for a complex and permeable concept. There is a wide range of what the word trans can mean. Halberstam also accuses Chu of prematurely cutting off a movement that Susan Stryker had only just begun to get moving. I don’t think it’s quite fair to accuse Chu of such a thing when the article appears in Transgender Studies Quarterly, a publication where Stryker serves on the editorial board. Few can cut down the work of a scholar all on their own, least of all a trans woman, even against another trans woman.
Halberstam is willing to play Chu’s game. First Halberstam cites a number of fraught arguments and problematics in the field of Trans Studies that Chu has glossed over or failed to mention. “I have named names. I have taken heat for it. I have survived.”
The article’s subtitle is, in fact, “After Andrea Long Chu.” The personal and political are on thin ice here. “Chu majors in takedowns, so much so that one might quiver to see oneself cited by her. But, it turns out, the only thing worse than being cited by Chu is not being cited.” Perhaps Halberstam feels slighted. It’s also disingenuous to say Chu hasn’t done her homework. Halberstam’s attempt at a takedown piece in a peer-reviewed journal is absurd. Chu is accused of being transphobic towards trans men and having a problem with butches. “Chu’s essays, and indeed her book, Females, are all bullshit,” Halberstam states. I’m calling bullshit on bullshit.
Halberstam takes a narrow reading of Females, as many did at the time of the book’s inception. Females is summarily dismissed as AFAB-phobic----yet it is Halberstam who uses the term “bio-men” and calls Chu’s writing “a drag performance.” It reminds me of an old roommate who referred to trans women as having “bio-dicks.” Neither is very fluid or generous in their conceptions of trans temporality. The present tense is ignored in favor of biological origin stories.
Chu is not someone who can be read as a literalist. She’s playing a game and Halberstam has fallen for it with all the ire of an angry professor mad at not being in on the joke. While Halberstam cites Kay Gabriel and Susan Stryker, they are merely pawns to demonstrate the way Halberstam feels targeted in Chu’s assertion that everyone is female and everyone hates it. While accusing Chu of Oedipalism, Halberstam falls into the same trap. Chu is now widely regarded as a brilliant critic, she’s even won a Pulitzer. It’s impossible not to read some amount of transmisogyny into earlier shallow critiques of her career.
Females is a book that fucks with the idea of trans/genre or trans as a genre. Such a small book to force trans studies to reckon, even if just with the idea that trans studies is over. It’s a dangerous thought, one that produces astonishing ripples.
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