2020/03/01 by V Varun Chaudhry · 1 citation
Psychology · Social Sciences · #LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy #Sex work and related issues #Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology
paper · doi:10.1086/706466
openalex publication_date 2020/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
This essay addresses how Darlene Clark Hine’s foundational concept of dissemblance unsettles, challenges, and pushes transgender studies to think more capaciously about racialized gender and, more specifically, the work of antiblackness in producing and structuring transgender as a category. Building from ethnographic fieldwork with transgender-focused organizations in Philadelphia, I critically interrogate how the institutional uptake of transgender—including not only how the category circulated for my interlocutors but also the rhetorical work of some transgender studies scholars—relies on antiblack assumptions about privacy and recognition. Dissemblance as a theoretical concept, and black feminist theory more broadly, I argue, allows transgender studies to more robustly address transhistorical and ongoing structural forms of racialized and gendered power.