Feminism Against Cisness - (Asterisk) by Emma Heaney (Paperback)

About the Book

The contributors to Feminism against Cisness showcase the future of feminist historical, theoretical, and political thought freed from the conceptual strictures of cisness: the fallacy that assigned sex determines sexed experience.

Book Synopsis

The contributors to Feminism against Cisness showcase the future of feminist historical, theoretical, and political thought freed from the conceptual strictures of cisness: the fallacy that assigned sex determines sexed experience. The essays demonstrate that this fallacy hinges on the enforcement of white and bourgeois standards of gender comportment that naturalize brutalizing race and class hierarchies. It is, therefore, no accident that the social processes making cisness compulsory are also implicated in anti-Blackness, misogyny, Indigenous erasure, xenophobia, and bourgeois antipathy for working-class life. Working from trans historical archives and materialist trans feminist theories, this volume demonstrates the violent work that cis ideology has done and thinks toward a future for feminism beyond this ideology's counterrevolutionary pull.

Contributors. Cameron Awkward-Rich, Marquis Bey, Kay Gabriel, Jules Gill-Peterson, Emma Heaney, Margaux L. Kristjansson, Greta LaFleur, Grace Lavery, Durba Mitra, Beans Velocci, Joanna Wuest

Review Quotes

"In this slim but significant volume, contributors disrupt normative narratives of assigned sex as determinative of sexed experience, with specific attention paid to intersections of racism, sexism and classism. It features outstanding essays by Marquis Bey, Grace Lavery, Jules Gill-Peterson and others."--Karla J. Strand "Ms." (5/10/2024 12:00:00 AM)

"From the first sentence--'Cisness is feminism's counterrevolution'--this collection radically rewires our thinking, making visible the work that cisness has been doing all along. I would buy it just for Emma Heaney's introduction, which gifts us 'a theory of sexual difference without cisness.' Happily, the rest of the volume, consisting of essays by field-defining thinkers, is equally groundbreaking. This collection is the most vital intervention in feminist/trans thought I have seen in a very long time."--Paisley Currah, author of "Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity"

"In this smart collection of essays, trans feminist scholars show us how cisness is constructed, imposed, naturalized, racialized, scientized, stabilized, policed, resisted, twisted, disputed, and refused. They remind us that the dominant fictions of gender sustain race, class, and colonial hierarchies, and they point us toward the solidarities we need in our troubled political moment."--Joanne Meyerowitz, author of "How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States"

About the Author

Emma Heaney is Clinical Assistant Professor of Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement at New York University and the author of The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory.