These thoughts, written in the aftermath of a half-day conference on race-shifting (first part viewable here) and influenced by Kim TallBear’s critique of identity, have me going out on a limb, for reasons that are likely pretty obvious. But I will persevere with them, and ask that you read them through to the end before reacting to isolated parts of the argument. Thoughts welcome.
1. Gender transitioning and race-shifting are parallel processes insofar as they involve a move (shift or transition) from one pole of a dyad to another: either from male to female or vice versa, or, in the case of race shifting, from one racial category (e.g., white, black, Hispanic/Latinx, Indigenous, et al.) to another.
2. Gender transitioning and race-shifting concern identity, which in late capitalism has become both deeply personalized (“this is about who I am”) and deeply politicized (“I have the right to be myself” = “we have the right to be ourselves”). Talking about them, in North America today (and to varying degrees elsewhere), has for this reason become something of a minefield. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Since they are important issues for many people, we need to talk about them coherently.
3. Gender transitioning and race-shifting are related, but not identical, because gender and race are very different things, and their perceptions vary. Among their key differences is their relationship to biology, or what’s physiologically given, and culture, or what develops historically within social and political relations. Race and gender can be perceived to contain both different proportions of “biology” and “culture” and different intensities of each.
For instance, biology can be understood in a “simple” form, where one’s sexual organs (or physical features, DNA, et al.) are thought to correlate directly with one’s biological gender (or race); this would be a more “traditional” (or scientistic) understanding. Or it can be taken to be more complex, where one’s sexual organs can deviate from one’s biological gender (or one’s physical features, DNA, et al. from one’s race), which therefore opens up the categories of “gender identity” and/or “racial identity” as things to be specified, worked at, or negotiated. Similarly, both gender and race can be conceived more culturally, as historically shaped within complex social and political relations, with “women,” “gays/lesbians,” “queers,” “Blacks,” “Latinx,” “Indigenous people,” et al. being categories that have taken on specific meanings within lived histories of oppression, trauma, resistance/liberation, and the like.
4. Disagreements around race and gender “shifting” mostly have to do with disagreements about how biology and culture play into the given phenomenon. For instance, where trans individuals may “feel” themselves to be “biologically” female or male, anti trans activists may feel a need to protect the “culture,” i.e. the lived histories and historical achievements (e.g., solidarity networks, “safe spaces”), of their gender group. (These aren’t the only arguments used on both sides, and I don’t mean to reduce them to that; they are just easily found examples, especially in recent controversies involving well known people like J. K. Rowling. See note* below.) Similarly, where race-shifters may “feel” themselves to be Indigenous (“no matter what proportion of my ancestry is European, in my heart I know I am Indigenous”), critics of race-shifting (or, in this context, self-Indigenization) would deny that the race-shifter is part of an Indigenous (or Black, etc.) community and would see that person as taking away from the cultural and political agency of real Indigenous (or Black, etc.) people and communities.
In both cases, critics of the shift advocate a more culturally and historically nuanced understanding of the category (race or gender) than advocates or practitioners of the shift, who see these things in more existentially basic and personal terms. These in turn define what kind of relationship — for instance, a stable or a fluid one — is considered appropriate to what set of terms.
5. But, again and crucially, race and gender are not identical. This makes it possible to be supportive of, or sympathetic to, one of the shifts (e.g., gender transitioning) and critical of the other (e.g., race-shifting) without being inconsistent. Since there are different forms of each (male-to-female and female-to-male gender transitioning, and different directions/trajectories between multiple “races” in the case of race-shifting), it also makes it possible to be sympathetic to one form of the same kind of shift and critical of another. This is because the specific gender/racial categories involved may account for “biology” and “culture” (and other potential or related factors) in different ways, with each term — especially what I am calling “culture” — being complex and nuanced.
The options can be depicted, heuristically, as a kind of Greimasian square:
with the hard diagonal line connecting S1 and ~S1 making up one axis (e.g., MALE – FEMALE, or WHITE – BLACK) and the hard diagonal line connecting S2 and ~S2 making up the other one. In this case we could have BIOLOGY and CULTURE as the two terms of the S2 axis, but I would suggest we leave that one in abeyance (leaving it to make up a third axis) and instead place the terms STABILITY and FLUIDITY at those opposite corners (S2 and ~S2), with the result looking like this:
MALE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . STABILITY
FLUIDITY . . . . . . . . . . . . FEMALE
Each of the other potential dyads (WHITE – BLACK, INDIGENOUS – NON-INDIGENOUS, et al) would be repeated as the S1 and ~S1 diagonal terms on their own squares. The weight of preference given to fluidity vs. stability and to the “identifying” terms (male vs. female, et al) would result in an X appearing in a different place on each version of the square for a person identifying as “X” (or transitioning from “X1” to “X2“).
As mentioned, I’ve replaced the Biology-Culture dyad with Stability-Fluidity, but really this should be a three-dimensional “Greimasian cube,” with “Biology” and “Culture” making up a third axis, and with movement being possible over time along any of the connecting axes or dimensions. (I do something very much like that with the categories “human” and “nonhuman” in my analysis of viewers’ experience watching animal-related films, in chapter 5 of Ecologies of the Moving Image. But that’s a whole ‘nother topic. That this can be fun is shown in the simple two-dimensional axis placing “Male” and “Female” opposite “Androgyne” and “Angel” in the diagram here. And that’s only two dimensions!)
The key here is the way in which “biology” and “culture” are understood as interacting with the race/gender terms and with the possibilities of fluidity and stability. Since we rely so much on “biological” and “cultural” language in discussing these things, these are best seen as place-holders that mean different things in different situations.
6. Initial questions: How useful is it to compare “gender” and “race” in this way, i.e., as interacting comparably with understandings of biology and culture, and with understandings (and valuations) of stability and fluidity? What are the limits to this comparison, and does it do violence to any of the categories as they are lived by any particular group?
7. Deeper questions: Is “race” a sufficient category to capture understandings of “whiteness,” “blackness,” “Latinxness,” “Indigeneity,” et al? (And when does “race” shift into “ethnicity” or related markers? For instance, where does “Jewishness” or “Holocaust survivor” fit?) Or might one or more of these not fit the category of “race” as well as the others?
I’m thinking especially of “Indigenous,” whose definitions vary both around the world and between adjacent cultural settings. If, as many Indigenous scholars (such as TallBear and those heard at the recent event) have argued, to be a member of a specific Indigenous group, community, or nation is something that comes not from an individual but from the group/community/nation — i.e., if it is not a matter of identity, but a matter of lived kinship and citizenship — then the Indigenous category may not fit the above at all. Might we need to rethink the other categories as well, or is Indigeneity simply different from blackness, Jewishness, and the like, in this respect?
I’ve argued before, here and here, that the relationship between people and land is more fundamental than the relationship of a “people” to other “peoples,” and that Indigenous people mark that fundamentality more than any other social category today. That, I suspect, is what makes the category “Indigenous” different from the other terms all too casually lumped together under the rubric of “race.” But other categories, too, have their specificities (“Black,” for instance, includes entire histories and geographies of racism, enslavement, and colonialism). The implication may be that we need a much more nuanced understanding of the full spectrum of socialities, one that includes kin-and-land-embedded socialities (like those embraced by many Indigenous peoples), socialities bound together through historical experiences of trauma (including eco-trauma), as well as more purely “anthropomorphic” socialities, including those oriented toward the emergent and futural possibilities of what human togetherness might be/come (and what role multispecies togetherness could play in it). But that’s all an argument to be developed further elsewhere.
8. Even more challenging questions: How do non-binary understandings of either race or gender affect (blur? scramble?) the outcomes? What are the virtues and pitfalls of “fluidifying” or “non-binarizing” any of these categories? Do contemporary notions of identity enable certain forms of fluidity between and across binaries, but constrain (stabilize) other forms? Which forms of “biology” and of “culture” are more or less emancipatory, and which are more or less relationally responsible/appropriate to different contexts? (And what’s the relationship between the “emancipatory” and the “relationally responsible/appropriate”?)
If, as I suspect (being more of a culturalist than any kind of biological essentialist), culture is the key to adequately answering these questions — culture understood to be historical, relational, political, and even ecological (ecocultural) — then what are the aspirational forms of culture that would answer them best?
As I wrote in a 2020 post on the trans rights debate,
These categories (sex, gender, et al. [here we could add “race” and “Indigeneity”]) are processes in motion, with histories that cannot be eliminated, but open to futures that cannot necessarily be imagined. Each of these categories is about how we relate to each other and to ourselves, including to our own bodies and to their social and biological expression.
The present time brings new challenges to them, as new opportunities for expression and creativity (in life, in art, in feeling) come up against inherited constraints, and it is our task to work through those challenges and to arrive at new syntheses.
I think the addition of “race” and “Indigeneity” to the list I was describing there does not alter the overall (process-relational) trajectory of my thinking. But it complicates the cultural, and therefore historical, dimension of it, since there are histories of race and Indigeneity — each of them as defined by oppressors and by oppressed, by colonizers and decolonizers — that multiply the challenges. These entail greater responsibilities to listen to those with greater experience in assessing their uses and their possibilities.
That’s in part what I was hoping last week’s event would help us with in our local (Vermont) Indigenous-non-Indigenous relational context. (I’ve written about the politics of that in the posts mentioned here.) I think it succeeded, but only time will tell how.
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*A quick afterthought: One thing I have underemphasized here is the fact that gender and racial categories have been used to oppress non-conformists and to contain other forms of cultural and political difference (e.g., when ideas of masculinity and femininity have been used by colonial powers to intensify the “governmentalities” by which subaltern/colonized people have been managed). Both anti-racist movements and critiques of gender binarism take much of their impetus from a recognition of these historical forms of oppression, including their intersectionalities. That puts these critiques into the “history” rather than the “biology” category. So it wouldn’t be fair to suggest the trans rights movement does not have its “cultural” dimensions; it certainly does.
