Review by Chia-Hsu Jessica Chang, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2024
Length: 266 pages
Edited by Emma Heaney, Feminism Against Cisness brings together eleven contributors to call for abolishing cisness – the idea that naturalizes sexual and racial dominance in colonial modernity. As Heaney pinpoints in the Introduction, cisness has long been foundational in certain strands of feminism. The anthology calls for a feminism where everyone is taken seriously, rather than one in which people must constantly prove their alignment with or are condemned by their unalignment from cis-defined womanhood (p. 1, 8). Such a feminism requires a paradigm shift in knowledge that thoroughly questions and unlearns cis-constructed ways of thinking, identities, and social relations.
What, then, is cisness that the anthology argues must be abolished? By framing the binary interpretation of sex as a biological norm, cisness assigns each person to one of the two sex categories and naturalizes this assignment as an inescapable condition structuring social life (p. 1-2). People’s senses of self and relationships are assumed to be expressed with reference to their binarily defined sex – whether in alignment with it or in deviation from it. The anthology identifies cisness as a historical construction integral to global coloniality, in which bourgeois whiteness is defined as superior and normative humanity, expressed through gender performances aligned with cisgender norms (p. 27-28, 59-60). The colonized, racialized, and captivated, as well as sexually non-dimorphic and gender-nonconforming individuals, are condemned as incapable of embodying such humanity and forced to learn to live in gendered ways as part of their pilgrimage toward modern humanity. Alternatively, they are demonized as a permanent terror contaminating the purity of modern humanity and must be contained, monitored, educated, or even extirpated (p. 59-62). Revealing the unnaturalness of cisness, the anthology draws readers’ attention to the specific histories and structures of dominance on which the supposed “natural” status of cisness is built, thereby debunking its self-endorsed universality and objectivity across cultures – a claim through which cisness marginalizes and erases other knowledge paradigms and ways of living (p. 59).
With clarity on how cisness is integral to global coloniality, the anthology argues that politics rooted in any given position within cisness may perpetuate racialization. This is evident in many white-centric feminists’ uncritical identification with the cis-category “woman,” which reinforces heteronormativity in alignment with the political interests of bourgeois white men and the settler state (e.g., the “gender-critical moms” who evict trans individuals in the name of protecting their children, as discussed by Jules Gill Peterson in Chapter Eight, “Caring for Trans Kids, Transnationally, or, Against ‘Gender-Critical’ Moms”). By claiming that cisgender difference is the root of all evil and that equality with cisgender men is the panacea, they erase the diverse experiences of intersectional oppressions, conflating the cis category of “woman” with the historical identity of “woman” shaped through resistance across sociocultural and ethnoracial borders. One resulting backlash is the oversimplified targeting of all women for criticism by some queer theories and related academic fields that emerged in the 1990s (p. 27-28). With this clarity, the anthology also critiques certain white trans communities that appropriate Black women as mere symbols outside cisness, rather than as real lives with distinct histories of resistance to intersectional oppressions, to justify their own liberation agendas (e.g., Joy Ladin’s appropriation of Sojourner Truth in her 2016 TEDx talk, as analyzed by Cameron Awkward-Rich in Chapter One, “On Trans Use of the Many Sojourner Truths”).
Alongside articulating the knowledge paradigm of cisness, the anthology practices compelling epistemic shifts away from it. Here are some examples. In Chapter Four, “Denaturing Cisness, or, Toward Trans History as Method,” Bean Velocci proposes treating transness as a historiographical method and an entire framework for thinking about gender, rather than merely a minoritarian subject awaiting verification and inclusion. In Chapter Three, “Trans Feminine Histories, Piece by Piece, or, Vernacular Print and the Histories of Gender,” drawing on Saidiya Hartman, Greta Lafleur proposes a speculative approach to imagine trans subjects in archives against the restrictive cis framework. In Afterword, “Toward a Feminism for the Living,” Durba Mitra moves away from the cis-framed demographic mindset that treats human lives as objects of biopolitical measurements. This shift is especially crucial in Third World contexts, where people are often reduced to labor values based on cisgenders for political-economic calculations, even when those calculations aim to critique gendered exploitation. In Chapter Six, “Faceless: Nonconfessions of a Gender,” inspired by Michel Foucault, Marquis Bey, experiencing gender as “a regime of subjectivation,” practices facelessness to withdraw from gender-based politics, including when “nonbinary” becomes just another gender category defined by “the contours of what a nonbinary body must look like” (p. 164, 170).
Shifting away from cisness opens boundless possibilities, and I spotlight the transformative kinships explored by several contributors. In Chapter Eight, Gill-Peterson presents an intergenerational kinship with their students, where mutual care and role-modeling do not presume cis-normative idea of family. Transformative kinships also emerge when trans individuals identify with womanhood through the transmission of laboring skills from significant women in their lives, as Heaney notes in Introduction. Indeed, womanhood and motherhood do not have to align with settlers’ family-state apparatus, as demonstrated by the STAR people and māhū organizers in Hawaiian land struggles, who embody motherhood alongside their roles as rioters and land protectors, as Margaux Kristjansson and Emma Heaney present in Chapter Two, “1970s Trans Feminism as Decolonial Praxis.”
To sum up, Feminism Against Cisness accomplishes at least four important acts. First, it foregrounds the epistemic clarity required to abolish cisness. Second, it exemplifies the distressing problems that arise when cisness and the racial and colonial logic constituting it are uncritically perpetuated or unapologetically embraced. Third, it demonstrates several praxes and inquiries that fundamentally shift away from cis paradigm of knowledge. Fourth, it illuminates flourishing kinships, and looks out toward those awaiting our efforts to grow, beyond cis relationships. These acts, among others, represent the anthology’s conscientious efforts to reorient women’s and trans movements toward a convivial future where all gender-transgressing and gender-nonconforming people find a home beyond mere tokenistic inclusion. Through these acts, it presents a manifesto for a feminist politics not grounded in affirming cisness, but in honestly scrutinizing what gender has done to us in different ways and how it has led us to believe our undesired realities stem from not clinging to cisgender categories hard enough. Ultimately, it points to a politics where feminist and trans perspectives are not separated – a politics in which one need not sever a part of oneself to remain loyal to either.
Finally, concluding my review by appreciating the anthology’s versatile uses, I highlight the valuable insights it can offer to teachers, community workers, and researchers examining the discontents of gender-based politics across ethnoracial and sociocultural contexts. Its examination of global coloniality and racial logic can especially benefit readers engaged in women, trans, queer, and ace people of color politics, intersex and transsexual embodiments, as well as indigenous movements, abolition movements, and decolonial praxis. It can spark productive dialogue with recent works such as Hil Malatino’s Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad, A Revathi’s A Life in Trans Activism, Maria Lugones’ “Gender and Universality in Colonial Methodology,” and Sherronda J. Brown’s Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture. Also, as its many contributors reflect on historiographical methods, it can benefit readers who engage with these methods, while also inspiring methodological innovation across disciplines. Pedagogically, it can inform introductory WGSS courses to challenge foundational ideas; method courses to showcase pioneering approaches; critical theories of race and queer of color critique courses to unpack intersectional oppressions; indigenous studies courses to complicate understandings of settler colonialism and land dispossession; and community engagement courses to serve as praxical guidance – among other possibilities.
Chia-Hsu Jessica Chang 張嘉栩 earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Binghamton University, State University of New York. Grounded in decolonial feminism and transnational women and queers of color critiques, her work explores the praxical methodologies of those who withstand and challenge intersectional oppressions as a significant aspect of racist violence and cultural erasure, demonstrating remarkable epistemic clarity and psychological resilience. She is especially attentive to methodologies employed by women, queer, and gender-nonconforming people of color that aim to build coalitions across racialized, ethnic, cultural, and other lived differences. Creative communication, storytelling, and friendship surface in her work as three notable threads weaving such coalitions. Her exploration of such praxical methodologies is based on her examination of the transpacific racial structure ingrained in everyday experiences, as reflected in Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong literature, film, sketch, and other media forms.