Bloomsbury - Trans Studies Book Series

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

Transgender Entanglements: The shape and limits of transgender 

Edited by Levi C. R. Hord and Wendy Gay Pearson

The incoherence of “transgender” as a category is both a feature and a bug. As an umbrella category, its boundaries are sometimes deliberately fuzzy, and sometimes vague enough to cannibalize everything that approaches them. As the field of Transgender Studies approaches its adolescence, with several decades of scholarship now behind us, it is crucial to turn to a mainstay of feminist thought and employ self-critique about the category of transgender itself, and how it orients our knowledges and scholarship. With a publicly circulating, often uninformed, and largely negative version of transness becoming central to political debates, it is more crucial than ever to linger on the question of what we – as scholars and activists – can do with the category. 

After the border wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s, transgender studies inherited a legacy of tension surrounding which subjects should be included under the rubric of transness, and which subjects should drive the political and scholarly projects of the field. Some, like Jay Prosser and Henry Rubin, held that transgender studies should prioritize the body narratives and phenomenological experiences of binary sex change. Others, like Jack Halberstam, problematized the clear boundary between transsexuality and other forms of gender variance, such as butchness. These conversations about the boundaries of transness are experiencing a revival as the result of increased trans visibility and the rapid expansion of categories like nonbinary and agender, which brush up against the edges of transness. They also offer potential new possibilities for coalition building and solidarity with other marginalized people, building on intersectional approaches to both politics and scholarship.

Some field critiques by Kadji Amin (“We Are All Nonbinary,” 2022) and Andrea Long Chu and Emmett Harsin Drager (“After Trans Studies,” 2019) have attempted to reassert clear boundaries and identify a proper subject of transgender studies in the transsexual, echoing earlier feminist loss and return narratives (Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, 2010). Other scholars, such as Marquis Bey, note the ways in which identity categories are forms of capture, and advocate for a politics of gender abolition through the archives of Black feminist thought. Most recently, prominent trans historian Jules Gill-Peterson (Transgender Liberalism, forthcoming) and trans legal scholar Paisley Currah (Sex Is as Sex Does, 2022) have argued that the emergence of “transgender” as a master term in the early 2000s led to the formation of a liberal transgender identity politics rather than a more useful pragmatic focus on the access to medical care and the right to change sex. In a moment of heightened attacks against gender variant people, such arguments suggest, the category of “transgender” fails to hold a coherent politics, and may well need to move aside to make space for other analytics and forms of coalition. 

This volume aims to engage in these ongoing modes of questioning who the “trans” in “trans studies” is, while holding the myriad complexities of what it means to define gender coalition and shared politics at all under the historical circumstances of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. 

This upcoming volume (to be published in the Trans Studies book series with Bloomsbury Press) will feature scholarship on things that confront the limits of “trans” as an analytic, as a category, as a framework; vestigial forms of transness; cultural challenges to the westernization of transness; transgender hegemony and/versus Indigenous epistemologies of gender; transness as retroactive and/or anachronistic category; possibilities for reclaiming history(s) under the trans umbrella; the diverse possibilities for thinking and experiencing transgender lives in politically fraught and dangerous times; transgender scholarship in these same politically fraught and dangerous times; trans oppositions to identity politics; transgender terminologies and both proliferation of and resistance to expanding categorization; category confusions, (including, e.g., the inclusion of intersex under the trans umbrella but also the public inclination to view cisgender drag queens as trans). 

We are looking for thoughtful, theoretically-informed chapters on relevant topics. We would welcome proposals for a roundtable discussion that would foreground conversations about the shapes and limits of transgender as a category. We are also open to works of creative nonfiction that citationally engage with these themes. We are also hoping to receive many different perspectives on the central questions here; what is transgender as a category, what does it do, whom does it exclude and include, and how are its various provocations potentially both contributing to or defending against the current difficult political moment in which trans people in the English-speaking world find themselves. We are also particularly interested in chapters whose topics are situated outside EuroAmerican concepts of gender, whether the focus is global and comparative or on specific, local cultures.

We are interested (though not exclusively) in submissions that touch upon:

• The tension between transness, as a universalized Western category, and the particularity of other cultural organizations of gender/sex (two-spirit, fa’afafine, bakla, Hijra, brotherboys and sistagals, takatapui, etc.)
• Intellectual histories and gestures beyond the “border wars” within transgender studies, such as those between absence/presence, materiality/language, and transsexual/transgender/queer
• Challenges to the inclusion criteria of transness by 21st century terminology, such as nonbinary and agender
• Vestigial or “minor” forms of transness - labels, experiences, histories, and narratives that do not cleanly fit inside commonsense understandings of transness, but which nonetheless linger around its borders, pressing inward
• The varying functions of the category “transgender” in its lives as a minoritizing and universalizing (Sedgwick) function
• The “proper” subject of transgender studies, and how that figure has changed through the field’s history and disciplinary inflections
• Telling trans stories: category pressure and the pleasures and dangers of standardizing trans narratives; “sideways” storytelling and narrative resistance among individuals and communities 
• Opportunities for solidarity across broad coalitions

Deadline for abstracts: 15 February, 2026

Interested authors should submit a 300-word abstract, a bibliography of at least five works that are central to your topic, and a 200-word biography.. Proposals should be emailed to wpearson@uwo.ca and lch2152@columbia.edu no later than 15 February, 2026. Abstracts, bibliographies, and biographies should be submitted as a single Word document, and previously published chapters or articles should be submitted as PDFs. Both Word files and PDFs should contain the author’s name in the file names. Please include your email address in your biography so we can contact you with our decision about your proposal.

Authors will be notified whether their proposals are accepted by May 31, 2026. Partial first drafts are due by August 31, 2026; solid first drafts of full chapters are due by November 1, 2026; and final versions are due December 31, 2026. The series policy states that all chapters must include at least one author with a PhD; however, co-authored articles are welcome. In your 200-word biography, please note the year and university where you earned your doctorate. Only previously unpublished works will be considered. The press does not accept simultaneous submissions.

Please submit your proposal by email to wpearson@uwo.ca and lch2152@columbia.edu.

*Note on the use of generative AI: it is unfortunate that we need to ask this, but please include a statement that your submission is your own writing and that any use of AI is duly noted and properly cited.