Bloomsbury - Trans Studies Book Series

CALL FOR CHAPTERS - DEADLINE EXTENDED

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 withother 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/versusIndigenous 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: 31 March, 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 31

March, 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 includeyour 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.

categories

cultural studies and historical approaches

gender studies and sexuality

interdisciplinary

rhetoric and composition

theory