29/10/20: On Liking Women

For the second session of the Queer STS Reading Group, and by popular demand, we're going to be reading Andrea Long Chu's 2018 essay, "On Liking Women". In this essay, which the theorist and historian Sandy Stone has described as beckoning in the "second wave" of transgender studies, Chu weaves several threads. As well as criticising reductive historiographies that would draw a direct line between the trans-exclusionary radical feminists of today and the radical feminists and political lesbians of the 1960s and 1970s, Chu argues that we must more readily confront the role played by desire in both the narrative of transition and gender itself. As she writes:

It must be underscored how unpopular it is on the left today to countenance the notion that transition expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire. This would require understanding transness as a matter not of who one is, but of what one wants. The primary function of gender identity as a political concept—and, increasingly, a legal one—is to bracket, if not to totally deny, the role of desire in the thing we call gender.

We'll be discussing Chu's text on 29th October at 5pm-6pm (London time) via Zoom.

The text can be found here: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women/

And the Zoom link is here: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/96212827191