What is trans-ness in gender? One way to understand it is through the notion of performativity—how language and nonverbal communication tacitly or overtly affects social actions—is the core of all utterances and imaginative literature. Using this notion we can re-interpret literature from a more inclusive perspective.
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Excerpted from chapter 5 of Race by Martin Orkin and Alexa Alice Joubin. New Critical idiom Sereis. London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 193-227. Full text available online
When confronted with the unknown, many societies tend to transfer observations of unfamiliar phenomena onto their mental map of what is already known. Race as a category is entangled with empirical knowledge, misinformation, and ideology, all of which seek to justify and sustain particular beliefs. Knowledge about otherness is socially constructed. Knowledge of race results from taxonomical observations made for colonial, medical, bureaucratic, or other purposes such as political movements. Continue reading