I N S T I T U T IO N A L I Z I N G T R A N S * S T U D I E S

Against Queer Theory

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C Á E L M . K E E G A N

Abstract The author explores how current disciplinary conditions force trans studies against queer
theory: Because queer theory is the institutional context through which trans studies is invited into
the university, it is also the containing ideological architecture against which trans studies must
articulate itself. Trans studies is therefore pressed “against” queer theory as a discursive surface in a
manner that limits it from being able to exit this disciplinary scenario.
Keywords queer theory, transgender studies, discipline, disciplinarity

a·gainst
/əˈɡenst/
Preposition
3. in or into physical contact with (something), so as to be supported by or collide
with it: she stood with her back against the door.
—New Oxford American Dictionary

B ear with me: trans studies is against queer theory. Or, to express this another
way, queer theory is the disciplinary surface against which trans studies must
constantly narrate itself, the field against which trans studies finds itself pressed in
a stipulated intimacy. Queer theory is both the door through which trans studies
enters and the room in which it is institutionalized. If we abandon linear peri-
odization as the model by which to order our relations, then we are not yet “after
trans studies” (Chu and Harsin Drager 2019) but are now (and still) against the
conditions of perceptibility that queer theory enforces. We cannot yet say that
queer theory recognizes trans studies as a discrete field, except perhaps as a
stimulating friction generated around queer theory’s most universally accepted
claims, or a trailing set of concerns worked through in a slightly different register.
Although trans studies has long understood that “queer” needs “trans” to tell its
foundational stories about gender (Prosser 1998: 21), queer theory continues to

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 7, Number 3 * August 2020 349

DOI 10.1215/23289252-8552978 ª 2020 Duke University Press
350 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

pretend that trans studies has only just arrived. Any pretense that trans somehow
follows queer, that we have moved from “queer to transgender” (Weigman 2012:
22), thus requires us to join queer theory in willfully ignoring a long-present and
coconstituting counterforce.
This is a situation trans people know well: the problem of the impossible
phenomenon, the haunting sensation, the phantom object, the missing limb. To
be here and yet-not, made absent by the way your name lives in others’ mouths.

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Oh, how this paradox follows us everywhere we drag ourselves!
Two short tales about being against.
1. It is 2017, and I am interviewing for a position at Large Southern
Research University. The job is for a queer-specific position inside a feminist
research collective. Everything seems to be going well until, when asked about my
activist work on transgender issues, I mention that it is vitally important that trans
people be allowed to narrate ourselves —that we be recognized as “speaking
subjects.” A committee member who is a postmodern queer literary scholar
immediately expresses doubt that this could be important, since subjectivity and
authorship are structuralist conceits. I do not get the job offer.
2. It is 2019, and I am giving a talk at Large Midwestern Research Uni-
versity. I am presenting a piece that discusses the similarities and differences of
queer versus trans theories (Keegan 2020), using Susan Stryker’s (2004) figure of
the “evil twin” to illustrate how these are supplemental rather than opposing
discourses. I am careful to note that the two fields constitute a “critical relation”
(Halley 2006: 272) in which the first principles of each discourse enliven the
other’s claims, producing an enriching and yet confounding paradox that perhaps
best expresses the actual structure of gender. As I finish the talk, a faculty attendee
raises their hand and notes that this piece is “controversial” because it “sets up a
binary between queer and trans.”
These encounters illuminate at the granular level how trans studies—
while nominally accepted as an existing field—is not yet generally understood or
treated as one in institutional practice. In these two instances, it is not that trans
studies is excluded per se, but that it is welcomed to perform only in alignment
with specific, preexisting scripts: in both stories, trans studies scholarship is
expected to uphold values central to queer theory (deconstruction and anti-
normativity) and present itself as if it is an affirmative subfield, or at least a
congruent body of thought. In the first example, my interlocutor does not appear
familiar with how transgender studies departs from queer theory’s deconstructive
mode to place high value on constative self-knowledge, or how this value
developed as a political response to the specific medical narratology of trans-
gender (i.e., transsexual) life. In the second example, the talk attendee appears to
be already so acculturated to queer studies methods that even though I am careful
 KEEGAN * Against Queer Theory 351

to present a nonbinary model of differentiation, they perceive me as constructing

a binary—and therefore intellectually suspect—formation. In both examples,
my interlocutors expect to hear something familiar because they presume trans
studies to be “like” (rather than against) queer theory. When I trouble that
assumption, trouble of a disciplinary kind can follow: to the extent that I insist on
trans-specific knowledges or methods that depart from the more familiar conceits
of queer theory, I risk being rendered unhirable, unintelligible —a “bad fit.”

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In the two instances I recount, we can see how the universalizing trend in
queer theory, in which any form of perceived nonnormativity must be elevated
and collected into “queer,” has had disciplining effects for trans studies —which
must struggle against them to appear as anything except a similar set of moves. If
queer studies expects trans studies to not cause trouble, this can force trans into a
feedback loop in which it is pressed to become more and more indistinguishable
from queer, thus further obscuring its own methods and claims. We might look
around and notice that we can’t notice trans studies as a distinct field, never
realizing that this is a structural effect of how the more privileged discourse of
queer theory disciplines —by including and citing trans only in ways that affirm
its own investments (Keegan 2018). The implicit normativities of queer theory as
an institutionalized discourse require trans studies to give an account of itself that
renders it either (1) indistinguishable from queer or (2) as a “bad object” and
therefore a source of trouble. Trans thus becomes a sort of usefully disposable
guest: one who can provisionally broaden the applicability of queer studies’
claims but still be disinvited from the room whenever it starts to tell a bad story.
The result is an impossible yet paradoxically real situation. To name these con-
ditions and ask for others—to resist them even as we refuse to leave the room
(because where would we go, honey?) means to be against.
While I have written elsewhere about the unexpected benefits of trans
studies being only partially welcomed into the academy (Keegan 2018), there is
nonetheless an affective and intellectual cost to living and laboring against these
fricative conditions of presence/absence. Writing that trans studies is “against
queer theory” is therefore meant to provoke a set of institutionally unutterable
questions, such as:

1. When queer studies scholars peer-review trans studies work, is it with the
knowledge of trans studies’ specific methods, aims, or vocabularies?
2. Are the multiple established monograph series and journals that are invested
in queer theory capable of soliciting and publishing trans studies scholarship
on its own terms?
3. Are the multiple academic press editors who are well versed in queer theory
also familiar with trans studies?
352 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

4. Can graduate students interested in trans studies attend multiple programs

where they are able to study with and be mentored by experts in trans studies,
rather than queer theory?
5. Do graduate programs understand the differences between queer theory and
trans studies?
6. Are graduate programs investing in and hiring experts to teach trans studies
outside the framework of queer theory?

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7. Are scholars who practice trans studies as a discrete field being hired into elite
research universities?
8. Are there robust discussions taking place about the ethics of queer studies
scholars engaging in trans studies work or teaching trans studies?
9. Are there transgender studies programs or departments that do not have to
operate through the context of queer theory?
10. Are transgender studies scholars working at universities that support them to
create programs or courses in trans studies, rather than appending trans
studies content to queer studies programs or courses?
11. Are transgender studies scholars working at universities that sufficiently
support new knowledge production in their field, rather than expecting them
to publish in established queer studies journals?
12. Are there regular conferences in trans studies?
13. Is trans studies work recognized as legitimate by conference programming
committees?
14. Can trans studies scholars regularly speak to one another without having to be
placed in the intervening disciplinary context of queer theory?

If we cannot say yes to most of these questions, then trans studies must remain in
the position of against. For trans studies, these conditions are how one can be
invited and disinvited at the same time: trans people are highly familiar with the
loaded game of recognition, how passing as a discrete gender is both expected by
others and yet shamed as a failed exercise, required by others to been seen as
human and yet simultaneously treated as a naïve performance. How is the phe-
nomenological position of trans studies in the academy uncannily similar to these
forced paradoxes of appearance and disappearance? One thing we might want
from trans studies now is further conversation about how to be up against the
impossible project of recognition on these terms: how to live and make work
inside these abrasive conditions, how to remain willing to engage in the service of
“a new hope” (Snorton 2009: 88)—even when it feels like our back is against the
door.
 KEEGAN * Against Queer Theory 353

Cáel M. Keegan is associate professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Grand Valley
State University and cochair of the Queer and Trans Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media
Studies. He is the author of Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender (2018) and coeditor
with Laura Horak and Eliza Steinbock of “Cinematic Bodies,” a special issue of Somatechnics
(2018).

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References
Chu, Andrea Long, and Emmet Harsin Drager. 2019. “After Trans Studies.” TSQ 6, no. 1: 103–16.
Halley, Janet. 2006. Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism. Princeton, NJ:
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Keegan, Cáel M. 2018. “Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* about Queer Studies Now?” Journal of
Homosexuality 67, no. 3. doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2018.1530885.
Keegan, Cáel M. 2020. “Transgender Studies; or, How to Do Things with Trans*.” In The Cam-
bridge Companion to Queer Studies, edited by Siobhan B. Somerville, 66–78. Cambridge:
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Prosser, Jay. 1998. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia
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Snorton, C. Riley. 2009. “‘A New Hope’: The Psychic Life of Passing.” Hypatia 24, no. 23: 77–92.
Stryker, Susan. 2004. “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin.” GLQ 10, no. 2: 212–15.
Weigman, Robyn. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.