Exgender: Being, Learning and Floating in a Gender Diverse Universe

The question: This assignment is a 1500 word blog post that engages with a topic from the course and the literature provided. The aim is to create a short essay that communicates the sometimes obscure academic language in a clear and accessible manner. Think about who you are writing for, what the obstacles to understanding are, and how arguments can be presented without resorting to jargon. You can experiment with different forms of storytelling and add visual material to support your arguments, but if you do so, reflect on the relationship between the visual material and the text and think about how the image contributes or detract from the information you want to convey. The chosen topic: Exgender: Being, Learning and Floating in a Gender Diverse Universe This discussion was between Lyman and Jo, who are two trans people with varying experiences of identities, cultural signifiers, and lived experiences related to being ‘Trans’, in all the ways we might define the word. They bring in their experiences of being trans in academia and in the field to explore differing constructions of transness and what those constructions mean for different people, supplemented and supported by their trans family and siblings in the reading list. The session will focus on the broad theme of understanding transness as a local and global identity. Centred on and guided by trans people, we will explore how anthropology and ethnography have viewed transness and how gender plays out for both the ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’. Questions: 1. What are some colonial and decolonial/postcolonial/anticolonial experiences of transness in India and Japan? 2. What can we say about the nature of cultural and \’uncultural\’ transness? Hijra Communities, Homonationalism and Breaking the Binary in India 3. Trans Ethnographies: how can we use the auto-ethnographic voice to understand transness and marginality? How does it aid us in ‘studying’ transness?