Philosophy of Gender: From Margin to Center was a course I designed and taught at St. Mary’s College, emerging from my research interest in how melancholia shapes the psyche and body of trans and disabled subjects. It explores how gender theory—especially Butler’s formulations—both reveals and occludes the trans body, and how trans melancholia must be understood not as purely psychic but deeply grounded in embodied, material trans histories. I pair theoretical readings, such as Butler’s Gender Trouble, with embodied archives of trans lives, such as C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides and Jules Gill-Peterson’s A Short History of Trans Misogyny. For instance, I discuss how the Black disabled body of Philip Devine cuts through the absence of Blackness in the Brandon archive. I also invite the students to connect their own experience of living in South Bend, Indiana, with Halberstam’s discussion of Brandon, a transmasc subject who lives in rural Nebraska for passing and survival, to discuss the possibility of alternative forms of queerness in the rural midwest.
Categories: Trans Studies, Critical Race Theory, Critical Disability Studies