Upcoming Events

Tuesday, March 3, 4:00 p.m. in Hall Center Conference Hall

Dr. Tara Gonsalves, Columbia University

Global Trans

Amidst an increasingly challenging political landscape, LGBT rights INGOs have worked to articulate a global rights category around which they can make claims. But, gendered and sexual meanings vary across context. How do INGOs deal with this variation to shore up a global Transgender rights category?  In this talk, I will explore how INGOs changed the category system they were dealing with. Drawing on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and archival materials including reports on LGBT rights published between 1990 and 2019, I show how INGO staff, whom I call gender experts, made a seemingly capacious category even more capacious. As they attempted to universalize the category of “transgender,” which emerged in the United States and Europe, gender experts used recognition strategies to deal with divergent gender categories. Initially, gender experts subsumed and inadvertently provincialized misalignments. Over time, as some gender-diverse participants explicitly and implicitly contested the universality of the category system and as opposition to LGBT rights coalesced, they shifted their approach. Gender experts began explicitly addressing the challenges of universalization, first by qualifying their use of the category and eventually transforming its meaning altogether.

Presented by KU Sociology
Co-sponsored by the Commons, the Hall Center, and the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies