Trans feminism as an outsider within the neoliberal university: On trans feminism's relation to institutionalized gender and queer studies and the instrumentalization of Blackness

Abstract

The article argues that trans feminism occupies the location of an outsider within the neoliberal university, particularly institutionalized gender and queer studies. Trans feminism must differentiate its epistemological frameworks from those of gender and queer studies, while simultaneously being dependent on the invitation to be accommodated in their departments. In the context of the neoliberal university, this invitation forces trans feminism into a predicament that positions it as an outsider within institutionalized gender and queer studies and reinforces the instrumentalization of Blackness. Instead of getting lost in epistemological trench warfare, epistemological work must focus on coalition-building and on those who are especially affected by violence, in particular Black, poor, and sex-working trans women.

Introduction

Since the emergence of trans studies as an academic field in the 1990s and 2000s (Stryker, 2006; Stryker and Aizura, 2013), it has struggled to gain footing in the university. While many trans academics constantly switch between being in and outside of the university in an attempt to secure a position, making it to the inside bears its own problems. In Being and Becoming Professionally Other, Erich Pitcher (2016) shows how neoliberal institutional organization frames the experiences of trans academics. By being subjected to various forms of (trans)gendered labor, trans academics become othered, positioned as “simultaneously margin/center; inside, but not of the institution, at least in terms of gender.” (139) Similarly, the field of trans feminism often gets treated as a “shadowy interloper” in the university (Enke, 2012: 2). In addition to the neoliberal institutional dynamics that affect trans academics, this is due to the difference of trans feminism’s epistemological frameworks to those of women’s, gender, feminist, and queer studies.

For the purpose of this article, the notion of trans feminism refers to a form of practice and thinking that arises from the shared, yet ambivalent, overlap of trans and feminist struggles against patriarchy, coloniality, and “cisness” ¹ (Heaney, 2024). Trans feminism rests on opening a space “to critique feminist attachments to cis life and imagine a feminism that frees itself from the racialized colonial imaginaries that have established cisgender as the social, legal, and scientific norm around the world.” (Mitra, 2024: 247) Although the field of trans studies also “disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes visible the normative linkages” between biology, social roles, subjective experiences, and culture both in and outside of feminism (Stryker, 2006: 3), I argue that there are two significant differences to distinctly trans feminist projects: First, while the field of trans studies always implicitly comprises a relationship to feminism and the struggle against patriarchy, it does not necessarily involve an explicit elaboration of this relationship. Second, trans studies have less of a focus on the conditions of trans feminine life than trans feminist perspectives. This does not mean that trans feminism today must be thought of as “a movement by and for trans women,” as Koyama (2003: 245) put it in The Transfeminist Manifesto at the beginning of the 2000s. Decades of discussions in feminist theory have shown that the stable subject of women, or trans women for that matter, as the basis for politics is neither helpful nor possible (Butler, 1994, 1999). Instead, trans feminism must focus on trans feminine life in terms of the social processes and conditions that position different bodies as trans feminine – as embodiments of femininity that are characterized as not cis – and the resulting dynamics of trans misogyny (see below). ²

Against this background, this article asks for the location of trans feminism within the neoliberal university. In contrast to Pitcher, this is not about the concrete experiences of trans academics within specific institutions. Instead, I am concerned with the positionality of trans feminism as a field. In doing so, I build on an ongoing debate within trans studies about its relationship vis-à-vis institutionalized women’s, gender, feminist, and queer studies. By expanding the focus of this debate from the emphasis on trans studies to that of trans feminism, I map the epistemological and institutional dynamics that arise when trans feminism gets “invited to join either women’s studies or queer studies contexts within the academy” (Keegan, 2018: 4). Trans feminism is usually dependent on the invitation to be accommodated in departments of institutionalized gender and queer studies due to its relatively low degree of institutionalization. In the context of the neoliberal university, this invitation forces trans feminism into a predicament. It is faced with the pressure to develop epistemological frameworks distinct from those of gender and queer studies for two conflicting reasons: First, because of gender and queer studies’ failure to account for trans femininity and the violent material realities surrounding it, and second, because developing distinct epistemological frameworks is a prerequisite for creating a field’s institutionalize-ability in an environment that is characterized by austerity and competition for limited resources. If trans feminism omits the elaboration of its own epistemological frameworks, it abandons both its potential futures of institutionalization and its “response-ability” (Haraway, 2016) to the material reality of trans femininity. In contrast, pursuing epistemological differentiation for the mere purpose of institutionalization runs the risk of succumbing to the logics of the neoliberal university machine, which has led versions of white trans feminism to an instrumentalization of Blackness, as elaborated further below. Work on epistemological differentiation is therefore not just a commitment to the material reality of the research subjects. It is also an imposition of conduct, which results from the neoliberal shortening of time, space, and resources, pushing trans feminism into an “outsider-within location” (Collins, 2009); i.e., the precarious position of a boarder space, which is forced to jeopardize its housing and future within departments that themselves suffer under an ever-growing pressure to expand their institutionalize-ability to secure their already dicey position within academia. Instead of getting lost in epistemological trench warfare, I argue that epistemological work must focus on coalition-building to improve the means for understanding and intervening in the processes of social positioning, with a particular focus on those who are especially affected by violence, such as Black, poor, and sex-working trans women.

To illustrate this argument, I start by laying out the terrain of this scene, namely institutionalized women’s, gender, feminist, and queer studies within the neoliberal university, and provide the means to map locations within this terrain. In a second step, I situate trans feminism’s location within this terrain. This consists of three parts: The role of epistemological differentiation and the material conditions of the neoliberal university and trans feminine life; the dynamics that arise when trans feminism gets invited into women’s, gender, feminist, and queer studies halls of institutionalized power; and the resulting position of trans feminism as an outsider within. Subsequently, I use the notion of trans feminism as an outsider-within position to reflect on how potential futures of institutionalization rely on the subjection and instrumentalization of Blackness, which impedes coalition-building between trans feminism and Black feminism. In conclusion, I argue for the need to build gateways to alternative futures based on coalition-building rather than differentiation for the mere purpose of institutionalization.

Mapping locations in the neoliberal university

The venture to map the location of trans feminism requires a notion of the terrain in which this location is situated. The terrain analyzed here comprises the halls of institutionalized women’s, gender, feminist, and queer studies departments, which themselves take place within the broader dynamics of the neoliberal university. In her attempt to map the landscape of institutionalized women’s, gender, and feminist studies (WGFS), do Mar Pereira (2018: 181) finds “that WGFS has gradually become formalised (at many levels: epistemic, organisational, professional, etc.) as part of academic structures, and as an academic structure, of production, certification and circulation of knowledge.” Yet, this does not mean that WGFS sit firmly in the saddle of the neoliberal university. Institutionalization is highly divergent and context-specific, and as such, notoriously hard to compare. Nonetheless, WGFS have found ways to build material infrastructures of institutionalization in the form of departments, study and qualification programs, and manifest a certain “epistemic status,” that is, recognizability as a formalized, credible, and relevant form of knowledge production (see also do Mar Pereira, 2017). Today, both this material infrastructure and epistemic status are increasingly folding under the pressure of neoliberal standards of productivity and profitability. For do Mar Pereira, these pressures need to be addressed as both ‘new’ and emerging forms of neoliberalism as well as ‘old’ and continuous forms of (neo)conservatism, which can also be seen in the ongoing attacks on gender and queer studies by the political right, trans-exclusionary radical feminists, anti-gender movements, and others (Butler, 2024). ³

In a similar vein, Social Text’s special issue Left of Queer (Eng and Puar, 2020: 4) laments the increasingly restrictive material conditions of queer studies knowledge production under “empire, globalization, neoliberalism, and biopolitics today.“ Although queer studies can look back on three decades of more or less successful institutionalization, today the field is increasingly confronted by the pressures of the neoliberal university, where one must actively seek out the remnants of queer studies and its once radical politics.

Since the 1980s, universities across North America, the UK, and Europe have followed the increasing trend toward market-oriented or market-like rationalities and managerial organization. The notion of the “neoliberal university” (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2000; see also Levidow, 2002; Slaughter and Leslie, 2001) aims to capture the intensification of these systemic trends across national differences, particularly in the global north. My use of the notion of the “neoliberal university” does not serve to discuss concrete empirical examples, where trans feminism’s positions in gender and queer studies departments can differ entirely, but to the overall intensified neoliberalization of the contemporary university system across North America, the UK, and Europe. Universities are faced with escalating financial austerity and massive cuts or reallocations of resources, resulting in an increasing dependence on and competition for external funding. This dependence threatens to turn research into a profitable and commodifiable enterprise in the form of a ‘knowledge economy,’ which in turn gives reason to transform or even cut entire departments and study programs that produce critical or “slow science” (Stengers, 2018) or not directly applicable results in general. Furthermore, it brings about the proliferation of short-term and precarious employment and mentalities of efficiency, standardization, and control. The neoliberal university conveys a managerial attitude towards research staff, such as through the employment of strategies of control that aim to impose and assess productivity (in terms of acquired grants and funds, the number of publications in high-esteemed journals, and so on) and the demand toward department members to become efficient, competitive, and self-governing subjects that are “expected to do more with less” (from larger classes with less time per student to more publications and secured funding with more precarious working conditions) (Muzzatti, 2022: 500).

Maddie Breeze, Yvette Taylor, and Cristina Costa (2019) thus suggest conceptualizing the neoliberal university in terms of the re-configuration of time and space. On the one hand, precarity, competition, and commodification can be conceptualized as temporal and spatial constraints on labor, be it research, teaching, or administration. On the other hand, this affects both a field’s epistemic status and its material infrastructure. While knowledge production must be framed as modern and timely to be recognized – a dynamic that carries colonial legacies –, the materiality of exclusion within the neoliberal university can be described as “institutional brick walls,” following Sara Ahmed (2017); that is, a sedimented material structure of exclusion that regulates the access of various bodies. These walls mark minorities as “space invaders” – people who, although entering what they were excluded from, remain “insiders as outsiders” (Puwar, 2004: 8), which in turn makes explicit strategies of space-(time-)making necessary (Bacchetta et al., 2018).

To determine the location of trans feminism within this terrain of the neoliberal university and of institutionalized women’s, gender, feminist, and queer studies (WGFQS), a notion of mapping or cartography is required. Here, it helps to draw on Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Michel Foucault’s (1995) Discipline and Punish. According to Deleuze (2006), for Foucault, who he deems “A New Cartographer,” power is not attributable to or localizable in certain entities but embodies operational relations. It has no essence or fixed location. Power can be described as a field, a relation between forces, or an “abstract machine,” which, despite asymmetries, does not omit any of the components it spans. This map of relations materializes in strategies and “concrete machines,” which allow power to integrate bodies in its operational flow by passing through them, thereby transforming their conduct. To locate positions within the social map of power is thus to identify its points of passage, which can be found where bodies and things are formed and organized in concrete machines, such as the school, the hospital, the prison, or the university. An integral part of these concrete machines is that they “impose a particular conduct on a particular human multiplicity” (Deleuze, 2006: 34; emphasis in original), a conduct that is imposed through the distribution of space and time. In the context of discipline and control, the spaciotemporal distribution is characterized by confinement. The crux of the matter is that “confinement [is] a secondary element derived from a primary function,” namely that of exteriority: “[C]onfinement refers to an outside, and what is confined is precisely the outside” (Deleuze, 2006: 43). Marginalized locations become visible and articulable through the imposition of a form of conduct that is a constitutive element of their histories of marginalization and operates through the confinement to narrow space and time, whereby this confinement is a result of the production of a constitutive outside of the within. Exploring how this confinement to a narrow space-time and the imposition of a particular conduct function in the case of trans feminism within institutionalized WGFQS and the neoliberal university is thus the challenge of the following chapters.

Trans feminism's location within the neoliberal university

To situate the location of trans feminism within the terrain of the neoliberal university, we must first take stock of trans feminism’s and trans studies’ degree of institutionalization. The first thing to note here is that the fields are still highly un-institutionalized in comparison to WGFQS, which prompted Stryker (2004: 214) more than twenty years ago to locate the emergence of trans studies “in the shadow of queer theory.” However, over the past twenty years, trans studies have solidified as a distinct field within the academic landscape of the Global North. Today, there are peer-reviewed journals, most notably Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ); large conferences, such as the “International Trans Studies Conference;” and three editions of the Transgender Studies Reader (whereas trans studies till date still largely lack distinct curricula, and larger numbers of research institutes and research groups, but for a few exceptions (see Stryker, 2020)). All of these can be regarded as thresholds of institutionalization. Hence, the second version of the Transgender Studies Reader from 2013 understands its predecessor from 2006 “as an account of [trans studies’] field formation” (Stryker and Aizura, 2013: 3). The third reader from 2023 goes even further: “As a field, transgender studies is no longer at a tipping point on the threshold of recognition; it has arrived.” (Blackston, 2023: 4) Yet, despite these accomplishments, the conclusion that the field of trans studies “has arrived” is not as self-evident as some traditional markers of institutionalization might suggest. After all, questions regarding its location and becoming vis-à-vis WGFQS have been among trans studies’ primary issues over the past 20 years and remain so today, as reflected in the recent debate about whether ‘we are after or before trans studies.’

Trans studies and trans feminism vis-à-vis institutionalized WGFQS

In 2019, Andrea Long Chu put forward the hypothesis that trans studies are already over, or at least on the verge of death. In her conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager titled “After Trans Studies,” she identifies trans studies’ failure and subsequent descent in its inability to develop frameworks “that would distinguish itself from gender studies or queer studies” (Chu and Drager, 2019: 103). Trans studies’ primary analytic operator, ‘trans-,’ mimics queer studies’ commitment to anti-normativity. What remains outside this focus on the subversion of binary sexuality and sex/gender is ‘the transsexual woman’: “The problem with the transsexual is that she’s always been too much of a woman” (Chu and Drager, 2019: 109). ⁴ Both her expression of femininity and her (potential) wish to transition medically, maybe even to pass, are framed as submissions to the binary sex/gender system. This kind of framing not only reinscribes the question of who is allowed to express which form of femininity but also fixes certain expressions of femininity to a singular interpretation. Furthermore, it ignores two other aspects: first, that the pursuit of sex/gender normativity can be a technique of survival in a trans misogynistic world (Bettcher, 2007), and second, that a trans body’s expression of binary sex/gender gets enabled by a non-normative move against the idea of a naturally given binary, in the first place (Chu and Drager 2019, 107).

Queer and gender studies’ failure to account for ‘the transsexual woman,’ or trans femininity as I would put it (see footnote 1), instructs Chu to argue for the need to develop a set of theories and methods that can counter the narrowing down to anti-normativity and save trans studies' deminse. In contrast, one year later, in 2020, Cassius Adair, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Amy Marvin reply in “Before Trans Studies” that “trans studies can’t be ‘over’ because, in fact, it isn’t yet here” (Adair et al., 2020: 306). From their perspective, trans studies have not yet arrived “because [its] sprouts have been struggling to survive in the poison [sic] soil of the contemporary university system” (Adair et al., 2020: 306).

The two positions not only differ in terms of the temporality of trans studies but also in the reasons for its struggles: Chu and Drager locate these reasons in trans studies’ own ideological dogmas, whereas Adair, Awkward-Rich, and Marvin identify them in the neoliberal university system. While the former focuses on epistemological relations – i.e., ideological differences and (self-imposed) barriers – revolving around the question of the transsexual woman, the latter centers on material relations – i.e., institutional and systemic conditions – revolving around the question of the allocation of space and time.

Put bluntly, the ‘great failure’ of trans studies is that we can’t all afford to write. […] These [i.e., the reasons for trans studies' struggles] are not abstract concerns about intellectual style but material questions: questions about who gets jobs, who gets read, who gets cited, who reviewers demand you cite, who has access to the university in the first place, and so on. (Adair et al., 2020: 309)

Hence, the authors of “Before Trans Studies” shift the perspective from mere epistemological questions to the material conditions of trans studies’ livability – and with it, to what hinders trans studies' becoming rather than what determines its demise. While I share the concern of the authors of “After Trans Studies” about the tension between trans femininity and anti-normativity, I also follow the assertion of the latter that these epistemological differences must be situated within the material conditions of the neoliberal university.

Additionally, Adair, Awkward-Rich, and Marvin rightly point out that the tension that Chu and Drager raise is not particularly new, but has been central to trans feminism for over two decades. One example of a trans-feminist critique of WGFQS’ frameworks about trans femininity – and here I start to shift registers from the discussion of trans studies to trans feminism – can be found in the work of Vivian Namaste. In “Tragic Misreadings: Queer Theory’s Erasure of Transgender Subjectivity,” Namaste (1996) examines the ways Judith Butler analyzes the life and death of Venus Xtravaganza, a Latina sex-working trans woman with ties to the New York ballroom scene as depicted in the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning. In Bodies that Matter, Butler (1993: 131) interprets Xtravaganza’s death (who was most likely killed by a client) as “a tragic misreading of the social map of power,” as Xtravaganza, who wanted “to become a woman,” was ultimately “treated by the symbolic in precisely the ways in which women of color are treated.” Subjecting Butler to a critical reading, Namaste (1996) shows how they themselves end up presenting a tragic misreading of the social map of power: By reducing Xtravaganza’s death to her pursuit of womanhood, Butler fails to account for the role of transsexuality, sex-work, and trans misogyny in the violence trans women face. Xtravaganza’s death, then, does not represent the inevitable effect of an uncritical reproduction of the hegemonic but an effect of the material reality of sex-working Latina and other racialized trans women in a cis-heteropatriarchal, racist, and capitalist society. Her death is bound to a marginalized location within the social map of power, whose material reality and livability is formed and enclosed by it. Thus, referring to the conditions of trans feminine life, must entail a form of “response-ability” (Haraway, 2016) – that is, being responsible for and able to respond to the relational processes of social positioningand the resulting material realities.

The point of this discussion is not to decide whether we are before or after trans feminism. Instead, it serves to illustrate three points: First, trans feminism has had to differentiate its frameworks from those of WGFQS since the 90s. Second, as briefly shown for the interpretive lens of anti-normativity, the labor to differentiate frameworks is particularly necessary for trans feminism's goal to account for the processes that position certain bodies as trans feminine, allocate their material spaciotemporal realities, and expose them to transmisogynistic violence. Omitting this labor can lead to a form of epistemic violence that substantiates the material violence that accompanies the lives of those who are positioned as trans feminine. Third, while differentiating frameworks is necessary for gaining an epistemic status that enables further institutionalization, within the context of the neoliberal university, it must also be understood as directing already scarce space, time, and labor toward building frameworks that oppose those of WGFQS. As trans feminism is usually housed within WGFQS' departments, this puts trans feminism in the position of having to jeopardize its arrivial and survival within the neoliveral university, instad of one of simply “having arrived.”

The invitation into the halls of institutionalized power

Cáel Keegan’s (2018) “Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer Studies Now?” helps to further flesh out the material conditions and dynamics of institutionalization within the neoliberal university. As trans studies today are primarily housed in WGFQS’ departments, Keegan is concerned with the dynamics that arise when trans studies get “invited to join either women’s studies or queer studies contexts within the academy.” His central argument is that this invitation pushes trans studies into a “double bind” – the need to perform a doubly “but” – that makes trans studies appear as an “epistemic blockage” to WGFQS; a blockage that needs to be disciplined to secure the institutionalization of the latter (3-4).

This double bind arises from trans studies’ necessity to relate to WGFQS’ frameworks: One end of the double bind refers to the tension between anti-normativity and transsexuality. As seen in Namaste’s critique of Butler, queer studies’ goal to deconstruct the gender binary sets anti-normativity as an (implicit or explicit) normative goal, which results in framing transsexuality as a submission to the binary gender system. Thus, “in response to queer studies’ investment in deconstructing the gender binary (M/F),” trans studies must say “but gender is real like this” (both as a lived experience and as a system of oppression) (Keegan, 2018: 4; emphases in original). The other end of the double bind concerns WGFS’ “foundational schema of sexual subordination (M > F).” By framing patriarchy as the systematic oppression of femininity through masculinity, it classifies other groups that do not embody hegemonic masculinity as “oppressed like women are.” According to Keegan, trans studies must also intervene here, arguing “but gender is not real like that” as if bodies inhabit definitely identifiable sexes, genders, or sexualities and as if “one gender or sexuality unilaterally oppresses the others” (Keegan, 2018: 6-7; emphases in original).

What remains undertheorized in Keegan’s account is how these epistemological scrambles are situated within the institutional pressures of the neoliberal university system that can push WGFQS to act as a disciplinary force against trans studies and trans feminism. That is to say that in the context of the neoliberal university, all precarious fields (such as, WGFQS, trans studies, and trans feminism) are confronted with the pressure to formalize the fields and their frameworks; the pressure to make themselves institutionalizeable in pursuit of competition for ever dwindling resources. Institutionalize-ability requires a certain epistemic status – i.e., recognizability as a distinct field with characteristic frameworks –, which results in pushing deviating forces to the margins. This type of external pressure can result in WGFQS turning inwards to discipline their ‘incorporated others,’ such as trans studies and trans feminism, to impose a form of conduct that adheres to the programs and frameworks that secure their institutionalize-ability. Furthermore, situating these dynamics within the neoliberal university also helps not to confuse the discussion of institutionalized WGFQS based on the sexual subordination model and the deconstruction of the gender binary, with the empirical heterogeneity of WGFQS. WGFQS are practiced across a variety of contexts and with different frameworks and interpretations. Thus, the reason I discuss WGFQS solely through these two frameworks is not only a necessary simplification, but, more importantly, because they have been providing the conditions for their institutionalize-ability in the Global North and are central to today’s attacks on WGFQS.

Shifting registers back to the location of trans feminism, we can see that trans feminism is caught in a similar double bind with regard to WGFQS as trans studies. Yet, there is a central difference between trans studies and trans feminism regarding one end of the double bind. Whereas trans studies and trans feminism usually concur on the pitfalls of anti-normativity, I argue that they differ in terms of the sexual subordination model. Although Keegan’s assessment that neither sex/gender nor power can be conceptualized as fixed in certain bodies carries a lot of merit, this is not the only way the sexual subordination model can be conceptualized. In contrast to a model that itself fixes sex/gender and power in certain bodies, a transfeminist approach to the sexual subordination model can focus on the ways sex/gender, in particular (trans) femininity, is mapped onto bodies through power. As Gill-Peterson’s (2024) notion of “trans-feminization” highlights, transmisogyny rests on how power positions various groups as trans feminine by ascribing sex and gender to their bodies, rather than on identity. It is precisely because the femininity and womanhood of bodies that are categorized as biologically male are marked as deviously hypersexual and thus trans-feminized that they are positioned as harassable, beatable, rapeable, and killable. The assessment that various groups are “oppressed like women are” (Keegan, 2018: 6; emphasis in original) or positioned as “womanlike” (Heaney, 2024: 8) is thus not about ascribing sex/gender to bodies. Instead, it is an attempt to capture the ways bodies get positioned within the social map of power, through various processes of feminization, including the woven-in devaluation of this positioning, which implies that one is “not even, properly, a woman,” to put it in the words of Emma Heaney (2024: 8; emphasis in original).

Trans feminism as an outsider within institutionalized gender and queer studies

In sum, a complex set of forces characterizes the location of trans feminism within institutionalized WGFQS. First, there is the double bind of having to differentiate its frameworks from those of WGFQS. In both cases – the opposition to the sexual subordination model and the deconstruction of the gender binary –, this necessity results from WGFQS’ failure to account for the ways transsexual women and other trans-feminized groups get positioned within the social map of power and confronted with violent material realities. The central difference between trans feminism’s version of the double bind, as presented by me, and that of trans studies, as presented by Keegan, is precisely the focus on trans femininity; that is, the necessity to reconceptualize sexual subordination as a system of various forms of feminization that result in different locations. Keegan holds that trans studies must overcome the entire model, whereas I argue that trans feminism’s opposition to it stems from its investment in extending the model by the concept of trans-feminization, thereby presenting a fuller picture of feminist struggles against patriarchy, coloniality, and cisness.

Second, the difference regarding the double bind does not mean that trans feminism represents a lesser epistemic blockage to WGFQS than trans studies. While trans feminism also replies to queer studies’ focus on antinormativity, ‘but gender is real like this,’ it objects WGFS’ model of sexual subordination slightly differently, by saying, ‘but sex is not real like that.’ This is to say that while patriarchy is characterized by the oppression of femininity, femininity is not defined by sex at birth. ⁵ In the context of the neoliberal university, trans feminism’s objection to the central frameworks that confer WGFQS’ epistemic status puts it in the precarious position of continuously jeopardizing its housing and future within departments that themselves suffer under an ever-growing pressure to expand their institutionalize-ability to secure their already dicey position within academia. These external pressures can prompt WGFQS to turn inside and act as forces that discipline trans feminism to adhere to the frameworks that (until now) provided for their institutionalize-ability.

Third, it positions trans feminism as particularly vulnerable regarding the disciplinary machine of the neoliberal university. In a context in which time, space, and resources become increasingly scarce, and academics must function as self-managerial subjects, the necessity to differentiate frameworks imposes a form of conduct that reallocates labor away from coalition-building and towards playing into the neoliberal logics of competitiveness and institutionalization. Trans feminism finds itself in a precarious position, wherein work on epistemological differentiation is not just a necessary commitment to the material reality of trans-feminized groups, but also an imposition of conduct, the pressure to make itself institutionalizable, which results from and gets amplyfied by the neoliberal shortening of time, space, and resources. While omitting the elaboration of its own epistemological frameworks equals abandoning both its potential futures of institutionalization and its response-ability to the material reality of trans femininity, giving in to the necessary epistemological differentiation runs the risk of becoming part of the neoliberal university machine and underpinning the conditions for the instrumentalization of Blackness, as I argue below.

Trans feminism's position within the neoliberal university can thus be described as occupying a border space between unequal power or as an “outsider-within.” Collins (1986) initially introduced the notion of the outsider-within as a Black feminist and intersectional approach to standpoint theory. While Collins focuses on the epistemic standpoints of Black women, the notion of the outsider-within can be used as a tool to understand how any marginalized group’s positionality influences its perspectives on the world (Collins, 1986: 29; 1999: 86-87). For the purpose of this article, however, I use the term to describe a marginalized location within the social map of power rather than to denote a specific epistemic standpoint that results from it. In doing so, I follow Collins’ (1999: 86) “Reflections on the Outsider Within,” where she critically engages with how the term got decontextualized from the histories of marginalization and oppression and reduced to “a personal identity category.” Collins elaborates that this is especially concerning amid the neoliberal university, wherein ‘being different’ can be sold to institutions that seek to present a neoliberal form of inclusion and diversity politics. To rescue the notion from its collapse into triviality, Collins refocuses attention back on how social relations generate different marginalized locations: “I now use the term outsider within to describe social locations or border spaces occupied by groups of unequal power” (Collins, 1999: 86; emphasis in original). This recollection on positionality with regards to power is also hinted at by Collins' preferred use of the term “outsider-within locations” in her later work (Collins, 2009: 300; emphasis in original).

Trans feminism is emblematic of a location in a border space, invited into the halls of institutionalized power but still always remaining on the doorstep. Trans feminism is torn between the need to differentiate its frameworks, the danger of playing into the dynamics of competition and institutionalization, and the risk of endangering its already precarious position within the neoliberal university. The pressures make trans feminists appear as a form of space invaders that challenge the established norms of WGFQS, which positions them simultaneously in and outside of WGFQS. Moreover, these pressures act as disciplining forces that, by incorporating trans feminism, confine it to a narrow space-time and impose a form of conduct (differentiation, competition, institutionalization), which serves the purpose of a constitutive outside within (i.e., the precarious position of needing to diverge and, by diverging, getting pushed to the margins). In other words, trans feminism’s allocation to the margins goes hand in hand with the confinement to a limited space-time and the resulting imposition of a form of conduct; i.e., either adhering to the dominant frameworks of WGFQS, thereby abandoning the future of trans feminism within academia, since adherence comes with abandoning the pursuit for developing trans feminist frameworks and institutionalization, or putting the already sparce resources of labor into differentiating its frameworks from those of frameworks of WGFQS, thereby playing into the logic of competition and institutionalization, which pushes WGFQS into re-substantiating themselves by formalizing their frameworks through delimiting trans feminism. Hence, trans feminism gets relegated to the position of a constitutive outsider-within; a convenient “add-on” (Enke, 2012: 2) that can be presented when necessary for neoliberal diversity politics and discarded the moment it comes to appointing positions of power or changing firmly established frameworks and narratives, often reduced to a disturbance before business continues as usual.

On the pitfalls of institutionalization and the instrumentalization of Blackness

Against this background, the question arises of what trans feminism’s future could or should hold. If we consult Collins on the possible futures of outsider-within positions, she answers that neither becoming an insider nor withdrawing to an outsider position is sufficient. While the former implies assimilating to the structures of power, the latter foregoes the opportunity to change the university from within. Instead, Collins demands that universities find “new ways” of inclusion and institutionalization (Collins, 1999: 88) that somehow retain a “creative tension” (Collins, 1986: 29). Yet, the question remains how such new forms of inclusion and institutionalization should or could be structured, what consequences they enact, and whether this is a desirable goal for trans feminism at all. Rather than proposing definite answers to these questions, my aim in this final section is to raise one last concern, namely, how the goal of institutionalization promotes (white) trans feminism’s instrumentalization of Blackness, particularly of Black (trans and cis) women.

In “We Got Issues. Towards a Black Trans*/Studies,” Treva Ellison, Kai Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton (2017: 162) express their concerns about how trans studies subsequent institutionalization “as a discipline functions as a scene of subjection for blackness [sic].” This concern stems from the observation that trans studies and trans feminism rely on Black bodies, Black thought, and Black death and disavow them simultaneously. That is, white trans studies’ and trans feminism’s reference to Black bodies and their premature death often does not serve to discuss Blackness or its relation to transness. Instead, “the field of transgender studies, like other fields, seems to use this Black subject as a springboard to move toward other things, presumably white things” (Ellison et al., 2017: 162).

A striking example of such an instrumentalized reference to Blackness can be found in white trans feminism’s use of Sojourner Truth's supposed exclamation, “Ain't I a woman?” Although it is unclear whether Truth used this phrasing at the 1851 Women's Rights Conference to claim her womanhood as a Black, formerly enslaved woman in front of a white crowd, many white trans feminists regularly draw on it to secure their own belonging to womanhood. This use of Sojourner Truth displaces her Blackness and the role it plays in the racialized exclusion from womanhood (Awkward-Rich, 2024: 43). Another example of the instrumentalization of Blackness is the death of Tyra Hunter, a Black trans woman who died because of the refusal of medical care following an accident in 1995. Hunter's afterlife had quite a remarkable economy, leading to new organizations being founded in her name and a constant evocation of her death in different trans communities across Europe and the US. In “Trans Necropolitics,” Snorton and Jin Haritaworn (2013: 71) show how Hunter's death is emblematic of how “trans women of color act as a resource […] for the articulation and visibility of a more privileged transgender subject.” Thus, for many Black, sex-working, and other marginalized trans bodies, “it is in death that they suddenly come to matter” (Snorton and Haritaworn, 2013: 74). Hence, the reference to Black women often gets instrumentalized by white trans feminists as a tool to become insiders, reducing them to a resource for their careers.

Not least, the instrumentalized use of Blackness impedes the formation of coalitions between trans feminism and Black feminism due to neglecting the fact that coalition-building between different outsider-within positions depends on the ability to account for the different histories of oppression of these locations. In contrast to such instrumentalization, coalition-building between Black feminism and trans feminism can emerge out of what Snorton calls the “collateral genealogy” of Blackness and transness. With collateral genealogy, Snorton (2017: 12) describes how “the fungibility of captive flesh produced a critical context for understanding sex and gender as mutable and subject to rearrangement.” In other words, transness, understood as a movement across sex and gender, is enabled by Blackness in the sense that it marks a “condition of possibility” (Snorton, 2017: 2; see also Ellison et al., 2017: 164) – that is, Blackness functions as the condition of transness in the sense that enslavement framed Black flesh as ungendered, which enabled thinking of sex and gender as unfixed and subject to change in the first place. Snorton traces these insights back to the works on “racialized gender” by Black feminists, such as Hortense Spillers. It is through Spillers’ understanding of sex/gender as always already racialized that Snorton concludes that transness is tethered to Blackness – sex/gender became conceivable as unfixed and fungible through its reversibility in Black enslaved bodies.

Because of these insights, the authors of “We Got Issues” hold that transness is “always and already theorized and theorizable from the literature on ‘racialized gender’” (Ellison et al., 2017: 165). Not only is transness tethered to Blackness, something that white trans feminism misuses in its instrumental reference to Blackness. Moreover, it is due to Black feminism that this link is traceable and decodable at all. Passing over these insights masks the ways in which Black feminism and trans feminism can form “coalitional epistemologies,” ultimately also hindering Black Trans Feminism from becoming (Bey, 2022: 59). ⁶ As Snorton (2017: x) puts it, “there is no absolute distinction between black [sic] lives' mattering and trans lives mattering within the rubrics of racialized gender.” This is only one of many reasons why I follow the authors of “We Got Issues” in their conclusion that “Black feminist theory [is] essential to Black trans theory and to transgender studies” (Ellison et al., 2017: 166), and, as I would add, to trans feminism. Trans feminism depends on Blackness and Black feminism. This counts both for liberal white trans feminists’ instrumentalization of Blackness and for critical attempts at trans feminism – they rely on Black feminist knowledge and the formation of coalitions with Black feminism to present a better picture of and opposition to the social map of power.

Conclusion

If trans feminism occupies the location of an outsider within institutionalized WGFQS and if its institutionalization can promote the instrumentalization of Blackness and impede coalition building between trans feminism and Black feminism, then its futures must be directed towards something different. Instead of leaning toward an uncritical notion of institutionalization, thereby reinforcing trans feminism’s instrumentalization of Blackness, a radical form of trans feminism “understands that there will be no inclusion” (Raha and van der Drift, 2020: 13; see also Raha and van der Drift, 2024). Following Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift (2020) inclusion within the neoliberal university is a form of white liberalism that allows a few privileged trans people to become insiders while foregoing any structural change. The consequence of this does not have to mean leaving the university. However, it means that radical trans feminism must refuse neoliberal logics. On the one side, this means that while the differentiation of trans feminism’s epistemological frameworks from those of WGFQS remains necessary due to the need to account for the position of trans-feminized lifes within the social map of power and its resulting material conditions, this must be an endeavor that is obliged to further the understanding of and possibilities for intervening in the allocation of these locations, rather than to compete for epistemic statuses that can be leveraged for institutionalization. On the other side, in terms of coalition-building, this means shifting the perspective to structures of agency, in this case, who can write what under which conditions and consequences, as well as the potentiality of change that lies in coalition-building based on the acknowledgment of both the interwoven and simultaneously different histories of oppression.

Hence, “radical trans feminism embraces the necessity of a new futurity” (Raha and van der Drift, 2020: 13). In doing so, it aims to enact a space “elsewhere” – a space dedicated to the livability of trans feminine, Black trans, and trans-of-color bodies, wherein “no life is disposable” (Raha and van der Drift, 2020: 20). Adapting the reading of Black feminism as always having been trans (Raha, 2017: 640; see also Bey, 2022: 53), trans feminist futures must always necessarily be Black trans feminist futures.