Öffentlicher Abendvortrag von Greta Olson und Laura Borchert im Rahmen des Dynamischen Clusters "Feministische Perspektiven auf 'Recht und Literatur'" des SFB 1385 "Recht und Literatur" der WWU Münster.
This talk works to de-binarize and trans law by moving through fundamental distinctions in literary analysis. Law acts as an authorial narrator when it ascribes unreliability to trans and non-binary persons. The analysis of anti-trans and anti-non- binary legislation in Germany and the United States uncovers persistent prejudices that trans people are actually men who masquerade as women or are childish persons who are unable to ‘properly’ embrace a binary gender identity. Transness poses a threat to immutable conceptualizations of sexuality as well as to traditional forms of narrative authority.
With Gayle Rubin, Greta Olson and Laura Borchert assert that imagined victimized women and affectively resonant images of defenseless children are deployed in anti-trans laws in a switch and bait operation. This operation responds to a moral panic regarding the movement away from binary gender identities, and the increasing visibility of trans and gender non-conforming persons. Greta Olson and Laura Borchert highlight law’s inherent cisnormativity in assuming a confluence between genitalia, identity, and sexual-legal personhood and suggest a research and activist agenda that aims to actively and progressively trans and genderfuck law. Trans and non-binary persons’ unreliability needs to not be regarded as a failing but rather as an invitation to contemplate identity in new terms, also legal ones.