On Transits And Transitions PDF Download

"On Transits and Transitions: Mobility, Displacement, and Trans Subjectivity in the United States" maps how relations of im/mobility and displacement position trans subjects in relation to constructions of U.S. citizenship and national subjectivity in the contemporary United States. Drawing on the insights of transnational feminist cultural studies, queer and trans theory, and critical legal studies, the dissertation looks to the law as a site for the production of the category of "transgender" and examines how different areas of the law manage trans migrants as populations to be included or excluded from the U.S. nation-state. I focus on three key areas of law and policy - asylum law, marriage law, and immigration detention policies - to show how these areas collaborate to define, regulate, and distribute conditional and limited forms of recognition for trans migrants, while also attending to the transnational circuits of neoliberal capital and knowledge that constitute trans subjects. I engage the question of mobility by interrogating the ways that the state institutions regulate not just trans bodies and identities but also the processes of transition. This approach allows me to map the unevenness of recognition for trans subjects across social, cultural, and legal determinations and to show how freedom for some trans subjects is founded on the unfreedom of other trans subjects. I argue that the recognition of trans migrants as legible and illegible in these areas of the law is specific but not exceptional to trans subjects. That is, the management of trans migrants is integral to how U.S. state institutions manage gender, sexuality, and racialized populations simultaneously, and therefore illustrates how citizenship and national belonging in the United States are premised on narrow and restrictive categories that affect all subjects, not just those who are transgender. In the process, my project challenges juridical understandings of citizenship by showing how the law depends on and perpetrates normative cultural categories of sex, gender, race, and nation.