Where is the T* in European Journal of Women’s Studies?

Abstract

An engaged participant in European women’s/gender studies can hardly have missed the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies over the past several decades. Indeed, with a growing number of monographs, journals, conferences and study programmes across many universities,1 transgender studies has become both a vital part of and/or sibling to women’s/gender studies and a direct departure from these fields. Differently put, transgender studies has both contributed to and challenged what has historically been understood as Women’s Studies.2 Along with other critical interventions including, but not limited to, queer and lesbian studies, postcolonial and critical race studies, and critical femininity studies (cf. Dahl and Sundén, 2018), this multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field of research has both widened the scope of research topics and called the main object of study – woman – into question. Yet, far too often, the theoretical, methodological and ethical insights of transgender studies have left the core of many journals dedicated to women’s/gender studies, our own included, rather unaffected. At worst, transgender issues remain excluded or marginalised; at best, they have become additional topics to be included in what trans scholars have called a ‘special guest approach’ (Tudor, 2021: 250; see also Courvant, 2011; Drabinski, 2011; Malatino, 2015), but with little impact on how hegemonic feminism (i.e. a feminism that departs from, naturalises and reproduces cisgender and heteronormative understandings of sex, gender and race) understands itself. In other words, it is curious that while the question of what is in a name – what we do to be considered women’s or gender studies? – has been debated at length and for decades (if not centuries), in European women’s/ gender studies, insights drawn from transgender studies have yet to be brought to bear on the issue in a sustained way. An Open Forum is certainly not enough to rectify this problem, and the aim here is not to give an account of the (emergence of the) field of transgender studies, its objects and subjects, its methods and stakes – in part because there are plenty of such accounts around, including of figurations of transgender studies in and beyond Europe and of why, in order to not cast the (European) transgender subject as White, transgender matters always need to be considered intersectionally (cf. Nay and Steinbock, 2021; Tudor, 2019; Tudor, this issue) and together