Gender at the Junction of Feminist and Trans Thought: Reading Minnie Bruce Pratt's S/HE.

Abstract

This essay argues that Minnie Bruce Pratt's 1995 lyrical and auto-theoretical text S/HE provides a powerful and still-relevant lesbian feminist, anti-racist vision that is not simply trans-inclusive, but that also highlights deep overlaps between trans and lesbian feminist thought, politics and community. Reading S/HE challenges the notion that feminist and trans approaches to gender are necessarily divergent. To make this argument, I develop close readings of S/HE, interpreted in the context of Pratt's participation in Camp Trans, especially during the summer of 1994, and of the interviews Pratt gave surrounding the publications of her book. I show how Pratt's understanding in S/HE of her own identity and of her relationship with Leslie Feinberg provide approaches to gender, sex, and sexuality that disrupt trans-exclusive feminist logics. Reading S/HE clarifies an important point of intersection-not difference-between some lesbian feminist and trans histories: an attachment to something akin to gender identity.