Trans without Borders: Resisting the Telos of Transgender Knowledge

T h e i n T e r e s T i n d e u n i v e r s a l i z i n g the West is so common nowadays that it is hard to imagine postcolonial criticism without it.1 Even so, historians of gender and sexuality seem to have fallen behind. This is far from suggesting that the field has witnessed no interest in non-Western cultures. Quite the contrary. Over the last few decades, scholarship on the history of gender and sexuality in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East has grown in a steady and promising rate.2 Yet an implicit norm continues to govern our scholarly apparatus, trickling down to the everyday politics of knowledge production in the history of sexuality. Inasmuch as it would be acceptable for scholars dealing with specific cultures such as those of Britain, France, and the United States to evade regional specificity in titling their work, historians of the non-Western world are expected to designate our project with descriptors such as “in Mexico,” “in South Asia,” “Iranian,” “Japanese,” and so forth.3