Taryn D. Jordan
Professor Sparks
WGS 700
2 November 2014
“Beyond Additions and Exceptions: The Category of Transgender and New Pedagogical
Approaches for Women’s Studies”
Toby Beauchamp and Benjamin D’Harlingue’s article, “Beyond Additions and
Exceptions: The Category of Transgender and New Pedagogical Approaches for Women’s
Studies” take up Gayle Salamon’s claim that within women’s studies transgender people and
bodies occupy a “lack of place” (Salaman 115). Beauchamp and D’Harlingue state,
“transgender bodies and subjects are already fully within women’s studies’ area of inquiry, and
transgender studies can use the theories and methods that women’s studies has developed to give
an account of gender” (46). Starting their article with a challenge from Robin Wiegman and
finishing with Salaman’s comments, Beauchamp and D’Harlingue critique the social
constructionist view of gender that naturalizes male and female gender norms. They argue that
this approach elides transgender existence or particularities of transgender subjectivities. Their
article extensively critiques the additive and exceptional nature of how transgender people are
positioned as other in textbooks and course documents (26). Beauchamp and D’Harlingue
develop their critique and solution to this problem by evaluating textbooks and media intended
for use in introduction to women’s studies courses. Moreover They illuminate how these
textbooks ahistorically construct gender as specific to a United States context. While
Beauchamp and D’Harlingue’s “new” pedagogical approach to teaching about transgender
people and bodies provided a few useful solutions on how to position transgender people in the
class, their article relies too heavily on the textbook, written, by Grewal and Kaplan.
Beauchamp and D’Harlingue take up the challenge offered by Robin Weigman in her
2002 article, “The Progress of Gender: Whither Women?” by challenging themselves to think
through the political affiliations found through social construction of both “genetic bodies and
discursive gender” (25-26). Thus the authors refocus Wiegman’s concerns by critiquing and
developing a new women’s studies pedagogy. To do so they evaluate three introduction to
women’s studies course textbooks (27-32). More specifically, their critiques of the textbooks are
centered on the various ways the textbooks conflate gender with body parts, which subsume
women’s experiences or “voices” as under a biological epistemic and ontological locations (27,
30). Thus, conflation of terms forecloses the experiences of people who are not biologically
marked as women, but nevertheless have experiences as women (27-29). The authors reference
Joan Scott’s canonical critique of experience as knowledge production to critique the textbooks’
use of experience as an unquestionable marker of what constitutes woman-hood without
assessing the various processes, histories and institutions that have lead to the creation of woman
(27-28, 30). Last, if the textbooks do say anything of transgender people, they become a lone
representative of transgender experience. Often they are awkwardly placed in a section of the
book on identity or sexuality, haunting other identities that constitute a transgender subject such
as race, class and nation (31). Moreover the transgender narratives tend to be written by FTM
transgender men rendering them anomalous to women and making transgender women’s
experience impossible (30).
The authors’ critiques of textbooks and media used in women’s studies classrooms bears
heavily on their articulation of a new pedagogy for women’s studies. They provide suggestions
and practices for positioning transgender people in the classroom material and discussion.
Beauchamp and D’Harlingue advocate careful positioning of transgender bodies and subjects
throughout the introduction to women’s studies course textbooks and materials to avoid using
transgender subjects and bodies as sites of exception or intentional objects of analysis in
classroom discussion (32,39). They craft their new pedagogy based on the textbook by Inderpal
Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in the Transnational
World. They highlight Grewal and Kaplan’s refusal to focus their textbook on identities of
women or anyone in particular. The authors name Grewal and Kaplan’s method “a genealogy of
gender” that allows for a discussion of gender and transgender subjects and bodies that do not
reinforce discursive violence such as questions about personal choices on bodily transition or
exceptional experience of one transgender person for all transgender people (32-33).
Beauchamp and D’Harlingue argue that this move situates gender as historically contingent and
constituted by various processes, institutions, and circulations of capitalism globally (33). Last
they recommend showing students a Sally Jessie Raphael (SJR) clip from 1989 where SJR
interviews a gender nonconforming person and the short film “Toilet Training” by Tara Mateik
and The Silvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP). The SJR clip offers an example of Wiegman’s
challenge; the guest evades SJR’s questioning about their biological anatomy by problematizing
all constructions of gender based on bodily functions. And the Tara Mateik and SLRP film
Toilet Training utilize a genealogy of gender that mediates, controls and surveils transgender
people that can be productive in discussion of how all gender is constituted (44-45).
The authors accomplish their goals of the article by reformulating transgender subjects
and bodies within the framework of gender studies. Additionally they illuminate the problems
within introduction to women studies textbooks and media and manage to highlight various other
issues present within the introduction to women’s studies courses. More specifically through the
authors critique of course textbooks, they elucidate the tendency of women’s studies instructors
to teach formulations of gender that are ahistorical and more importantly only attend to a United
States focus on gender formation. Their critique of the textbooks reminded me, as a former and
future introduction to women’s studies instructor, of the importance of keeping in mind the
transnational circulation and formations of gender.
Finally, they rely too heavily on Grewal and Kaplan’s textbook Introduction to Women’s
Studies: Gender in the Transnational World as the basis of their new pedagogy. Their over
reliance on Grewal and Kaplan’s textbook made me question their ability to fully critique the
book due to the authors’ relationship and/or proximity to Caren Kaplan. They are both graduates
of University of California Davis and both were members of the cultural studies group, an area
of study that Kaplan is affiliated. I know this critique may seem harsh but in naming this
murkiness, I do not mean to imply ethical malfeasance. Instead, I see the author’s treatment of
the textbook points to the tensions located in evaluating senior scholars’ work that is in direct
relationship to young scholars in a published article. I would have preferred Beauchamp and
D’Harlingue engage with Grewal and Kaplan’s book critically forwarding a new pedagogy that is
not completely based on one single textbook.
Works Cited
Beauchamp, Toby, and Benjamin D’Harlingue. "Beyond Additions and Exceptions: The
Category of Transgender and New Pedagogical Approaches for Women’s Studies."
Feminist Formations Summer 24.2 (2012): 25-51. Project MUSE. Web. 2 Nov. 2014.
Salamon, Gayle. "Transfeminism and The Future of Gender." Ed. Joan Wallach. Scott. Women's
Studies on the Edge. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. 115-36. Print.