Glasgow Trans Collective
This is a proof of concept for our site! Here's a link to crows playing in the snow. The links on the menu bar on the left don't lead anywhere currently.
No-one else is coming to save us.
The threats against us are not abstract, but concrete.
Labour and resources are leaving the Trans community at a rate they do not return
There is no perfect moment to begin.
So let's get to it!
Things that will be on this page
- A zine archive
- Various resources, information, links
- Ways to contact us
- Donation links; Emergency Fund Info
[this webpage is WIP, so here's a few paragraphs from Butler to fill the page and showcase the layout :)]
Those who make such prescriptions or who are willing to decide between subversive and unsubversive expressions of gender, base their judgments on a description. Gender appears in this or that form, and then a normative judgment is made about those appearances and on the basis of what appears. But what conditions the domain of appear- ance for gender itself? We may be tempted to make the following dis- tinction: a descriptive account of gender includes considerations of what makes gender intelligible, an inquiry into its conditions of possibility, whereas a normative account seeks to answer the question of which expressions of gender are acceptable, and which are not, supplying persuasive reasons to distinguish between such expressions in this way. The question, however, of what qualifies as “gender” is itself already a question that attests to a pervasively normative operation of power, a fugitive operation of “what will be the case” under the rubric of “what is the case.” Thus, the very description of the field of gender is no sense prior to, or separable from, the question of its normative operation.
I am not interested in delivering judgments on what distinguishes the subversive from the unsubversive. Not only do I believe that such judgments cannot be made out of context, but that they cannot be made in ways that endure through time (“contexts” are themselves posited unities that undergo temporal change and expose their essen- tial disunity). Just as metaphors lose their metaphoricity as they con- geal through time into concepts, so subversive performances always run the risk of becoming deadening cliches through their repetition and, most importantly, through their repetition within commodity culture where “subversion” carries market value. The effort to name the criterion for subversiveness will always fail, and ought to. So what is at stake in using the term at all?
What continues to concern me most is the following kinds of questions: what will and will not constitute an intelligible life, and how do presumptions about normative gender and sexuality deter- mine in advance what will qualify as the “human” and the “livable”? In other words, how do normative gender presumptions work to delimit the very field of description that we have for the human? What is the means by which we come to see this delimiting power, and what are the means by which we transform it?
