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*Call for Papers for Edited Volume –Trans Studies: Beyond Hetero/Homo Normativities* The Institute for Research at Women at Rutgers University invites submissions for an edited volume entitled, Trans Studies: Beyond Hetero/Homo Normativities, which we anticipate publishing at a university press. Currently at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary scholarship, Trans Studies have undermined pre-existing, oppositional sex/gender binaries by focusing on the fluidity and malleability of gender identity and expression. Trans Studies therefore destabilize and complicate many of the debates about the social, biological and cultural constructions of gender and sexuality. There has also been a heated debate among scholars and activists—especially in the United States and Latin America—on the distinctions between transgender, transsexual and transvestite, and the ways in which each one of these terms interrogates scientific, artistic, popular, cultural and ethnic definitions of gender and sexuality based on the idea of a set spectrum, or conceived as a result of a particular performance or practice. Scholars and activists who work on trans issues are currently analyzing the social, psychological, and legal impact of surgical gender reassignment, as well as promoting the protection of legal rights for trans people in public spaces. The proposed edited volume would like to address this topic as an exploration of the new frontiers that are open when the relationships between gender, sexuality and the body are not conceived within heteronormative or homonormative frameworks, but from the perspective of psychoanalysis and desire, philosophy and subject theory, law and civil rights, cultural and social studies and issues of representation, and sociological and political science debates on social imaginaries and political radicalism. This volume will encourage a broad conversation about the most recent redefinitions in Women’s, Queer and Sexuality Studies in dialogue with debates in Trans Studies. Possible topics might explore: - The relationship between identity, desire and the body - The relationship between feminist theory, queer theory and trans theory; the ways in which Trans Studies have transformed Feminist and Queer Studies - The performativity of gender and sexuality - The history of gender as social and scientific construct - The relationship between LGB and T in movement politics, nationally and internationally - The relationship between trans studies and transnational studies; migration, queer and trans rights; trans tourism - The possibility of translating trans identities beyond territorial borders - Queer linguistics; the challenge of capturing fluid conceptions of gender identity and expression in language; of terminology and its associated politics (e.g. transgender, transgendered or trans; intersex or DSD); of exporting/transposing nomenclature between different national contexts - HIV infection and trans people - The most pressing medical/social/legal/public policy issues affecting trans people - The role of intersectional oppression (e.g. race, ethnicity, class, sexuality) in the field of Trans Studies - Sexual rights as human rights, especially rights related to gender identity and gender expression The volume will be edited by Dr. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Dr. Sarah Tobias (bios below). Please send abstracts of 200 – 300 words accompanied by a C.V. to [log in to unmask] by May 15, 2012. Full text articles should be ready no later than May 15, 2013. Dr. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is a cultural critic and literary theorist. She works on issues of sexuality and gender in the production of knowledge and cultural representations in Latin American colonial and Caribbean postcolonial literature and discourse. Her other areas of research and teaching interest include Colonial Latin American discourses and contemporary Caribbean and Latino narratives, migration and cultural studies. Professor Martínez-San Miguel is the author of Saberes americanos: subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 1999), Caribe Two Ways: cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (Ediciones Callejón, 2003) and From Lack to Excess: 'Minor' Readings of Colonial Latin American Literature (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2008). She is currently working on her fourth book project entitled Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context, a comparative study on internal Caribbean migrations between former/actual metropolis and colonies, to question transnational and postcolonial approaches to massive population displacements and their cultural productions. She is the director of the Institute for Research on Women and holds a joint appointment in Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Literature and Comparative Literature. She has an M.A. and Ph.D. in Latin American Cultural Studies from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.A. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico. Dr. Sarah Tobias is a feminist theorist and LGBT activist whose work bridges academia and public policy. She is co-author of Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families (University of Michigan Press, 2007) and author of "Several Steps Behind: Lesbian and Gay Adoption" in Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt (eds.), Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays (Cornell University Press, 2005), as well as co-author and editor of numerous policy-related reports and articles. She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Queering Democracy. Dr. Tobias is Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Women and affiliate faculty in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers. Prior to joining the Institute in January 2010, she spent over 8 years working in the nonprofit sector and also taught at Rutgers-Newark, the City University of New York (Baruch College and Queens College), and Columbia University. She has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree from Cambridge University, England.