Let's (Not) Talk About (Transgender) Sex
The Erotic Erasure of Trans Desire & Sexuality
Let's (Not) Talk About (Transgender) Sex
The Erotic Erasure of Trans Desire & Sexuality
Description
For decades, trans studies and queer theory have treated the trans body as a theoretical construct – a site for identity, dysphoria, and gender politics – leaving erotic realities largely unexamined. Desire, pleasure, and real sex has been pushed to the margins, rendered almost unspeakable.
This book challenges that silence. It asks why sexuality – once a privileged site of inquiry in queer theory – has all but vanished from trans scholarship, and what this erasure reveals about the politics of respectability, cisnormativity, and the lingering discomfort with bodies that refuse to behave “properly.”
Through rigorous analysis and intimate narrative, the book explores how bodies do things – and how different bodies do different things – shaping possibilities for desire, sensation, and intimacy. It interrogates the cultural and academic forces that have de-sexed trans subjects, examines the aesthetic and linguistic struggles around naming and eroticizing trans bodies, and charts a path toward a trans studies that embraces the messy, fleshy, and truly human dimensions of sexuality.
Both provocative and personal, this book insists that there can be no real account of gender without a reckoning with sex. It is a call to bring pleasure back into the conversation – not as an afterthought, but as a vital site of knowledge, resistance, and joy.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
A Word About Language
Part One - How to (Not) Talk about (Trans) Sex
“What We're Rollin' Around in Bed With”
An Under-privileged Site of Inquiry
A Language of Erotic Aesthetics
Phantasmagorical Pleasures
Down the Rabbit Hole
“Our Right to Mainstream”
“The Only Thing That Makes You Interesting Is Me”
A Geography of the Absent
Undoing Exclusion
“A Very Neat System:” De-Gendering Gayness & De-Sexing Transness
Flattening Identities
Stay in Your Own Yard
New Under the Sun
A Language of Gender Neologisms
The Power of Meaning
Of Crossdressing Elephants
Erotic Privilege
Asexual Identity-Just Not A Sexual identity
The Promise of Ecstasy?
Part Two - Bodies Do Things/Things Done to Bodies
Welcome to “Caveat Hell”
Sex & the Transsexed Body
What Are Emergent Identities Citing?
Weighing Anchors
Born this Way?
Oppression or Enlightenment?
An Intricate & Little-Studied Dance
Erotic Structuralism
“Sweaty Concepts”
Surviving (Re)Embodiment
Fear & Loathing at 5am
Internalized Gazes
Aesthetic Imperialism
Internal Reality Enforcement
Clinging Like Vapor
No Original
The Un/Reality of Bodies
I'll See It When I Get Hot Over It
Toxic Shame and Transnormativity
An Obligation of Abnormality
Surviving Sex
Sensation & Accomplishment
A Field in Exile?
Endnotes
Product details
| Published | Apr 30 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 208 |
| ISBN | 9781350574533 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Series | Transgender Theory |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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