1970s transvestite taxonomies and the new queer frontier
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to Kadji Amin, vernacular discourses in recent years have “exploded Butler’s heterosexual matrix in a way hitherto unimaginable” (2023: 91–2). Yet neither queer nor transvernacular taxonomies are new, and the separation of sex, gender and sexuality has been a contested topic among trans subcultures since at least the 1950s. Combining original archival research with feminist, queer and trans philosophes of gender, this paper argues that, despite being almost entirely unhistoricized, the identity category of “transvestite” represented one of the most highly organized, internally differentiated, and intellectually significant identity formations of the 20th century. We can learn a lot about possible futures for queer studies by turning our attention to the recent past and the untheorized archive of 1970s trans community print culture is full of lists of the constantly evolving identity categories available for members of these early trans communities. From the 1960s onward, united through mailing lists and a burgeoning periodical culture, a complex ecosystem of transvestite subcultures emerged throughout the Anglosphere. Trans people used correspondence, newsletters and magazines, to connect across nations and continents. Through these formats, they discursively constructed how to understand transness, queering prevailing understandings of sex, gender and sexuality. Examining the impulses behind and effects of these complex categorical formations historicizes and enriches understandings of the ambivalence of trans taxonomies today.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".