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Let's (Not) Talk About (Transgender) Sex

The Erotic Erasure of Trans Desire & Sexuality

Let's (Not) Talk About (Transgender) Sex cover

Let's (Not) Talk About (Transgender) Sex

The Erotic Erasure of Trans Desire & Sexuality

Description

For decades trans studies and queer theory have addressed the trans body as an abstraction, a site of gender, instead of a site for desire and or pleasure. But bodies do things, and different kinds of bodies do different kinds of things. This book explains how sex and embodied pleasure went missing from trans studies and queer theory, and uses the author's first person auto-ethnographic accounts to chart a path back for trans studies to engage the everyday realities of trans people's erotic lives and experiences.

Table of Contents

Dedication

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

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 30 Apr 2026
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 192
ISBN 9781350574526
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Series Transgender Theory
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Riki Wilchins

Riki Wilchins is a founder of modern transgender r…

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