Marginal Bodies, Trans Utopias

Caterina Nirta is senior lecturer in social sciences at the University of Roehampton, UK

Caterina Nirta addresses one of the central political questions of the present – transsexual bodies and the various forces and intensities which compose them, their capacities to invent new modes of subjectivity and new kinds of sexual and gender practices. In asking how it is possible to understand corporeal becomings beyond identity politics and beyond gender binaries, this book proposes a provocative transgender utopianism of the present.Elizabeth Grosz is Professor of Women's Studies and Literature at Duke University, USAThis book provides what the author describes as ‘an ethical utopianism,’ which it thinks through in relation to the actuality and actualisation of gendered and somatic life by transgender people. Drawing on Deleuze, it offers a critique of gendered being/becoming which foregrounds immanence, or the materiality of the present, over transcendence, or a future that never arrives.Professor Alex Sharpe, School of Law, Keele University, UK Caterina Nirta potently re-establishes the need for utopia, based on well-analysed, crystal clear theory, and proposing a perfectly actualisable possibility of a new utopia where both singularity and multiplicity are equally honoured. The whole book is an effortless and at points poetic passage through disciplines, methodologies, theories, spaces, bodies, genders, and genres. It dwells a genuinely hybrid space, simultaneously rigorous, exciting, voyeuristic and caring.Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Professor of Law & Theory, author of Spatial Justice: Body Lawscape AtmosphereCaterina Nirta provides a provocative new perspective on lived experiences of time and the ethics of being. She radically reconceptualises notions of utopia, arguing for a recognition of transgender actualisation in the here and now through a timely analysis of how individuals might claim space within and against essentialist social and legal structures. Drawing extensively on Deleuzian philosophy and empirical insights from trans video diaries, Marginal Bodies, Trans Utopias offers an important contribution to contemporary debates around queer temporality, gender binarism, legislative recognition, public toilets and Othered bodies. Ruth Pearce, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK

• Introduction Chapter 1 - How Might It Be? 1.1 Why Deleuze? 1.2 Why Video Diaries? 1.3 Why This Research? Chapter 2 - Actualised Utopias 2.1 Utopia of the ‘Not-Yet’ 2.2 No Future, No Present 2.3 Temporal Immanence 2.4 Future in the Present 2.5 Sustainable Utopian Ethics Chapter 3 – Logics of Recognition 3.1 Gender Recognition Act 2004 3.2 Shift Gender/Sex 3.3 Until Death Do Us Part 3.4 Dialectics of Recognition 3.5 Limits of Recognition 3.6 Intersectionality 3.7 Will to Be Imperceptible The Diary Sessions, I - On Gender Recognition Chapter 4 – Spatial Dystopia. Or a Case Against Public Toilets 4.1 The Monolingualism of Public Toilets 4.2 The Making of Public Toilets 4.3 The Un-Making of Public Toilets 4.4 An Ethics for Public Toilets The Diary Sessions, II – On Public Toilets Chapter 5 – Marginal Bodies 5.1 The Monstrous Body 5.2 The othered Body 5.3 Different Bodies 5.4 Perverse Bodies 5.5 Nomadic Bodies The Diary Sessions, III - On Wrong Bodies Conclusion