Terrorizing Gender

Mia Fischer is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver.

“Fischer’s novel approach . . . yields utterly compelling analytical results and promises to make a lasting contribution to work on the racialized surveillance practices of the state by accenting its gendered aspects.”-Rachel Hall, Women’s Studies in Communication "Fischer's book makes a valuable addition to scholarship on (the failures of) assimilationist and rights-based LGBT political movements. It also intervenes in broader social and cultural debates about the politics of inclusion and the politics of visibility, with the chosen case studies offering a vital counterpoint to progress-oriented narratives. It promises appeal to gender and sexuality studies scholars and students working in media studies, cultural studies, critical race studies, and surveillance studies."-C.L. Quinan, IMPACT “Terrorizing Gender is an incendiary contribution to media studies and transgender studies. With brilliant rigor, Fischer shows how recent U.S. transgender visibility has occasioned a revival of narratives presenting trans people as deviant and threatening. . . . The result, as Fischer masterfully illustrates, is an extremely limited public trans visibility, premised on replicating white supremacy and violent policing of those trans people who do not or will not comply with state regulation. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in transgender politics and media.”-Aren Z. Aizura, assistant professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota, and author of Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment “Mia Fischer’s Terrorizing Gender valuably unsettles normative assumptions and reveals precarious implications of the vaunted transgender ‘tipping point.’. . . Terrorizing Gender’s compelling necropolitical critique floodlights the conditions and obfuscations of trans precarity, and its closing call to embody Tourmaline’s politics of ‘nobodiness’ offers a promising glimpse of visibility’s queer future.”-Charles E. Morris III, professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University and coeditor of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking “Methodologically innovative and theoretically sophisticated, this brave book exposes how transgender people in the United States are increasingly subject to state-sanctioned violence and surveillance practices. . . . This book will occupy a central place on my shelf as it bridges the fields of surveillance, trans, and media studies, and critical race and feminist theory. I can’t wait to teach it.”-Shoshana Magnet, associate professor at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa “An essential resource for students of queer and trans media, and more broadly media studies students seeking to understand the relationship between representation and lived experiences. . . . The substantiation in Terrorizing Gender of the many ways in which (hyper)visibility in the media reproduces and reinforces the state’s regulation of trans lives is a timely and valuable addition to the existing trans, queer, and feminist media scholarship on visibility and will assuredly inform the future of these fields.”-Ash Kinney d’Harcourt, Feminist Media Studies "Terrorizing Gender ultimately asks media scholars to move beyond reductive debates over “good” and “bad” representation, instead pointing to the more insidious ways in which visibility as a directive both obscures more entrenched struggles in marginalized communities as well as contributes directly to increased political violence toward those who are most at risk."-Erique Zhang, International Journal of Communication “Reveal[s] a set of interlocking and coordinated harms, psychic and physical, that course through individual and group actors, mass media representations, and the state.”-Jeanie Austin, RGWS: A Feminist Review

• List of Illustrations    Acknowledgments    Introduction: A Transgender Tipping Point?    1. Pathologizing and Prosecuting a (Gender) Traitor    2. Transpatriotism and Iterations of Empire    3. Blind(ing) (In)justice and the Disposability of Black Life    4. Materializing Hashtag Activism and the #FreeCeCe Campaign    5. Sex Work, Securitainment, and the Transgender Terrorist    Coda: The Perils of Transgender Visibility    Notes    Bibliography    Index