Trans. Gender und Race in einer Zeit unsicherer Identitäten

In the summer of 2015, shortly after Caitlyn Jenner publicly embraced her identity as transgender, Rachel Dolezal, president of a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was "outed" by her parents as white. This led to a heated media debate about the fluidity of gender and race. If Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman, could Dolezal not also identify as black?

Starting from the controversial coupling of "transgender" and "transracial," Roger Brubaker illustrates how gender and race, long understood as stable, innate, and unambiguous, have been viewed in recent decades—as varying in different ways and to different extents—as mutable and subject to choice. Transgender identities have rapidly moved from the periphery to the mainstream, blurring the boundaries of ethnicity and race. Although sex has a biological foundation unlike race, the choice or change of sex or gender paradoxically finds much greater acceptance than the choice or change of race.

While Dolezal's claim to be black was accepted by few, the fluidity of racial identities is increasing as ancestry—understood more and more as mixed—loses its dominance over identity, and race and ethnicity, as well as gender, are seen as something we do rather than something we have. By re-examining race and ethnicity through the multifaceted lens of the transgender experience—not just as a movement from one category to another, but also as a position between and beyond existing categories—Brubaker emphasizes the malleability, contingency, and arbitrariness of racial categories.

In a time when gender and race are being redefined and reconstructed, this book explores fertile ground.