Trans, Time, and History

The notion of a historical past is intricately interwoven with considerations of chronology, periodization, and the specific cultural experiences of movement and change that undergird how people view their position within time. Bornstein’s claim naturalizes gender variance in the present by appealing to a shared transgender history, bracketing the “shamanic” as a romanticized, primordial system that exists outside civilizational time and place. As Evan B. Towle and Lynn Marie Morgan have noted, “The danger of portraying the transgender native in this way is that it can perpetuate stereotypes about non-Western societies, with their ‘shamanic rituals’ and panoply of gods”. Authors Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura devote a section of their anthology Transgender Studies Reader 2 to “Timely Matters: Temporality and Trans-Historicity”. Historicity is a term fraught with meaning, historically labile, and resistant to easy categorization. Its richness and unfixity resemble nothing so much as the heterogeneity and indeterminacy that people tend to associate with queer and trans.