Citizenship on the Edge: Sex/Gender/Race and Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity are two refreshingly interdisciplinary works that will be useful to scholars in any discipline interested in where the rubber of state power hits the road of the lives of marginalized people. The former is a collection of essays coedited by Nancy Hirschmann, a political theorist who has long traversed the bounds of political science, women’s studies, and disability studies, and Deborah Thomas, an anthropologist and filmmaker whose work on Jamaican politics, culture, and history reflects a similar spirit of interdisciplinarity. The latter is a single-authored monograph by Paisley Currah, a political scientist who has made formative contributions to the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies. By centering the experiences of subjects “on the edge” of civic legitimacy and legibility, such as immigrants; women; incarcerated people; queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people; disabled people; and people of color—both books shed much-needed light on state power, particularly the state’s normalizing power to sort populations into categories like “healthy” or “criminal” and to produce security for some and vulnerability for others.
Citizenship on the Edge: Sex/Gender/Race features scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including Africana studies, anthropology, disability studies, gender studies, history, law, political science, and sociology. What unites the volume’s eight chapters is an interest in the manifold ways in which “citizenship is uncertain, unstable, and precarious within the United States and around the world” (p. 4). It is this condition of tenuousness and vulnerability that the titular phrase “on the edge” is meant to convey. As the editors explain, “The notion of citizenship being on the edge” refers to “the precarity of belonging and security” experienced most acutely not only by populations who are “peering over the edge but denied entry” to “the circle of the state” such as immigrants, refugees, and migrant workers but also by those “already within the circle of the state, such as the incarcerated, those who face employment or housing discrimination (and who are not eligible for public housing), and those who rely on welfare benefits or on publicly funded student loans for higher education” (p. 2). “Being on the edge of citizenship,” the editors continue, both “means being subject to state surveillance” and being “denied state protection, education, and economic resources” or even “the right to exist” (pp. 2–3).
The geographic scope of Citizenship on the Edge is impressive. It includes rich engagements with the history of sex law reform in the Anglophone Caribbean (chap. 3), the evolution of gender regimes in the Maghreb (chap. 4), and the enforced sterilization of Indigenous women as a form of “surgical counterinsurgency” (p. 236) in Peru (chap. 8). Although there is plenty here to engage readers with broad international and transnational interests, the rest of the chapters center the United States. For example, the first chapter offers an intersectional analysis of hate speech, elucidating how conventional interpretations of the “immediate injury” doctrine render invisible the very real harms that hate speech inflicts on “vulnerable raced-gendered bodies,” such as forced visibility, democratic illegibility, and a host of adverse physiological effects (pp. 21, 24). Other chapters explore US marriage law’s privileging of “breadwinner masculinity” (chap. 2), the racialization of madness to negate Black men’s citizenship rights in the post–civil rights era (chap. 5), the heightened scrutiny of trans and disabled bodies and the expansion of regimes of “biocertification” in US airports (chap. 6), and the continued reliance on racialized, gendered, and deeply carceral policy narratives in Obama-era anti-trafficking awareness campaigns (chap. 7).
The breadth and sweep that Citizenship on the Edge manages to contain without becoming unwieldy or unfocused are laudable. However, as coeditor Hirschmann acknowledges in the afterword, several important topics do not receive sustained treatment here, including “mass incarceration and the digital divide,” “police violence targeted at African Americans,” and “the Covid-19 pandemic” (p. 245). The absence of direct engagement with the pandemic—a result of unlucky timing rather than a principled editorial decision—is especially regrettable because few events in recent memory so starkly reveal the modes of civic exclusion that Citizenship on the Edge foregrounds. When Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla announced in November 2022 that, despite his company’s plans to shift their COVID-19 vaccine to the private market and raise its price by more than 400%, the vaccine would continue to be “free for all Americans,” he provided a strikingly unambiguous example of how the bounds of citizenship continue to be defined by characteristics like race, ethnicity, class, and (dis)ability well into the twenty-first century. “Americans,” in Bourla’s utterance, means “Americans with health insurance,” a group who are much more likely to be white, wealthy, and nondisabled than their uninsured counterparts. As public support for COVID-19 prevention, mitigation, and treatment is withdrawn and market forces are unleashed despite the persistence of high rates of infection, severe illness, and death, the fate of the approximately 27.4 million Americans without health insurance is more “on the edge” than ever.
Paisley Currah’s Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity is a more tightly focused work than Citizenship on the Edge. At its most basic level, the book is about sex classification policies adopted by US administrative agencies like the Social Security Administration and the New York City Bureau of Records and Statistics and how these policies have changed over time. Through an analysis that is granular and painstaking even by Foucauldian standards, Currah persuasively shows that the impetus behind state actors’ definitions of sex at any given juncture is not some ontological belief about what sex is but a much more pragmatic set of considerations about the specific governance projects that sex classification is being used to further in each context. This is the insight captured in the book’s title: sex is as sex does. As Currah explains, “Sex changes.… When some individuals cross borders, walk into a government office to apply for benefits, get a driver’s license, go to prison, sign up for Selective Service, get married, or have any interaction with a state agency, their sex classification can switch from male to female, from female to male, and even, in a handful of jurisdictions and situations, from M or F to non-binary” (p. 7). Although it is tempting to see these shifts as anomalies or bureaucratic errors, Currah invites readers to take a different tack. “For the purposes of this project,” Currah writes, “F and M and X do not designate properties.… They are simply what is recorded after a decision has been made by state bureaucracies and judges. They are ink shapes on paper, the electrical on/off pulses of binary codes in administrative records” (p. 32). If we let go, at least provisionally, “of the assumption that there is…any whatness to (legal) sex apart from what the state says it is,” Currah contends, moments of seeming confusion and contradiction become opportunities to gain a more complete view of what states are and what governance projects a seemingly irrational and inconsistent patchwork of sex classification policies enables them to accomplish (p. 10).
Currah’s argument unfolds over the course of six empirically and theoretically rich chapters. Chapter 1 provides an overview of three dominant conceptualizations of sex—sex as a physiological property that is fixed at birth, sex as an anatomical property that can change with genital configuration, and sex as a psychological property like gender identity—and argues for moving away from interminable inquiries into what sex really is and toward more directly political investigations of what sex classification enables states to do. Chapters 2 and 3 extend this argument for denaturalizing sex to a fascinating and sophisticated set of arguments for denaturalizing and pluralizing the state. In these chapters, Currah diagnoses a tendency prevalent in both liberal and more radical/critical approaches to politics to reify the state into a coherent unity, and, in the case of liberals, imbue it with moral qualities like justice and rationality. The tangled morass of sex classification policies adopted “at different agencies, in different jurisdictions, and at different levels” excavated by Currah belies these mystifications and makes it clear that “states are not moral beings” but “mobile technologies for arranging difference, distributing pain and pleasure” (pp. xv, 58).
After presenting sweeping reconceptualizations of both sex and the state in chapters 1–3, chapters 4 and 5 serve as case studies or applications of Currah’s theoretical interventions. Chapter 4 examines “a moment in recent US history when transgender demands for sex reclassification collided with the institution of heterosexual marriage” (p. 102). Between 1999 and 2004, several state appellate courts handed down decisions invalidating ostensibly heterosexual marriages involving transgender people on the grounds that these marriages violated state same-sex marriage bans. The holdings in these transgender marriage cases were premised on the notion that “the sex assigned at birth remained one’s sex for the purposes of marriage,” even though, in these same jurisdictions at these same times, sex was permitted to change on identity documents like driver’s licenses and birth certificates if an individual provided a letter from a doctor certifying that their sex had been changed by surgical procedure (p. 102). Beneath this apparent contradiction, Currah unearths a deeper continuity: when the state’s objective is to inventory, track, and surveil its inhabitants, a policy allowing sex to change alongside changes in physical appearance is embraced; when the state’s objective is to secure certain preferred “segments of the population to the nation through marriage,” a policy that holds sex to be fixed at birth is embraced (p. 124). In both cases, the sex classification policies track not some overarching ontological belief held by the state about what sex is but instead the state’s larger purposes and objectives in employing sex classification in each context. Beyond serving as a compelling demonstration of the book’s overarching “sex is as sex does” conceit, chapter 4 also makes a noteworthy intervention into critical theory’s well-worn recognition versus redistribution debate. By underscoring marriage’s role as an instrument of economic distribution that, before the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling, was also deeply structured by sex classification, Currah “troubles the relegation of sex reclassification to the noneconomic” and “shows how the status-based wrongs experienced by people whose gender identity does not conform to social expectations have been deeply imbricated in matters of distributive justice” (p. 102).
Chapter 5 moves away from the figurative bonds of matrimony to the chillingly literal bonds of US prisons. The sex classification policy under scrutiny here is the “freeze-frame” policy mandating that whatever level of treatment a transgender prisoner is receiving at the time they are first incarcerated must determine the level of treatment they will be provided during the term of their incarceration (p. 28). As a result of this policy, many transgender prisoners in the United States are confined in facilities that align with their genital sex, rather than their gender identity, placing them at heightened risk of sexual assault and other forms of violence. Although most critiques of the freeze-frame policy cast it as simply another instance of anti-trans discrimination, Currah reaches beyond the “trans–cis divide” to explore how the policy reflects not merely transphobia but also “larger social logics of incarceration” (pp. 123–24). The upshot of this incisive analysis is the troubling realization that much advocacy on behalf of trans prisoners by mainstream trans rights groups fails to challenge the carceral and neoliberal logics underpinning freeze-frame and other similar policies that make prisons into “dead zones”: carceral “islands around which time and civil society flow, but which they do not penetrate,” where inmates, regardless of gender identity, are subjected to “a sort of ‘living death’” (pp. 134, 137).
Currah’s provocative invitation to view the treatment of trans prisoners outside the frame of transphobia in chapter 5 moves seamlessly into the book’s conclusion, which offers a timely meditation not only on the necessity but also the limitations of an identity politics orchestrated around the umbrella category “transgender.” Although Currah concedes that identity politics has a vital role to play in defending against the targeting of transgender people by a revanchist Right, he is adamant that a movement that embraces gender pluralism while neglecting gender hierarchy will never achieve its goals (p. 145). In Currah’s words, a “gender pluralist politics” that “affirms the demands for recognition of sexual and gender minorities” and “makes room for, even celebrates, all the ways in which gender can be revised, remixed, reworked” is “a good thing. But it’s not everything” (pp. 146, 149–50).
The “crucial tool” that “risks getting lost” in the move to gender pluralism, Currah argues, is an old-fashioned and decidedly second-wave feminist “emphasis on asymmetry” (p. 148). As Sex Is as Sex Does shows, the labels that sort us into M or F “are anchored by forces deeply embedded in the machinery of governance” (p. 147) that predate by centuries the articulation of transgender as a political identity and the targeting of transgender people with discriminatory practices and policies. This is why even “the political jurisdictions most progressive on trans issues” have not stopped “assigning M or F at birth to the vast majority of the newborn population” (p. 147). Sex classification is not only about stigmatizing people with trans or nonbinary genders; it is also about maintaining women’s subordination to men. Absent an explicitly feminist challenge to “the larger asymmetry of power in gender relations that is responsible for cementing sex into the legal structures in the first place and is now responsible for continuing gender subordination outside the legal sphere,” Currah declares, the trans political movement “will indeed turn out to have been nothing more than a minoritizing, single-focused, limited political project” unable to effect “the kinds of changes we need to make life livable” (pp. 13–14, 151).
Taken together, Citizenship on the Edge and Sex Is as Sex Does show that lives often described as marginalized are, in fact, central to grasping the forces structuring contemporary political life. At a time when governments and social movements around the globe are working to extirpate critical theory, critical race theory, feminism, and queer theory from educational curricula and public discourse, it is heartening to see these rich and varied intellectual traditions being brought to bear by a diverse set of scholars to illuminate concepts like citizenship and the state and to theorize sex, gender, race, and (dis)ability as potent instruments of governmentality.
