Summary

Transfeminism(s) as both forms of social activism and intellectual inquiry generate ever-evolving frameworks and theoretical provocations that continue to ask critical questions about who the subjects of feminism are and what struggles are supported by purported feminist logics. Transfeminism has evolved to include genders that exist outside of the cisheterosexist binary and white supremacist logics of personhood to whom certain people can recur to garner their “subjectivity.” Transfeminism aims to account for other excluded classes of people and genders including transmen, trans nonbinary and genderqueer folks, and intersex people bringing back some of what the legal framework of intersectionality aimed to account for with the discrimination against Black women in workplace situations. It has also expanded its definitional logic and framework capacities such that it does not engage in merely additive logics of feminism that might mirror diversity and inclusion initiatives in institutions. Instead, its capaciousness, particularly in its activist iterations globally, has been mobilized to account for extrajudicial organizing around queer and trans bodies and medical needs, abolition, transicide, nonnormative sex practices for queer and trans folks such as liberated sex practices like asexuality, kink, and BDSM, queer and trans sex work, disability needs, immigrant and migrant demands, bodily autonomy, and other forms of material and bodily precarity produced by multiple forms of marginalization for queer and trans people whose needs do not exist at the center of mainstream heteronormative, homonormative, or transnormative politics. When fully accounted for in its materialist foundations in activism globally and in its historical genealogy in the aforementioned legacies in organic intellectuals and career academics, transfeminism has the pedagogical potential to participate in liberatory practices for those who most need them in institutional spaces through which we move, in community organizations, and the most intimate spaces of kinship formations toward other modes of living.