The contributors to Feminism against Cisness showcase the future of feminist historical, theoretical and political thought freed from the conceptual strictures of cisness: the fallacy that assigned sex determines sexed experience.
The essays demonstrate that this fallacy hinges on the enforcement of white and bourgeois standards of gender comportment that naturalise brutalising race and class hierarchies. It is, therefore, no accident that the social processes making cisness compulsory are also implicated in anti-Blackness, misogyny, Indigenous erasure, xenophobia and bourgeois antipathy for working-class life. Working from trans historical archives and materialist trans feminist theories, this volume demonstrates the violent work that cis ideology has done and thinks toward a future for feminism beyond this ideology's counterrevolutionary pull.
The book is edited by Emma Heaney who contributes in addition to Cameron Awkward-Rich, Marquis Bey, Kay Gabriel, Jules Gill-Peterson, Margaux L. Kristjansson, Greta LaFleur, Grace Lavery, Durba Mitra, Beans Velocci and Joanna Wuest.
Duke University Press, 280pp, 15cm x 23cb, paperback, 2024