1 - Trans Without Borders: Asia Narratives, Eunuchs, and Historical Thought

This essay outlines the programmatic contours of a new keyword, transtopia, which makes room for different scales of gender transgression that are not always discernible through the Western notion of transgender. The methods of comparative racialization, native diversification, and genealogical furcation comprise an epistemological overhaul in which transness is made globally legible in a non-hierarchical way. Using examples from the early modern Ottoman empire, colonial India, and contemporary Sinophone culture, I relocate the legibility of eunuchism from transgender to transtopian history. By challenging the modern West as the privileged site of theoretical production, a transtopian hermeneutic directs attention to the web of interrelations forged between historical actors and their con/texts from which transness gains nuance and momentum. Ultimately, this paper seeks to answer the following question: When the concept of transgender assumes the soul of globalizing narrativity, in what ways is it possible to comprehend historical and cultural variations of gender that do not unequivocally subsume under the scalar hierarchy between the universal and the particular?