Book Announcement: Terrorizing Gender - Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State

Book Announcement: *Terrorizing Gender - Transgender Visibility and the
Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State*


I’m delighted to announce that *Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility
and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State *(University of
Nebraska Press) is now officially available! You can order directly at the
press’s website (and get 40% off with the discount code: 6AS19):
https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9781496206749/
or find it another bookseller of your choice.



*About Terrorizing Gender: *

The increased visibility of transgender people in mainstream media,
exemplified by *Time* magazine’s declaration that 2014 marked a
“transgender tipping point,” was widely believed to signal a civil rights
breakthrough for trans communities in the United States. In *Terrorizing
Gender* Mia Fischer challenges this narrative of progress, bringing
together transgender, queer, critical race, legal, surveillance, and media
studies to analyze the cases of Chelsea Manning, CeCe McDonald, and Monica
Jones. Tracing how media and state actors collude in the violent
disciplining of these trans women, Fischer exposes the traps of visibility
by illustrating that dominant representations of trans people as deceptive,
deviant, and threatening are integral to justifying, normalizing, and
reinforcing the state-sanctioned violence enacted against them. The
heightened visibility of transgender people, Fischer argues, has actually
occasioned a conservative backlash characterized by the increased
surveillance of trans people by the security state, evident in debates over
bathroom access laws, the trans military ban, and the rescission of federal
protections for transgender students and workers. *Terrorizing Gender*
concludes that the current moment of trans visibility constitutes a
contingent cultural and national belonging, given the gendered and
racialized violence that the state continues to enact against trans
communities, particularly those of color.



*Praise:*

 “Mia Fischer’s *Terrorizing Gender *valuably unsettles normative
assumptions and reveals precarious implications of the vaunted transgender
‘tipping point.’. . . *Terrorizing Gender*’s compelling necropolitical
critique floodlights the conditions and obfuscations of trans precarity,
and its closing call to embody Tourmaline’s politics of ‘nobodiness’ offers
a promising glimpse of visibility’s queer future.”—Charles E. Morris III,
professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at
Syracuse University and coeditor of *QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking*


“*Terrorizing Gender* is an incendiary contribution to media studies and
transgender studies. With brilliant rigor, Fischer shows how recent U.S.
transgender visibility has occasioned a revival of narratives presenting
trans people as deviant and threatening. . . . The result, as Fischer
masterfully illustrates, is an extremely limited public trans visibility,
premised on replicating white supremacy and violent policing of those trans
people who do not or will not comply with state regulation. This book is
essential reading for anyone interested in transgender politics and
media.”—Aren Z. Aizura, assistant professor of gender, women, and sexuality
studies at the University of Minnesota, and author of *Mobile Subjects:
Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment*

“Methodologically innovative and theoretically sophisticated, this brave
book exposes how transgender people in the United States are increasingly
subject to state-sanctioned violence and surveillance practices. . . . This
book will occupy a central place on my shelf as it bridges the fields of
surveillance, trans, and media studies, and critical race and feminist
theory. I can’t wait to teach it.”—Shoshana Magnet, associate professor at
the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa


All the best,
Mia

Mia Fischer, PhD
she|her|hers
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
University of Colorado Denver
@MiaFischer

Latest pub.:  Fischer, M. (2019). "Piss(ed): The Biopolitics of the
Bathroom." <https://t.co/RRuSgEMJOu?amp=1> *Communication, Culture &
Critique*, 12(3), 397-415.

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