Open Cities Reading Circle: Trans*ness and Cities

On January 14, 2025, the Open Cities Platform welcomes you to a reading circle on trans*ness and cities to contemplate the complexities of urban gender passing. For, we might wonder: what do cities offer to trans* people? What remains foreclosed, if not unsafe within urban environments? And how do bodies traversing gender boundaries experience these environments?

In recent years, trans*ness has been a central component of heated debates on public space. Discussions on public bathrooms and the right to self-identify gender between trans* activists and anti-trans* feminists, for instance, have ignited transphobic discrimination and anxieties in various Western societies. At times, trans* people themselves have raised their voices to address discomfort or injustice in public settings. Design researcher Sasha Costanza-Chock (2021) noting the gender normativity of security screening technologies in airports is but one example coming to mind. What these discussions share, is a concern with the relation between trans* individuals and public living. For, as one passes through deserted streets or crowded squares, one also passes (or not) as a gender to others. Given this dual mobility, this reading circle draws attention to various questions, including: how might particular gender trajectories, thus specificities of trans* embodiment, propel diverging relations to the urban? How do societal mechanisms of power (race, class, sexual orientation, ability, and more) constitute materiality and thereby govern passing – both in terms of gender identification and spatial navigation?

To contemplate these questions, we wish to read the following two texts:

Hayward, Eva. “Spider City Sex.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 20, no. 3 (November 2010): 225–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2010.529244.

Trans* scholar Eva Hayward’s piece has influentially contributed to the turn toward posthumanism and animal studies in trans* studies. It works to theorize how sensorially changing bodies “intensify (and are intensified by) habitats, environments, neighborhoods.” To do so, Hayward draws inspiration from spiders both metaphorically (how do bodies become entwined with their surroundings) and literally (how do different species co-exist ecologically). Could we (re-)explore Hayward’s article, however, to think through trans*ness and urban living? To consider how trans* bodies may experience and thereby co-constitute cities?

Zengin, Asli. “Displacement as Emplacement.” In Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World. Durham: Duke University Press, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478027751.

Political anthropologist Asli Zengin’s chapter discusses the lived experiences of trans* Women in Istanbul, Turkey. As its title suggests, the chapter studies the tense relationship between displacement and belonging, examining how anti-trans* spatial planning has required trans* and GNC people to develop geographical networks (spider webs?) of safety. Zengin’s work inspires us to consider the multidimensionality of cities as environments affording community, intimacy, and yet installing violence and forced displacement. How, we might then wonder, have trans* Women construed, abandoned, and rebuilt realities-within-realities?

This event is part of the ongoing “reading circles” series by the Open Cities Platform that offers a chance to 'sit with texts', allowing participants to engage with scholarship that informs new perspectives on the contemporary and historical relationships between cities, media, and identities.