T he introduction to this special issue comes in a time of global transformation and, simultaneously, amidst severe reinforcement of the borders of knowledge, embodiment, life and death, movement, and social value that often work to secure the territories of racialized and gendered civility within Europe, and indeed worldwide. Trans political struggles across European countries have successfully intervened in the legal and medical regulation of the borders of gender embodiment/identification. This includes making over legal gender recognition processes within a self-determination model and increasing the available gender markers for official documents beyond male/female (ILGA World 2020). Activists and experts have also collaborated with the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, to remove the trans-related categories in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11) from the chapter titled "Mental and Behavioral Disorders" to "Sexual Health," under a new code, "gender incongruence" (Suess Schwend 2020). 1 In terms of public culture and media, the European continent is also gripped by a wave of trans and gender-expansive visibility, heralded by the bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst of Austria winning the hugely popular Eurovision Song Contest in 2014, and capped by the 2020 appointment of Europe's first openly transgender minister, Petra De Sutter, as the new deputy prime minister in Belgium.Going to press, Europe is caught up in the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic that has laid bare the extreme vulnerability of refugees and trans folks in accessing basic services, such as health care, education, and employment, and has brought more attention to their already long-entrenched experiences of social and physical isolation (Fedorko, Ogrm, and Kurmanov 2021). The crisis has served to intensify regimes of cisheteropatriarchal white supremacy that rule

This essay scrutinizes the conundrum of recent trans* politics in the Global North and West. Although this trans* politics has achieved important social changes for some gender-variant people, it at the same time participates in neoliberal notions of equality. In addition, while constructing a seemingly legitimate subject called transgender, this politics perpetuates colonial violence. This article suggests a turn to atmospheres as a crucial term to reassess this quandary. With a focus on discomfort, this article explores ways to decolonize and deprivilege transnational trans* politics in the Global North and West. It argues that such an approach might open up ways to consider trans* politics as an imaginary that would enable fragmented realities, bodies, and selves to become legible and articulable and thereby also make it possible to name the constitutive violence that is at work in politics under the purview of trans*.

"Der Beitrag geht von der These aus, dass Heteronormativitätskritik als Entgegensetzung von Normalisierung und Entnormalisierung für ein Denken queerfeministischer Politiken zu eng ist, um deren Gleichzeitigkeit und Ambivalenz adäquat fassen zu können. Am Beispiel der Verquickung von normalisierenden und entnormalisierenden Implikationen von Politiken sogenannter Regenbogenfamilien schlägt der_die Autor_in ein affekttheoretisch gewendetes Verständnis von Heteronormativität vor. Dieses dient im Beitrag als Ausgangspunkt für ein dreifaches Spannungsgefüge queerfeministischer Politiken: als affektiv durch Paradoxien strukturiert, als temporal nicht fortschrittsbezogen linear und als Raum scheinbar unpolitischer Sozialität." (Autorenreferat)"The article argues that a critique of heternormativity as the contrasting juxtaposition of normalization and subversion processes does not grasp the simultaneity and ambivalences of these processes, and thus proofs to be an inadequate tool to theorize queerfeminist politics. The author draws on examples of the politics of queer families and the entanglement of normalizing and subverting impacts therein to reconsider the concept of heteronormativity through an affect theory lens. This reconsideration of heteronormativity is the starting point for a threefold reformulation of queerfeminist politics: as affectively structured by paradoxes, as a non-linear temporality devoid of a narrative of progress, and as a locus for apparently apolitical socialities." (author's abstract

Dieser Beitrag untersucht, wie der Wandel familialer und verwandtschaftlicher Nähe- und Fürsorgeverhältnisse durch die Forderungen von Familien mit schwul, lesbisch, bisexuell, trans* und/oder genderqueer lebenden Eltern nach rechtlicher Anerkennung politisch diskutiert wird. Anhand einer diskurstheoretischen Analyse der Debatten im Schweizer Bundesparlament sowie ethnografischen Datenmaterials wird der Frage nachgegangen, welche Zeitlichkeiten in der polarisierten Auseinandersetzung um die Bedeutung des Phänomens ‚Regenbogenfamilien‘ und deren politischen Forderungen aufgerufen werden. Der Beitrag zeigt, wie die Erweiterung der rechtlichen Anerkennung von Familie durch homonormative und nationalistische Grenzen abgesichert wird und wie sich ambivalente Normalisierungsprozesse konstitutiv für Fortschrittspolitiken herausstellen.

In this article the term "ontological choreography", coined by Charis Thompson, is used as a heuristic analytical device to grasp the different realities of reproductive technologies. The question is addressed as to whether this ethnographic tool is fruitful for understanding the making of families by heterosexual people and LGBTQ. Three case studies from a research project on fertility and family in the context of assisted reproduction in Switzerland reveal the fascinating complexities of temporal aspects of the ontological choreographies, but also some of their weaknesses as a tool. We propose to expand it by taking relationality and historical time into account.