Aren Z. Aizura, Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment

On the Intersection of Somatechnics and Transgender Studies

“…In the strongest reviews, not only are the arguments of the book authors' brought forward, but the reviewers (trans*-identified writers and theorists themselves) write back to the authors in a trans-substantial dialogue, pushing the arguments beyond their original problematics (both in context and communities) and insisting on an even deeper intersectional analysis that is responsive to anticolonial, antiracist, and critical dis/ability movements. For example, in a review of Aren Z. Aizura's Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment (2018), Nael Bhanji (2020) reiterates the author's analysis of destination gender-reassignment surgery as a form of "biomedical tourism" (Aizura), writing, "Mobility is not a universal right but a neoliberal fantasy that has material effects. Delimited by the differential positioning of bodies, and constrained by the realities of capitalism, the allure of transsexual reinvention is always already haunted by the specter of racialized otherness."…”