Femboys in the Factory

Abstract

This article aims to explore the political economy of trans life through an examination of the category of the “femboy” as a means for understanding the concrete processes of sexuality and social activity responsible for the internally differentiated valuation of kinds of trans labor and the wider regime of accumulation of which these valuations form a part. Following Kevin Floyd's historical materialist account of gendered performativity, it details the femboy's historical emergence within hierarchies of racialized sexuality. Using the case of online streaming, the article argues that femboys’ disavowal of transness, and intelligibility to dominant regimes of sexuality, subtends their higher valuation than trans women in comparable lines of work. Making use of the case study, the article argues that identification itself appears to affect the judgment and valuation of individuals within the labor process and that such aesthetic judgements—the contours of how capital “sees” its subjects—are both ineliminable and constitutive of the concrete differences that emerge in the process of production. Aesthetic judgment and the process of abstraction therefore offer an entry point into both the analysis of the labor process more generally, and the relations of desire, abjection, and identification that enforce the present subordination of trans people.