The politics of trans visibility (Open group)

9th Nordic Trans Studies Conference, December 8-9, 2025, Örebro University

Within both activism and research, emancipatory hopes have been attached to the idea of trans visibility. However, visibility can become not only a site of recognition but also a mechanism of regulation – an appeal to dominant norms and institutions that can, under swiftly changing political conditions, revoke previously granted legitimacy or weaponize it against the very individuals it once supported.

As governments and reactionary movements broaden their attacks on gender minorities, trans visibility has become a perilous terrain - visibility can mean surveillance and hostility. For trans studies, and lives, this means new and pressing questions regarding academic freedom and censorship, livability and legal and human rights.

The submissions can think both with and against “paranoid critique” (Sedgwick 1997). From the point of view of “reparative reading” (ibid.), visibility is ambivalent. It can lead to unforeseen effects, whether ‘bad’ or ‘good’. Visibility is multilayered, entailing different potentialities and meanings for the people navigating it. Among other things, it may be counterpublic, fugitive and ephemeral, or networked.

Presenters

●      Isak Løberg Jacobsen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway: “Hit, men ikke lenger?”: Transmasculine pregnancy, transnormativity and Norwegian homotolerance

●      Joa Hiitola, Tampere University, Finland: Temporal Dissonance in the Gender-Affirming Care for Trans Youth

●       Matti Pihlajamaa, University of Helsinki, Finland: Protecting or politicizing trans children’s rights? Affective-discursive reading of the 2023 gender recognition reform debates in Finland

●       Sara Barbo, Tallinn University, Estonia: A Critical Phenomenology of Visibility and Being In-Between in Trans Movement Work

Facilitator

Valo Vähäpassi holds a PhD in Media Studies. Their PhD project addressed the way affective media practices bring people together around co-articulations of transness and violence. They have published on Christian right, trans activism, user generated reality enforcement, and the intersections of transgender studies and disability studies.

The working group is open to non-participating audiences.