The Moves we Make
Fabricating Authenticity - Jason W.M. Ellsworth
K. Merinda Simmons [+]
University of Alabama
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K. Merinda Simmons is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Graduate Director of the Religion in Culture MA Program at the University of Alabama. Her books include Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora (Ohio State UP, 2014), The Trouble with Post-Blackness (co-edited with Houston A. Baker, Jr., Columbia UP, 2015), and Race and New Modernisms (co-authored with James A. Crank, Bloomsbury, 2019). She is editor of the book series Concepts in the Study of Religion: Critical Primers (Equinox).
Description
Examining the competing (and predominantly “progressive”) discourses policing trans identifications in the cases of Rachel Dolezal and Caitlyn Jenner, Simmons critically reflects on the construction, (im)permeability, and crossing of various identification boundaries to highlight how dominant and normative understandings of race and gender have serious and even life-threatening consequences for those who diverge from the status quo.