An American Grammar Book

Written in the aftermath of the 2025 UK Supreme Court decision on “biological sex,” these three provocations play with the collusions between British colonialism and American settler colonialism that structure regimes of the racializing and gendering of sex and gender. The first provocation takes up the subtitle “An American Grammar Book” of Hortense Spillers's iconic essay “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe” to reflect on the tangled histories of how American versus British grammar books and dictionaries define sex and gender. The second considers the coeval emergence of theorizations of unfeeling and negative affects in recent works of affect theory and trans studies. The third interrogates queer femme Asiatic racialization as the self-reflexive culmination of taking trans studies seriously as praxis for staff, students, and colleagues alike within and beyond the institution.