Masculinity in Transition is a book that moves the study of masculinity away from an overriding preoccupation with cisnormativity, whiteness, and heteronormativity, and toward a wider and more generative range of embodiments, identifications, and ideologies. Author K. Allison Hammer’s bold rethinking of masculinity and its potentially toxic effects lays bare the underlying fragility of normative masculinity. Here, Hammer is joined in conversation with Kale Bantigue Fajardo. This episode was recorded in late fall of 2023.
K. Allison Hammer (they/them) is assistant professor and coordinator of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Southern Illinois University. Hammer is author of Masculinity in Transition.
"A major intervention into masculinities studies, Masculinity in Transition brilliantly and consistently pushes the field toward a critical understanding of masculinity as a complex gender formation." —Christopher Breu, author of Hard-Boiled Masculinities
"How might we understand masculinity if we turn toward culture rather than biology? K. Allison Hammer uncover(s) remakings of masculinity that center care, porosity, and unruly alliances—uplifting models for the precarious now." —Amber Jamilla Musser, author of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance
Chapters
Masculinity in Transition is a book that moves the study of masculinity away from an overriding preoccupation with cisnormativity, whiteness, and heteronormativity, and toward a wider and more generative range of embodiments, identifications, and ideologies. Author K. Allison Hammer’s bold rethinking of masculinity and its potentially toxic effects lays bare the underlying fragility of normative masculinity. Here, Hammer is joined in conversation with Kale Bantigue Fajardo. This episode was recorded in late fall of 2023.
K. Allison Hammer (they/them) is assistant professor and coordinator of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Southern Illinois University. Hammer is author of Masculinity in Transition.
"A major intervention into masculinities studies, Masculinity in Transition brilliantly and consistently pushes the field toward a critical understanding of masculinity as a complex gender formation." —Christopher Breu, author of Hard-Boiled Masculinities
"How might we understand masculinity if we turn toward culture rather than biology? K. Allison Hammer uncover(s) remakings of masculinity that center care, porosity, and unruly alliances—uplifting models for the precarious now." —Amber Jamilla Musser, author of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance
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K. Allison Hammer:
You know, recent events, including the development of Me Too and also the Trump era, made me wanna take a more critical approach to masculinity within the LGBTQIA2S plus acronym.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
I think that there's also a really strong historical threat, and you are dealing with some things from the nineteenth century to the twenty first. Good evening, everyone, or good morning, or good afternoon, whenever you are listening to this podcast. I am Kale Bantigay Fajardo, and I'm an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in the American Studies department and also in the Asian American Studies program. And I'm gonna be the host or interviewer of Professor K. Allison Hammer, the author of Masculinity in Transition, which has just come out with the University of Minnesota Press.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
So just to say a little bit about myself, and then I will introduce the author. In addition to what I said about being a professor at Minnesota, it's also an honor to be with the UMN Press because Minnesota also published my first book, which is entitled, Filipino Oceanographies of Seafaring Masculinities and Globalization. So I am a masculinity studies scholar, and I also do queer and transgender studies, and I took a queer and trans approach to thinking about Filipino seafaring and the global shipping industry. So I don't want to go too much into that, but I did want to say that I am in the field of masculinity and queer and trans studies scholars. So I was really excited when Allison invited me to do this podcast with them.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
Without further ado, I wanna give, Allison a proper introduction. K. Allison Hammer is an interdisciplinary scholar and critic of American culture, gender, and sexuality in the twentieth and twenty first century. Their work brings together a diverse archive of historical and contemporary literature, performance, film, and media. As a professor, they are interested in helping students understand and theorize the complexities of gender and sexuality in transnational context and the relationship to race, colonialism, and permanent war.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
They received a PhD in English literature with an advanced certificate in women's and gender studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Prior to coming to Southern Illinois University, where they are now, they taught at Vanderbilt University in the Gender and Sexuality Studies department, where they launched the first courses in transgender studies and critical masculinities studies. Their first book, Masculinity and Transition, as I just mentioned, that was just published by the University of Minnesota Press. In this work, they look at toxic masculinity through a trans and queer lens to explore its historical root systems and cultural and political expressions. New ways of being masculine have been developed across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty first centuries, suggesting the fragility of the toxic norms currently shaping culture, politics, and society.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
They take a critical approach to masculinity as a complex gender formation that is tied to different embodiments, subjectivities, sexualities, identifications, and ideologies. The book promises to transform the field of transgender studies or trans studies, queer theory, and political theory more broadly. Additional articles and book chapters can also be found in the Rutledge companion to art and disability, frontiers, journal of lesbian studies, women's studies quarterly, studies in gender and sexuality, feminist formations, and transgender studies quarterly, The Lifted Brow in EOAGH. I wanna say congratulations for publishing the book, and it's a really great book. And I'm sure you're really excited to, have it out there in the world after working on it for so long.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
And so if you could just introduce the book and maybe, how you got interested in it and what you think are the key arguments in your book.
K. Allison Hammer:
Sure. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for for being the host, and, thank you so much to Minnesota for being such a wonderful press all around and for hosting this podcast. So I wanna start off by saying that this project is really completely different from my dissertation in that in the dissertation, I was really interested in more individual forms of resistance through butch. And I was interested in expanding butch outside of a specifically lesbian balance and looking at butch through a variety of different embodiments, racial categories, and also across film, literature, and music.
K. Allison Hammer:
Actually, I was interested in doing music in my dissertation. But, you know, recent events, including the development of Me Too and also the Trump era, made me wanna take a more critical approach to masculinity within the LGBTQIA2S plus acronym, and also to really understand the history of what we're calling toxic masculinity in the culture, though I make the move very early on in the book to call it normative, to speak to the ways in which it's like the air we breathe or the ethos. It's not something that can be located in one individual. It's more a very far reaching way of being. And I also tie it throughout the book to political fraternity via Jacques Derrida's politics of friendship and also through critiques of racial capitalism to establish how systemic norms of masculinity or masculine normativity is in a thoroughgoing kind of a way.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
Do you wanna talk a little bit about methodology too?
K. Allison Hammer:
Sure. So I'm very one of my professors at at CUNY, Robert Reid Farr, would say the word promiscuous. Like, I'm a promiscuous scholar, and I use a variety of different fields in my work. It does depend upon very delicate readings of the objects themselves, but I use work from the field of sociology, political theory, philosophy, obviously queer studies, trans studies, queer of color critique. You know, my methodology throughout was really to establish the spine of the argument as really tied to this idea of fraternity and seeing where that is visible or not visible within the things that I was critiquing.
K. Allison Hammer:
Because really what I wanted to do was also to make a book that was celebratory of queer and trans masculinities, and looking at it from a more generative perspective than just sort of critiquing toxic masculinity throughout. And so it's really kind of a queer methodology for sure of piecing together different insights from different fields and having it kind of come together into a more complex but complete picture, I'd say.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
So one of the contributions that you make in your book is that you directly and explicitly state that your book is engaging with racial capitalism and also white supremacy along with heteronormativity. I was wondering if you wanna say a little bit more about that angle of it. Was it that scholars had started talking about racial capitalism and that you wanted to bring that into queer and trans studies?
K. Allison Hammer:
Yeah. I mean, it's part of the renewed queer studies approach, the critique of queer liberalism, you know, discussed by David Eng and many others. And, however, if I could be so bold, I thought that it needed to be more specific as far as how is it that queer liberalism shows up, especially with masculinity, the need to sort of look beyond just a behavioral transgression of gender norms, but also to look at how are specific cultural products participating in normative masculinity, which I define through two very specific terms, and that is the psychological wages of dominance, which is kind of a riff on W. E. B.
K. Allison Hammer:
Du Bois, and Desire for Profit to sort of really begin to assess what is normative masculinity really comprised of. I really wanted to look more closely at whiteness, specifically also at white queer and trans folks. And that was also coming out of specific writers who were asking some very important questions, and that includes Miriam Abelson's book, Men in Place, which is a sociological study of trans men in The United States. She asks, in her study, quote, are trans men a sign of more egalitarian gender relations and decreasing homophobia? Are they solely a local variation or are they superficial rather than substantive changes that repackage hegemonic masculinity without upsetting relations of power in any significant way?
K. Allison Hammer:
You know, she was really asking for trans men to speak on especially white trans men to speak on their relationship to racism and just found that a lot of her interviewees were not really that interested in critiquing their racism, and that's not to pick on one single identity category, that's simply to say that race became extremely important in a different way than it was prior to the core of the argument, and specifically in The United States. And there were a few other books that came up too along the way, including True Sex by Emily Skidmore, which is from NYU Press. And what she discovered, which I found really fascinating, she assembles this through an archive of newspaper articles that trans men were living prosperous lives in small town America at the time. And within the emerging eugenics movement, trans men could become part of this white band of brothers performing honest, quote unquote, honest labor, even after their assigned sex was revealed. And I thought that was really powerful.
K. Allison Hammer:
I hadn't really thought of it in these ways before until I started reading some of these works. And, you know, your book, of course, Kale, Filipino Crosscurrents, really also gave me the courage to create this larger frame to really question the global and local dynamics and the construction of masculinity. Particularly, I was drawn to your anecdote about how your subjects were more likely to interact with you and discuss tomboy subjectivity if you talked about your working class roots in The Philippines. And when you brought up your career as a US based academic, which sort of implies this elite status, you were treated as a quote unquote woman. And I thought that this was really important too in terms of looking at very specific historically contextualized examples to see what in the culture, what in the politics, what in the economic formation of the time folks were responding to or negotiating masculinity within.
K. Allison Hammer:
And so those are some of my main source materials at the time. And also Todd researched masculinities in theory, which really brought together this comparative frame that I was really excited about because it was something I wanted to do with Butch, but just found that some things about Butch began to rattle me in a certain way when it came to whiteness. And that was a lot of my confrontations with Stein's belief in her own genius as well as her own whiteness and elite status that allowed her certain privileges and ways of moving through the world, and also, like, her relationship to Otto Weiniger and the belief that women were inferior beings unless they attained a level of masculinity.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
So, well, just to give a little background on tomboy because not everybody out there might understand what, Allison is saying. So tomboy in in my work and also in The Philippines is a sort of queer and trans embodiment and figure that in our terms now we might say is butch or trans masculine. And I was doing fieldwork with mostly cis men who work in the global shipping industry. Allison is referring to how I was treated in different ways as my own identity at the time of my field work was sort of in the middle of butch and trans. And I'm trans identified, and I go by hehim.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
I didn't say that. So I just wanted to say that is like a working class, kind of identity in my book. And so I appreciate you bringing that up and making that connection in the local and global frame that you have in your book. One of the questions I had kinda and because you brought up tomboy, Jack Halberstam is actually the person who encouraged me to write about that. So I first met Jack in the early two thousands, and I was having dinner with him.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
And so he wanted to know about my fieldwork, and I told him. I said, well, you know, they sort of treat me this way on the ship, and, like, they wanted to talk to me about about tomboys. And he said, oh, that's so interesting. Like, go with that. And so that helped me to have confidence to write such a chapter, which wasn't in my dissertation, and then made it into the book.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
So I do love Jack's work, and you engage with Halberstam, particularly his book, Female Masculinities, and you talk about how that was really influential. And you also do critique the book, which I thought was cool in the sense that it made me think that trans and queer studies had sort of evolved and developed in a way that we are a couple of perhaps generations generation that came before us because we know that they did a lot to establish the field, and that and that's certainly how I feel about Jack. So I thought it was cool and interesting that you did honor him and that book, and then also you wanted to productively critique certain parts of it. So could you maybe talk about that decision and what parts were helpful and what parts do you feel like you would want to add something based on other texts or other analyses or other work that you did where you wanted to push female masculinities in the maybe a direction that Jack wasn't able to at the time that he wrote that book?
K. Allison Hammer:
Yeah. Definitely all of the above. So, Jack Halberstam, I mean, I I don't believe that I would be a scholar today without Jack Halberstam. So just to get that in there, when I found hemomasculinity, it really changed my life, because I'd never read anything like it. And although I didn't know that I was a non binary trans person at the time, trans masc person at the time, there was obviously something in it that resonated with me and I hadn't even come out yet as a lesbian.
K. Allison Hammer:
My trajectory is coming out as a lesbian and really more of a femme at the time, and then going through all these gender kind of undulations along the way before I found that the language of non binary was not available when I was I mean, not even remotely. And so that language there's so many more terms that we have now than I had, certainly. I think that what happened for me was I was thinking so much about my own whiteness, and I was thinking so much about what does it mean to move toward masculinity as a white person. And something that Bobby Noble wrote just really stuck in my brain, which was that becoming trans or becoming trans masculine actually gave them more white privilege. So it was almost like becoming more masculine was also becoming more white, and I could not really get that out of my head.
K. Allison Hammer:
Although there certainly is, you know, critique of race within female masculinity, I felt that it really needed to go much further, particularly as we are seeing all this escalation of racism, xenophobia, all the mess that emerged in 2016, which for me was just I see now anyway, and that's part of my privilege, but I see now was just laying bare all that had come before it and all that always was there. And so I really felt that I was struggling so much on a personal level with what it meant to be a white trans masc person, and that I wanted to see where whiteness played a role, whether that was access, whether that was markets, whether that was less exposure to violence. And I thought that the image of the fighter, the pugilist, was a little bit becoming a little bit problematic for me after January 6, especially, because, you know, I don't look at that event as only through the lens of a singular embodiment. I look at that as a white supremacist event that contained a lot of different bodies. So I felt like gender performance could no longer be the marker of anything progressive or anything anti racist necessarily.
K. Allison Hammer:
And also Linda Martine Alcoff's, Future of Whiteness was very influential to me as well, where the working class American culture contains so much racism, which we know that, right, that I couldn't make that leap anymore without more careful thinking through and more specificity of what whiteness means in different contexts, if that makes sense.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
That's great. I think that's really important to I'm really glad that you wanted to address those things.
K. Allison Hammer:
Yeah. And I just wanna add on one more thing, and that is Kaji Amin's intervention with things that disturb and that I also didn't have to make a totalizing critique in one direction or another. Meaning, it wasn't about sort of that one's a racist and that one's not. It was more like I'm disturbed by this. Let me explore it.
K. Allison Hammer:
And I'm talking about the book disturbing attachments.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
So you talk about in the methodology that you just discussed that it was literary, sociological. I think that there's also a really strong historical thread running through it. And you are dealing with some things from the nineteenth century to the twenty first. Do you wanna talk a little bit about the historical dimensions or and the objects of the chapters?
K. Allison Hammer:
Yeah. I chose to include Emily Dickinson because there was a really interesting trans reading of her work available. That's the earliest work that I deal with. These were also readings that I've done in graduate school that, you know, those kind of readings that just never find a home. And I just thought, okay, this is this is an interesting home within this imagined boyhood concept, which is basically my idea that if one was transmasculine, one could invent a boyhood that never actually happened.
K. Allison Hammer:
And I saw that in Dickinson's work. And so I was able to also use some theorizing around the cult of true womanhood and what that meant to sort of break away from that for her and how there were very few options for her and, of course, like, putting that into the context of whiteness as well. So I don't do a linear framework. I break the book into three different sections. I should have mentioned that first.
K. Allison Hammer:
I put the book into three different sections. So the first section is sexual domination, and the second is challenges to the conception of nation. And the third is impenetrability, which is actually the section I'm, like, most excited about continuing with because it it has a lot of possible applications beyond what I brought in there. And so I really just began to link these different objects together across time and to see how different historical factors were present that enabled and also placed limits upon the performance of masculinity. I think it was a very organic process that put these objects together and drew affinity toward one another.
K. Allison Hammer:
So the historical critique is very important, and I didn't mention that earlier, or the different audiences would enjoy. So, for example, I bring together Stein and Cather, who a lot of people enjoy, obviously, but also from this very specific angle of World War one and how they connected with common soldiers in comparison to how Stein, for example, was also entertaining rich and famous folks in Paris. World War I was another node there, and also nineeleven was a node for the Western, but also the entire history of the Western. Oh, the multi generational critique. Right?
K. Allison Hammer:
So I have I bring in Stone Butch Blues. That was a novel that I read from, like, a very specific, more romantic lens, which a lot of people do. It was more of a, sort of, a love story that I found inspiring as a lesbian and later as, like, a trans masc, non binary person. But what I found when I read the novel with fresh eyes and I invented this term reading again, which is really to sort of look with fresh eyes at a text that's been looked at so many times and found that really the history of labor, like Feinberg was telling that the history of labor throughout, really from the post war strike period, the intensity of post war strikes, like, up until the nineteen nineties. And that critique also resonated for many Bruce Pratt, who I had the chance to speak with about it.
K. Allison Hammer:
But I felt like this range of things up to contemporary, non binary, poet performer, Andrea Gibson, I think is the most current performer right now, and also the westerns. I felt that by bringing these objects together and their histories, it would bring also generations together as well. That was part of my intent there.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
So I really love your point, what you call reading again. But I guess I wondered, like, how did you do that? Like, your description of it is not too long, like, sort of looking at something with fresh eyes. Because if I were to teach your book, I think students might not know, like, how do you do that? Like, do you have to wait five years and go back to something?
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
Right? Because it takes a certain maturity and investment in a scholarly life without sounding pretentious, what we do. Right? So, like, it takes time. Like, you have to be reading a field or a literature, and then you're saying you return to something that maybe, has been engaged with.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
But I guess that's sort of how I was reading it, but do you wanna elaborate on it?
K. Allison Hammer:
Yeah. That's a really good question. I hadn't actually thought of that before about the question of time, and does one have to leave something aside for a period of years and return to it? You know, here's where I'm I'm thinking about the concept of unruly alliance that's threaded throughout the book, and the idea that it's possible to not just read again as a solitary activity, but to also be open to others' ideas about a text and that could be something that's done in more of a collective setting. I mean, I was thinking about it through this practice of engaging with something in a certain way at a certain point in time and then returning to it and perhaps having that distance.
K. Allison Hammer:
But I think maybe we could also talk about detachment as a Buddhist concept at this point, where, you know, this sort of idea of setting aside what is personally driving you about the book and maybe looking at it with more of a passionate detachment, then I think you could actually teach students how to see that way, and seeing it from the other perspective, maybe in sort of shorter readings too, like reading something at the beginning of a semester, having all these insights along the way, and then reading it again at the end to see sort of how things have unfolded over that period of time. I mean, it's all experimental. I think it's kind of an interesting idea.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
Thank you for elaborating on that. That's helpful. So you talk about the Trump era as being an important marker that kind of helped you to rethink your dissertation. And you do, for example, talk about, like, in relation to Gertrude Stein, you talk about how Gertrude didn't actually like Roosevelt, and Gertrude Stein actually had some conservative politics. I didn't know that she may have possibly supported the Franco regime during the Spanish civil war.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
I mean, I I've only read some things about Stein, so I'm not a Stein scholar. But so it seems like presidents do set the tone in terms of masculinity, or they're in the public eye and they set the discourse or can potentially, sort of the way that Trump was doing that. Do you wanna talk about some of those observations around the larger political culture where the political leadership in The United States has been primarily cis men?
K. Allison Hammer:
Yeah. Really primarily. I yeah. I have sort of prepared some thoughts about that or thought that through a little bit. And I think what's really interesting about the question is it kind of leads us back to the problem because on the one hand, we can talk about presentation, like, how does a president present their masculinity?
K. Allison Hammer:
But then you could also talk about the level of policy. So, for example, like, I talk about Reagan quite a bit in chapter five on the HIV AIDS literature and film of Reynaldo Reyna and also Marlon Riggs. And, you know, Reagan, you know, he was sort of a cowboy, but not the super macho guy. And also, he had a kind of grandfatherly presence at points, Like, you wouldn't know what was going on in a certain way behind the scenes. And I think that's also one of my points throughout is that presentation can be deceptive.
K. Allison Hammer:
Because meanwhile, it was the moment when the GOP became this most entrenched and white far right political party in the world, when we see it become the party of climate denial, destruction of the social safety net, lowering of etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And so I think when it comes to this disconnect, that also goes back to a critique of liberalism where, you know, liberal masculinities more generally have always been pretty tepid in their support at best for marginalized communities in general. And that goes right through from, you know, the country's founding to the present. So I kind of I was interested in the question because it got me to thinking too, it becomes a bit more extreme after nine eleven. And I pointed to a comment that Bush made to King Abdullah of Jordan, and this was in 02/2001, and I'll just read out the quote.
K. Allison Hammer:
We're steady, clear eyed, and patient, but pretty soon we're gonna have to start displaying scalps. And this was on September 28, and this was said, you know, publicly. And so, I wanna say, you know, now that I'm kind of thinking about it, I wanna say that in terms of this more violent presentation and the normalization of that, I wanna say that Bush was a kind of turning point in that respect. And there may be things that Reagan said that I don't know about. I'm sure that there are, but I think the overall presentation of Bush also needing to step up into this very masculinist role after nine eleven, and then we see, of course, you know, the Patriot Act compromising constitutional rights to free speech, privacy and due process.
K. Allison Hammer:
So so that's Bush. And then moving right along, so I talk about Bush in the westerns chapter, I talk about Reagan in the HIV AIDS chapter, and I do sort of a more thorough sweep of the history of labor, and it's very sort of non productive tie to the Democratic party, like, throughout its history. And then when you get to Obama, like, I was thinking that that really, for me, would take a different trail of analysis that would have to take in things like assimilationist or respectability politics and things like that because of how much Obama suffered, you know, being criticized as not from The United States, having to show his birth certificate. Like, these were things that prior presidents obviously had not been subjected to. But I think within that also very erudite masculinity, that very kind of liberal wise man sort of presentation, we have to think about his role in accelerating drone attacks.
K. Allison Hammer:
So I think that's, you know, you do see that disconnect there as well, but I'm hesitant to make that tie completely. And then Biden, you know, I I'm really having a hard time with the current administration for for several different reasons. And I don't talk about this in the book, but I think the fast tracking of building the wall on the southern border, which he claims he had to do because the funds had to be out were allocated already and there was nothing he can do. I think that's a little flimsy, but I also feel like it brings up this issue of Trump's presentation is grotesque for many folks. Biden's presentation is not grotesque, but the wall still gets built, if you know what I mean.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
Yeah. That's a great point. So another book that was published recently is Omishakin, Natasha Tinsley's book, The Color Pink, Black Femme Art for Survival that University of Texas Press published last year. So Tinsley's also writing her book in response to the Trump era. And what she noticed was that there were a lot of queer and trans black femmes who were producing, like, really interesting critiques through music and film, like Janae Monet.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
But I did just read it and teach it. And disclaimer, Tinsley is the mom of my daughter. But I thought it was really interesting that you both were writing in the same era, but that she was dealing with femme cultural productions, and you're dealing with butch and trans and kind of an expansive masculinity project. So I wondered if you had any thoughts on the development of femme studies and and what you think is going on between these two subfields or fields within queer and trans studies and also black studies.
K. Allison Hammer:
I have not read Tinsel's book, but I'm really excited to read it. And what I'm hoping is that chapter one might be useful for femme studies and I think for queer and trans and or BIPOC femme studies. But what I'm doing in that chapter is also continuing in a way Halberstam's project of continuing to think about how cis femmes also can perform masculinity and how trans women can perform masculinity. And I think that's an interesting thing to think about because I think a continuation of Halberstam's framework allows for that as well. And so, just to introduce that chapter, I talk about female phallicism, which, you know, I talked to a lot of trans women in my life about this concept because I wanted to see if it was actually useful for trans femmes and for cis femmes as well, because I deal with two different sides of potential deployments of this concept of female fallacism.
K. Allison Hammer:
The first is through Nampus D'Monte's film form in Silver and Gold and also her performance in Digorito, which is just like a wild film. And it just sort of speaks to another thing that bothers me about this butch centrism, if you will, in masculinity, which is that it becomes possible then to say, well, butches and trans men aren't the only ones to strap on, for example. You know, I think that's that kind of was something that was brewing inside of me too was this question about expanding the phallic possibilities beyond just butch and trans transmaspos. So I think that would be useful. I mean, I don't I can't speak to whether that would be useful.
K. Allison Hammer:
I hope that that would be useful. And I think it was also an extension of how I was thinking about earlier twentieth century blues artists as well, who were using more masculine identified forms of sexuality and performance in their work. And so, also, I wanna tell a little bit about that chapter, so I expand Judith Butler's idea of a lesbian phallus, where they are revealing this philosophical ruse of the penis phallus equation and asking also whether for trans women because Butler's very clear in that theory that any body part will do as this sort of renewed phallus, just not the penis. And I thought, well, that's interesting because what about for trans women who for whatever reason, whatever their course happens to be with, gender affirming care, I wanted to see if there was room in there to think about a whole, like, blending of, quote, unquote, biological and synthetic, like, if they could meet together somehow. Because both, like, Preciado and Halberstam and Butler are kind of still centering on this idea of the synthetic.
K. Allison Hammer:
And I thought, well, that's that's kind of problematic in a way for some trans women.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
Yeah. I forget the artist's name in Tinsley's book, but Tinsley, talks about somebody who refers to their body in terms of having a biologically male penis.
K. Allison Hammer:
Right.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
I think that that's partly what you're talking about.
K. Allison Hammer:
Yeah. Exactly. I do analyze The Crying Game, and I analyze it though through the film Disclosure, because Disclosure made me remember that film, And, also, the fact that it started this whole phenomenon in film for many years after of men vomiting in response to seeing trans women's penises. And so, it was sort of like, oh, wow. That needs to be remembered, first of all, because I remember seeing that film, and I remember just this sort of whole whole horrible disclosure moment and how people responded to it at the time prior to any kind of understanding of trans subjectivity really whatsoever at the time.
K. Allison Hammer:
And I just love the way that Zachary Drucker speaks about, you know, can you be a beautiful woman with a penis? Is that possible? And it sort of troubles, again, those ideas of phallicisms that will exclude the so called biological.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
In the book launch that the University of Minnesota Press did a couple days ago, you mentioned that you were highly influenced by your stepdad who was a Buddhist, and I also identify as a Buddhist. And so I was wondering what specifically about Buddhism helped you to understand normative masculinities and marginalized or alternative masculinities.
K. Allison Hammer:
Yeah. I really I love that you picked up on that. And I was really very saddened that he passed in March of this year, really right before a lot of really great things happened that we had been all kind of waiting for. Like, I got a tenure track job, and then I also published this book. And, you know, it was really difficult.
K. Allison Hammer:
So let me let me get to the question though. So we lived together in a kind of multi generational household for about four years and that was something that happened in a as a result of issues on both sides that required a kind of mutual aid situation. And, you know, there was a lot of illness between my mom and my stepdad. And so when we were living together, he, you know, introduced me to it. But, of course, being a Buddhist, he didn't force it on me.
K. Allison Hammer:
It was just sort of part of his being. And we would sit together every night, and he would read from his sutras, which so he took vows in three different traditions. He took vows in Zen, Vipassana, and Tibetan. And so he had been practicing for over forty years. And the thing that really amazed me about him, and he wasn't he wasn't orthodox about any of those views, but, you know, I saw what Buddhism did for him and this was to make him just extremely accepting of my trans and queer friends, like whoever came around, they were invited in and that was one of the things is like he never stopped growing.
K. Allison Hammer:
He was 93 when he died, so he grew up in a very different era as well in the depression. And, for him, like, coming out of his Buddhism, like, identity was not a static thing, as it's not in Buddhism. In fact, quite the opposite. It was something for him that could change very frequently. And, in fact, like, you know, he would say, and this is, you know, not his saying, but to know the self is to lose the self.
K. Allison Hammer:
And, I think that for me, maybe we wanna renew a lot of the less or anti identitarian perspectives coming out of queer theory to really think about how we bond across difference to break up this fraternal idea of bonding and that was something that was really influenced by him. And it means though that identity work is crucial, but that ultimately it should move us toward an understanding that there is no self. This is gonna get real real weird real fast. But, yeah. So there's if there's no self, it doesn't mean that I I don't have identity.
K. Allison Hammer:
It just means that I'm connected to everything around me and I'm connected to all beings. And also that part of taking vows means that you helped beings wherever that help is needed and whenever you feel you can be of help. And it's not a charity thing. It's much more about I am connected to you and you are connected to me. You know, I haven't been able to sit since he passed.
K. Allison Hammer:
I just haven't. It just every time I sit, I just cry. So I'm hoping that I will get back to it because I know that, like, he wants me to practice and continue practicing. But yeah.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
Thank you so much for sharing something that's also really personal. I I'm really sorry for your loss, and he sounds like a great guy.
K. Allison Hammer:
Yeah. He was a great guy.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
Like, yeah. He's not gonna force Buddhism on you.
K. Allison Hammer:
No. You don't do that.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
Kind of related to that though, in queer and feminist studies, there's been significant work on care or self care and community care and also healing trauma. How does your book dialogue with these kinds of conversations? Can you talk about the care practices that you mentioned in your book? And what about care practices you yourself are invested in as a queer slash mask, non binary scholar, teacher, and perhaps activist or just human being? The reason that I'm asking this question is if we're thinking about normative masculinities as being toxic, then it seems to me that people who do identify as masculine are also trying to figure out how to not do that, which your book does address.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
So that's also why I'm thinking about care and trauma and healing and those kinds of things.
K. Allison Hammer:
Yeah. So I'll just sort of talk a little bit about what I read and how it impacted me. I read work in queer crip studies, specifically Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha's books on care and also some of her poetry as well. And I also read Hill Malatino's Trans Care, and I was most, most influenced by Dean Spade. And I think it was Dean Spade's work on mutual aid.
K. Allison Hammer:
So he wrote Normal Life and then also wrote the little book on mutual aid, which was more of a how to, and tons of other stuff too and teaching and everything. And there are many other influences that came to mind, and I'm invested in my own recovery situations, my own healing work, of course. But I think that, like, what came out of it for me was something that I wasn't seeing, and that is a way in which mutual it comes close with Spade's work on mutual aid, I think, though, especially his work with abolition. But this idea of working across identity categories and thinking expansively beyond affinity, not that it's not happening, but I felt that there needed to be really a concept that could address radical heterogeneity in the more the spirit of women of color feminism's, concept of oppositional consciousness, this sort of thing. It came out of my own experience in a lot of ways too.
K. Allison Hammer:
For example, I was part of, like, a queer spiritual collective where we did care groups. And these care groups were multi generational, which is very rare to find anything that is multi generational outside of one's family. I think a lot of times it was both cis trans queer people. And it was really based in this idea of everyone cooking for each other and saying, I need a ride there and I need to do this here. And it was actually run through a queer church community that I also attended.
K. Allison Hammer:
And I think that care group made a big impact on me. And, again, it's not that it's not happening. It's happening all the time. And the other thing that I'm thinking about right now is that I live in Carbondale, Illinois, which if you don't know about Carbondale, Illinois, it's in the very Southern end of Illinois. Illinois is a very big state, like a big peninsula almost.
K. Allison Hammer:
And I was living in Tennessee and came up here, and I think there was so much fear for me living in Tennessee. There became so much fear that I became kind of isolated, to be honest, especially after, you know, the Matt Walsh debacle happened and Vanderbilt, where I received my own gender affirming care, you know, shut down its youth care. Well, I was forced to. And, you know, the senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee headlined the end child mutilation rally, and Proud Boys were showing up. And it just was becoming increasingly threatening to the point where I did not feel safe.
K. Allison Hammer:
And so coming here, one of the things that's been really exciting is it's a center of reproductive justice, because we have two abortion clinics in a town of 20,000 people, and people are coming from all over the area, as far as really Tennessee and even further south, to get care. And there's also, trans refugees coming in, literally, from Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee. And there is actually, you know, organizations that are helping folks to resettle. But what happened for me is I immediately got folks together to think about reproductive justice because I felt like I could. And I really reached out to groups of people that don't normally meet together.
K. Allison Hammer:
You know, I spoke with black women community leaders who were talking about their own experiences with health disparities in terms of birthing and health disparities in general in the community, and I wanna do something on black maternal death rates and infant death rates in Carbondale. So that for me is unruly alliance. It's because I'm reaching out to folks to bring other viewpoints and perspectives and and caring about their stories so that I want to educate since my primary role as an educator, but also as someone who's now running events as a coordinator. And I think for me, it's not necessarily even about working with organ like queer and trans organizations in town. We have one called the Rainbow Cafe that is really primarily white people, and I think that's fine, but I also think it's very well staffed.
K. Allison Hammer:
Like, I don't honestly think that they need more volunteers. I would go there for community, for myself, potentially. But I think for me, it's always about seeing where those identity lines can and must be crossed in order to reach people who are most suffering in the community. And I think I'm gonna be able to do really good work here in a small town that is suddenly on the map. I mean, there have been articles in New York Times and USA Today about this town, and I'm already seeing a lot of places where I can contribute and also bring these stories out.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
That's great. Those migrations are also happening in Minnesota and different folks coming to the Twin Cities for various kinds of care. So my next question has to do with, I really like it in the New York Times where artists and writers talk about, like, what their day looks like. I'm always really intrigued since sometimes our lives can be unstructured, you know, in a way. So I just wanted to ask you, what do your days look like, and what is your writing practice?
K. Allison Hammer:
Yeah. I really like this question. I think that one of the things that I learned about writing about labor is this term job consciousness, which is from new labor historian David Brody. And it's basically laying bare, like, what do you do? How do you do it?
K. Allison Hammer:
What are the conditions? Talk about what our labor is like. I I think we need to do more of that personally as academics. I think it's really where we also get to know each other better. I am an artist scholar, so that doesn't mean necessarily make art so much anymore because I was a visual artist before I became an academic.
K. Allison Hammer:
It was a complete weird fluke that I became an academic, actually. So I like to create distance between me and whatever institution I'm in, in order to do the writing that I do because it requires and I have this luxury now, which I did not have in previous positions. To have that allotment of two kind of full days in my schedule. Obviously, that means, like, working weekends a lot of the time, where I can detach from the demands of, right now, teaching and coordinating and emails and, you know, for me, and I know that you're a fellow Buddhist traveler, so for me it really is about getting into that meditative flow state where I can connect with what it is that I'm really thinking and feeling. So, yeah, I mean, with the book, I also, like, of course, and I need to talk about this too because it's real.
K. Allison Hammer:
Like, for those of us who it took a minute, by a minute, I mean, six years to get on the tenure track. It was very challenging. Right? I mean, it's very, very difficult to write a book and to teach a three three load and to have family responsibilities and etcetera. And so, that wasn't always possible, which meant that I spent a lot of my summers, all of my summers, every break, you know, doing this.
K. Allison Hammer:
I love it, which drives me toward it, because I do love this work and I do love the process. And I don't have a I don't think conventional way of thinking about it at all.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
You're probably a little tired from writing this first book, but where is your work going? What kinds of things are you interested in now?
K. Allison Hammer:
Yeah. I wanna move out from just talking about The United States per se, but I am still very interested in the reach of the United States military. And I've read a couple of just starter tiptoeing into the field of thinking about the military and, you know, I'm just very angered by it right now. I'm very upset about it. And the history that we don't really know about and the extent of it and the reach of it, which, you know, when you think about August a year, it's a really tremendous amount of money that we spend on securing our democracy, quote, unquote.
K. Allison Hammer:
So I'm interested in that, but I'm also like, what I'm mainly interested right now is looking at islands, and I have a few different sites that I'm interested in. I'm very interested in Hawaii, and I'm very interested also in the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, which has a really interesting tragic history of indigenous folks being kicked off of those islands, first by the British and then The US took over. And these are not widely known about, but the Chagosians are still trying to return to their home, and it's now a military fortress. So I'm interested in gender along those lines because the bit that I've read about it, the indigenous people had this very fluid concept of gender, and there's this image that I have in my mind when I've watched, like, a film recently of this Chagosian who's sitting watching this footage of American military sort of stomping and building and polluting and expanding this complex on the island that was once called home. And there's specifically, like, a shot of a woman in, like, a bikini, like, leaning over with a machine gun.
K. Allison Hammer:
And it's just very strange to see this collision of, you know, what is it like to see one's home completely ripped out from under you? And there are many, many, many, many, many, many other stories like this. Right? Lesser known, more well known. I'm really interested in Hawaiian resistance.
K. Allison Hammer:
I've read from with my students, queer and trans writings out of Hawaii where the resistance is so strong. And but it's also this fantasy land of vacation and, you know, the show White Lotus recently tried to take on this theme of colonialism, but I think to mixed effect. So that's what I'm thinking about right now, and I don't know how it will take shape, but I'm still very much interested in in continuing to think about The United States, but from outside of just the frame of the Continental United States.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
Well, that sounds really exciting, and it sounds like you might be dialoguing a bit more in Asian Pacific studies. Yeah, so that would be pretty cool if you started going to our conferences. Yeah, we're kind of out of time, but I want to thank you for answering my questions and also speaking with the audience out there. Before we go though, I wanna thank Margaret Sattler, the staff person from the University of Minnesota Press who has been listening in on this conversation and helping us with tech. So we really appreciate, Margaret and all the other folks at the press who support new and also older as authors.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
And, Allison, if you wanna say any, parting words.
K. Allison Hammer:
Yeah. Just thank you so much for being here with me. I really, really appreciate it and value your insightful questions. And thanks everyone for listening. And, yes, Margaret, thank you so much for doing tech for us and making all this happen.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
Thank you, everyone. Good night.
K. Allison Hammer:
Thank you.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo:
Good morning and good afternoon, etcetera.
K. Allison Hammer:
This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The books Masculinity in Transition and Filipino Crosscurrents are available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.