Trans Womanhood Now and Then: Catherine Keller’s Apocalypse Pattern and the Eschatological Horizon of Gender

Are trans women, in the words of Catherine Keller, “doing an apocalypse?” This paper conducts a (re)reading of Keller’s Apocalypse Now and Then, exploring whether and how her concept of “apocalypse pattern” can both enable and circumscribe the process of transitioning for trans women. Keller discusses the apocalypse pattern’s manifestation in essentialist feminist discourse that maintains a narrow view of womanhood in the anticipation of women’s liberation. She also echoes critiques of anti-essentialist feminist discourse and its own apocalyptic tendency to purge feminism of essentialism. This paper engages Keller’s reading of essentialist and anti-essentialist feminist discourses on gender to argue that their respective apocalyptic tendencies defer or close the possibility of womanhood for trans women. I conclude that Keller’s concept of “counter-apocalypse” proves useful for trans women’s negotiation of the tension between an immanent realization of womanhood and an eschatological horizon of womanhood.