Trans Vitalities

Mapping Ethnographies of Trans Social and Political Coalitions

Elijah Adiv Edelman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780815356516
• eBook ISBN: 9781351128001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book applies a framework of 'trans vitalities' through an ethnographically-anchored exploration of trans coalitional labor and activism in Washington, DC. Specifically, it considers how trans social justice work at the local level exemplifies why and how the notions of 'trans community' or 'trans rights' must be reconfigured. Trans vitalities, as a framework developed in this volume, functions in three particular ways: 1) to disrupt and rethink what valuable, viable, or quantifiable quality of life looks like; 2) to shift our understandings of community towards 'coalition'; and 3) as a methodological, theoretical, and application-based set of tools that integrates a radical trans politics and community-based approach towards addressing trans lives. Trans Vitalities incorporates one-on-one interviews, community map-making projects, and an analysis of the DC Trans Needs Assessment, produced through trans coalitional labor.

An accessible case study for both how to research trans-specific topics and how to apply a framework of trans vitalities, this book is valuable reading for those who research or instruct on LGBTQ topics as well as activists, policy makers, and law makers.

1Trans studies and anthropologists studying ‘trans people’

Trans studies—or research on or about the experiences, identities, and practices of transgender, transsexual, trans, or gender-non-binary communities of practice—is a relatively new area of focus within the discipline of anthropology. Anthropologists who engage in trans-specific research may do so in any geographic location and across the primary subfields of the discipline: socio-cultural, biological/physical, archeological, and linguistical. Historically, anthropologists who have conducted research or examined gender practices that do not fit within a traditional Western sex-gender binary have done so outside of the context of North Atlantic populations, with the exception of indigenous communities. Much of this literature emerged out of a focus on non-heterosexual sexual practices or identities. Moreover, older scholarship on gender transgression did not necessarily reflect the words or experiences of those being researched but rather relied on and reflected the markedly eurocentric and ethnocentric approach of the researchers. As such, much of modern trans-specific research conducted in anthropology relies heavily on interdisciplinary texts for both historical and theoretical orientations. Additionally, trans, as a category of analysis, has itself undergone shifts in usage and meaning, which continue to evolve as the field grows. Finally, authorship and representation are important features of trans studies in anthropology as many of those who have had access to the capacity to conduct research and publish texts are not members of the communities that they represent.

Trans studies in anthropology has relied on both interdisciplinary research and also, importantly, has emerged from a focus on sexuality or ‘queer studies’ within anthropological research. Importantly, as Boellstorff et al. (2014), Stryker (2017), Stryker and Aizura (2013), and Towle and Morgan (2002) explore, the categories of queer and transgender must be problematized as they are applied to populations for whom these are not salient identities or categories of practice. As such, a great deal of attention has been paid to distinguishing how queer studies in anthropology might differ from trans studies, as Boellstorff (2007), Hines (2006), and Davidson (2007) examine. Trans studies, as distinct from queer studies, are the focus of both Denny (2013) and Serano (2016).

Trans studies in anthropology builds on theories introduced by both older texts that theorize gender, such as Kessler and McKenna (1978), as well as more modern texts emerging out of other fields, such as Halberstam (2005) and Puar (2017). Importantly, critiques of how ‘difference’ in trans experience and studies has been overly simplified or addressed, or overly represented by non-trans people, are the focal points for Namaste (1996), Irving (2008), Mog and Swarr (2008), and Roen (2001). Stryker (2004) provides a historical context for understanding how and why trans studies has been subsumed in queer studies. While socio-cultural approaches in anthropology have typically produced more trans studies work than other subfields in anthropology, the specificity of those approaches is nonetheless important and distinct from non-anthropological trans research. Blackwood (1998) notes how gender and desire among West Sumatran ‘women’ differ from models used in the West. Similarly, and echoed in Howe et al. (2008) and Tan (2014), Ocha and Earth (2013) focus on the ways in which gender models used in the West to frame trans experience do not necessarily work in the context of Thai sex workers. Echoed in Conner and Sparks (2014), Di Pietro (2016), Dutta and Roy (2014), and Khan (2016), Stryker (2012) identifies how the notion of ‘transsexuality’ emerges as a distinct form of Western anglophone discourse.

There are few monograph-length ethnographies that focus explicitly on trans communities of practice. The monograph-length anthropological works that explore gender transgression as an identity category, such as Driskill (2016) across Cherokee nations, Gaudio (2011) in northern Nigeria, Ochoa (2014) in Venezuela, Reddy (2005) in India, Sinnott (2004) in Thailand, and Swarr (2012) in South Africa do so in tandem with discussions on sexuality. Other texts, while not explicitly produced by anthropologists, such as Najmabadi (2013) in the context of Iran, Raun (2016) in trans online communities, and Namaste (2011) in Canada, provide additional monograph-length explorations of trans studies in practice. Bolin (1998) and Valentine (2007) reflect the only ethnographies produced by anthropologists that focus solely on communities that identify as trans. Edited volumes and anthologies constitute one of the primary avenues for publication of trans studies in anthropology. Older texts, such as Blackwood and Wieringa (1999), Jacobs et al. (1997), and Lewin and Leap (2002), feature texts that are among the first to discuss trans communities of practice in anthropology. Newer texts, such as Driskill (2011), Johnson (2016), and Kuntsman et al. (2014), offer significant contributions to trans studies in general, while still emerging out of anthropological work.

The issues of human rights, social justice work, violence, or maltreatment constitute a large segment of research and discussion in trans studies. Spade (2015) and Currah et al. (2006) provide historical and a contemporary analysis for broad trans political work. Similarly, reports such as Edelman et al. (2015) provide a focused outcome for trans public anthropological work. These texts also include more theoretical discussions on trans rights work, such as Hines and Santos (2018) in the UK and Portugal, Papantonopoulou (2014) in occupied Palestine, Peña (2010) in the Miami-Cuban diaspora, and Vincent and Camminga (2009) in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Trans studies and embodiment

Throughout this text I highlight the importance of the physical, sensate, and biopolitically regulated body in trans experience and practices. As such, in order to explore how trans subjects navigate the terrain of the nation’s capital as a ‘trans city,’ I simultaneously attend to both the phenomenology of the body (i.e., personal lived experience) as it is expressed through lived experience as well as the political, economic, and biopolitical significance of embodied gender-discordant pasts and presents (e.g., the pathology associated with transsexuality or with expressions of trans femininity). I situate the data emerging from the maps—where one goes in the city—within the Washington, DC wherein various social and legal ideologies shape mobility.

While my fundamental question here is how trans persons navigate, discuss, and assign meaning to Washington, DC as a city they live and work in, I tie these discussions to an overarching theme of ‘trans vitalities.’ Specifically, I explore the notion of vitalities through what Elizabeth Grosz frames as a body/city dynamic as ‘complex feedback relation,’ wherein:

[T]he body and its environment, rather, produce each other as forms of the hyperreal, as modes of simulation which have overtaken and transformed … the city is made and made over into the simulacrum of the body, and the body, in its turn, is transformed, ‘citified’, embraced as a distinctly metropolitan body.

(Grosz 1992, 242)

In other words, affect and emotional and physical sensation cannot, and should not, be divorced from the exploration of trans lived experience (as emphasized by Rubin 2003, 30), particularly in how one’s knowledge about their body potentially guides and drives the discretionary logic that frames the narratives of DC as a ‘trans’ city.

While the study of trans experiences has historically overemphasized the body, biological and medical anthropologists have identified how the biomedical sphere articulates with notions of the body and cultural production in significant ways. Importantly, these texts do not focus on the bodies of trans people as a source of deviance or as a way in which to typify gender but rather as belonging to social actors that are impacted by heavily regulated medical technologies. Bucar and Enke (2011), Bucar (2010), and van Eijk (2014) identify how accessing biomedical technologies by trans persons may be used to identify a place or space as ideologically valuable. Durban-Albrecht (2017) explores self-narrated Haitian trans experience through environmental and embodied fractures, while Franklin (2018) contrasts medical legislation in Brazil intended to provide trans health care to ultimately devalued forms of trans care. Plemons (2017) focuses on the ideological weight assigned to surgical practices that seek to ‘feminize’ the bone structure of the face in the United States. Geller (2005) considers how skeletal remains are gendered as a cultural, rather than biological, practice. Jarrín (2016) highlights the ways in which biomedical intervention may be inappropriately assumed to be desired by travestis in the Brazilian context. Similarly, Zengin (2014) argues that it is the medical establishment in Turkey that requires a desire for specific embodiments rather than the trans persons seeking care.

The few texts that do reflect a geographically situated exploration of trans lived experience (Valentine 2007; Stryker 2012; Namaste 1996) do not attend simultaneously to multiple lived and experiential bodies but rather focus on specific groups or identity categories. Those that attend to a feeling and embodied trans body do so productively through phenomenological approaches (Rubin 2003, 27) and through the embodied narratives of lived experience (Prosser 1998; Cromwell 1999, 32), but do not attend deeply to the broader socio-political structures framing those experiences. In this project I attend to situated trans lived experience that both takes into account intersecting subjectivities as well as the somatic and sensual body in the political-economic conditions of its production. This project shifts the focus from just the body or the space and explores the conversation emerging with that dialectic—how meaning is produced and felt by the subject and in the place.

With this in mind, the role of medical and psychological diagnosis places a particular burden on trans persons attempting to gain access to capital and cultural productivity. In the US context, deeply infused with assumptions of neoliberal political economy, this productivity is linked to the capacity to maintain stable employment, to fit normative gender roles, and other normalizing technologies. To secure employment in the formal economy, one must first produce documents detailing one’s citizenship, such as a driver’s license or birth certificate, and thus candidacy for employment; for the gender transgressor, the process of acquiring these documents is lengthy, potentially costly, and demands ascription to particular racialized, heteronormative, and classed-based gender hegemonies (Meyer et al. 2002; Roen 2001, 511; Stryker 2008; Finn and Dell 1999). Vis-à-vis fulfillment of medico-legal definitions of gender pathology as outlined by the medical establishment, a trans person can gain access to technologies that ‘repair’ this mind-body discordance, and thus access to legal documentation of one’s citizenship (Meyer et al. 2001). These technologies, such as hormone treatment and surgery, ‘correct’ both the political demands made of trans subjects to be ‘normal,’ and result in very real discomfort felt by many trans subjects. At present one must secure a diagnosis of ‘Gender Identity Disorder’ (the official diagnosis term used at the time of this research as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)) or ‘Gender Dysphoria’ (the diagnosis term that replaced GID in the 2012 version of the DSM) to access medical and legal resources. This evaluative demand, or even the mere labeling of one’s experience as ‘transsexual,’ works to demand an erasure of variability in gender expression and identity and apply pathology to vastly different kinds of bodies and experience. That said, this ‘diagnosis’ nonetheless responds to a very real, and valid, embodied experience among persons who do not identify with the gender assigned to them at birth. Not all trans people identify as having GID or as being trans, yet they all tend to experience, to varied degrees and in multiple ways, a sense of gender discordance, which in turn becomes politicized by the nation-state.

It is through a ‘successful’ body transformation, wherein one has produced an image of having ‘shifted’ perfectly from one hegemonic gender category to another in physical form, that trans subjects may acquire the documents that prove their citizenship and thus authenticate their ability to be productive (Irving 2008). What is key here is that this ‘recourse to normativity’ erases or prevents the formation of any kind of salient political or social difference, which, again, serves to both unite and segment trans coalitions as a whole (Aizura 2006, 302). That is, in order to appease both the medical professionals and the nation-state one must strictly reproduce a particular kind of raced and classed gender normativity; to be a person of color, queer, gender queer, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Tracing entangled trans desire lines—vitalities and geometries of motion
• 1 Trans studies and anthropologists studying ‘trans people’
• 2 Washington, DC: Depicting trans spatialities
• 3 Mapping as method: Articulations of bodies in place
• 4 Mapping ideology and embodied practices: Approaches to documenting and discussing lived experience
• 5 Measuring vitalities
• 6 Towards a generative politics of life: Trans vitalities through spatialities of social justice
• Index