Product Description

"Imagining Transgender" is an ethnographic examination of the emergence and institutionalization of "transgender" as a category of collective identity. Embraced by activists in the early 1990s as a means to advocate for rights and services specific to the needs of gender variant people, the category quickly gained momentum in public health, social service, scholarly, and legislative contexts. Working as a safe-sex activist in Manhattan during the late 1990s, David Valentine conducted ethnographic research, mostly among male-to-female transgender-identified people, across sites including drag balls, support groups, meetings of a cross-dresser organization, clinics, bars, and clubs. He found that while young fem queens were labeled "transgender" by social service agencies and activists, many of them either did not know the term or were fiercely resistant to its use. They self-identified as gay.Valentine analyzes the reasons for and potential consequences of this difference - between how some of the most vulnerable and marginalized gender variant people conceive of themselves and how they are perceived by service providers and others. Valentine argues that "transgender" was so rapidly adopted because it clarifies a model of gender and sexuality that has been gaining traction since the 1970s: a paradigm in which gender and sexuality are distinct arenas of human experience. Prevalent within feminism, psychiatry, and mainstream gay and lesbian politics, this distinction and categories based on it unintentionally exclude some gender variant people - particularly poor persons of color - for whom gender and sexuality are deeply connected experiences.Valentine does not oppose the rise of "transgender" as a category; he appreciates the genuine legal, medical, and social advances it has facilitated. Instead, he advocates a broad, inclusive vision of social justice and an attentiveness to the politics of language.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #734648 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
"There is a paucity of ethnographically based work on transgender, and David Valentine's book is a major contribution not only ethnographically but also historically and theoretically. Valentine is concerned with a range of value and political questions, committed explicitly to humane positions without being ideological or propagandist."--Esther Newton, author of Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas "The definitive study that documents the rise and spread of 'transgender' as a category and a field of knowledge, activism, and power but also as a mechanism for disenfranchisement, discrimination, and violence. Deeply learned, wonderfully accessible, and ethnographically rich, this remarkable book sets a new benchmark not only for all future work on transgender but also for how we might think about gender, sexuality, identity, and politics more generally."--Don Kulick, author of Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes "David Valentine had the good fortune to be conducting anthropological fieldwork in New York at the precise moment when a new term, 'transgender,' was first coming into widespread use. Now we have the good fortune of sharing his ethnographic insight into this new category's emergence. Imagining Transgender offers a provocative on-the-ground account of this important shift in Western notions of gender identity and sexuality. The book is sure to stir debate in the emerging field of transgender studies, as well as in other disciplines that concern themselves with this timely topic."--Susan Stryker, coeditor of The Transgender Studies Reader