perspective. “Ever since coming out as trans, and living it, my view of the world has certainly broadened.” As a queer person, she loves spending nights out dancing at gay bars, partying in Key West, and making friends in the LGBT community—something she never did before her transition. She considers sexuality and gender to be fluid concepts and laments how they are too often narrowly defined. Margie’s gender transition also queered her marriage. Recently, Margie and her wife made the decision to open up and redefine their relationship. Both have started to date men. Although they are often mistaken for a lesbian couple when they go out, they routinely check out potential male lovers together. Revealing a playful grin, Margie explained, “The funny thing is when we go shopping and she dotes on me, people perceive us as a lesbian couple. That bothers her a little bit. I love her and I grab her and give her a big kiss, but she doesn’t want to be perceived as a lesbian. That’s fine. I’d rather have the guys hitting on me anyways.”
***
Margie’s story speaks to the central themes and concerns of this book, namely, the many influences of media and technologies of communication on the everyday lives of transgender individuals. In her life narrative, media were leading protagonists. They both structured the norms that limited her life possibilities and offered avenues of agency and self-authorship. From reading the Christine Jorgensen paperback to experimenting with transgender identity in Internet chat rooms, Margie’s media use influenced and interacted with the dynamics and contexts of her life situation to transform how she performed gender, understood sexual subjectivity, and lived her everyday life. Media were used as resources for information and self-exploration, and helped her facilitate difficult interpersonal conversations. They were also ambassadors to the outside world, as she looked to and relied on them to explain transgender experience to broader audiences. Media were also affective engines, as they stirred and moved her. They generated powerful resonances, provoking a spectrum of emotions ranging from disappointment and discomfort to excitement and hope. They reinforced feelings of loneliness, while simultaneously introducing horizons of possibility. Finally, throughout her gender transition, media made a sense of ordinary life more or less within reach.
In chronicling the experiences of people like Margie, this book offers a portrait of how transgender individuals lived with media toward the latter part of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. This was a time before the recent wave of transgender visibility in our culture, before what Time magazine called the “Transgender Tipping Point” (Steinmetz 2014). It was before Caitlyn Jenner and her reality TV show, before Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, Amazon’s Transparent, and the current transgender reality television boom. It was before the celebrity of Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, and before transgender male models graced the cover of Men’s Health magazine. Situated during this historic moment, during a time of growing but uneven and scattered access to transgender representation and communication networks, this book offers a snapshot of how transgender audiences made their way toward identity and ordinary life. It explores how they integrated the available media discourses into their emotional, cognitive, and everyday experiences. It investigates the media practices transgender individuals employed to achieve and preserve what Butler (2004) calls a “liveable life” (225), that is to say, a life that consists of “what humans require in order to maintain and reproduce the conditions of their own livability” (226).
Preliminary research into these issues has furnished important insights confirming, for example, that media help transgender communities politically organize, find information and resources, share life stories, perform identity work, and feel less alone.1 These studies are important first steps, but have only begun to scratch the surface. As Margie’s life situation illustrates, the story is far more layered, complicated, mundane, and entrenched in the everyday than this work reveals. This book’s objective then is to offer an empirically grounded and deeply contextualized analysis of the intersection between media, transgender experience, and everyday life.
Media Audiences and Everyday Life
This book foregrounds transgender individuals as media audiences and users of technology. It spotlights their thoughts and experiences, allowing them to speak on their own behalf. Aligning itself with their point of view, it privileges an “emic” (Fetterman 1989) or insider’s perspective, seeking to understand transgender individuals and communities on their own terms. This approach emerges from a rich tradition in the qualitative, ethnographic study of media reception and use.2 Broadly speaking, audience ethnographies focus on the interpretive work of audiences (Livingstone 2003), or the meanings they bring to and take away from encounters with media and technology. Audience ethnographies situate audiences within the complexities of living in the everyday world, trying to “get a grasp of our contemporary ‘media culture,’ particularly as it can be seen in the role of the media in everyday life” (Alasuutari 1999, 6).
This book’s inquiry is anchored in everyday life—that intuitive and familiar yet ultimately nebulous concept. While we all have an everyday life, and harbor a sense of what it is, its exact definition is elusive, multiple, and contested. In this book, I approach everyday life in line with Lefebvre (1991), as a kind of “fertile soil” (87), a generative ground beneath our feet from which all human activity grows. It is our home base, our domus, an utterly known place defined by repetition, habit, and order (Bonner 2003; Felski 1999; Highmore 2002). In this way, everyday life is “the essential, taken-for-granted continuum of mundane activities that frames our forays into more esoteric or exotic worlds” (Felski 1999, 15). At the same time, everyday life is elastic and ripe for incursion by the queer and the uncanny. As Creed (2005) suggests, “the supposedly stable nature of the everyday, its regulatory laws, are easily undermined,” and its character engenders a “strange alliance of familiar and unfamiliar” (485).
The taken-for-granted continuum of everyday life, one always poised for metamorphosis, is a site of competing power relations and a relentless struggle between structure and agency. For scholars such as Lefebvre (1991, 2002), everyday life was fundamentally exploitative: governed by capitalist elites, colonized by the logic of the commodity, and plagued with unequal power relations.3 Others such as Michel de Certeau (1984) argued that even as everyday life is constrained by a “grid of discipline” (xiv), human agency and creativity ultimately lie at its core. In the everyday, de Certeau (1984) argued, “users make (bricolent) innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules” (xiii–xiv).
I adopt the point of view that everyday life is not fully constituted by structure or by agency. Rather, it is a dialectical relationship between macro-level forces and micro-level individual practices. Following Kaplan and Ross (2002), the everyday exists
somewhere in the rift opened up between the subjective, phenomenological, sensory apparatus of the individual and reified institutions … Institutions, codes, and paradigms are not abstract constructs confronting us in some official “out there.” Nor do we come to institutions alone. We live in them in historically specific ways, and we live them. (79)
Everyday life is exactly this space of living: living with, living in, living in-between, and living against power. Yet, the everyday is remarkably more than the calculated workings of power, more than a field upon which market forces or politics play out. Even Lefebvre (1991) conceded that everyday life “has a secret life and a richness of its own” (87).
Following in the ethnographic tradition, this book delves deeply into everyday experience to draw out its secret life. It investigates the large and small challenges, triumphs, and contradictions of being transgender and living in a world increasingly organized around communications technologies. As Carey (1992) argues, “modern communications have drastically altered the ordinary terms of experience and consciousness, the ordinary structures of interest and feeling, the normal sense of being alive, of having a social relation” (1–2). This book interrogates the relationship between these media developments and transgender life. In other words, it delineates the “media life” of my participants; a life lived “in” media and one made possible
