even its nemesis. Queerness is organized around a “politics of provocation” (Epstein 1996, 153). For some, it is the fulfillment of a radical marginality, a defiant refusal to be known or make sense, an absolute negativity. It is thoroughly “oblique or off line” (Ahmed 2006a, 565). It is “anti-social,” located “outside and beyond” all forms of collective life and intelligibility (Edelman 2004, 3).15 For others, queerness is more hopeful, but equally radical, understood as a kind of utopia, a “forward-dawning” (Muñoz 2009, 28) stance toward the future. It is a horizon, a not-yet-here promise of perfect community, wild imagination, and human emancipation. Queerness has also been conceived of as righteous failure. As Halbertsam (2011) suggests, queerness as “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2).
But gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans individuals all make dinner. Even the “queerest of the queer” go food shopping. At times, they consciously choose to fit in and do “normal stuff.” Sometimes—for a variety of reasons—they are unable to refuse the status quo or resist the media they encounter. Sometimes they do not want to unmake or unbecome—especially when making and becoming have been so difficult. For transgender individuals, a group that typically wields less social, political, and economic power, resistance as a political practice or life strategy is not always possible, or even preferable within the context of daily, lived experience.16 To be honest, I have always been uncomfortable placing the responsibility of “the revolution” on the shoulders of the most marginal and disenfranchised. As trans scholar Viviane Namaste (2000) insists, transgender people and experiences are “more than a theory that justifies our existence” and “more than the interesting remark that we expose how gender works” (1). Rather, transgender life is “much less glamorous, than all that … forged in the details of everyday life, marked by matters not discussed by academics or clinical researchers … constituted in the mundane and uneventful” (ibid.).
Sympathetic to Namaste’s critique, this book turns toward transgender experiences in the everyday world and the ways queerness is lived. It considers what is unique about transgender life, but also underscores how transgender people live in common (as common) with others. It attempts to answer why Margie was so insistent that transgender people are “just ordinary people.” Critical, cultural scholarship has yet to come to terms—in any serious or sustained way—with why so many queer and transgender identifying people desire aspects of ordinary, orderly life. What exactly does the ordinary mean to them? What is attractive about it? Why the impulse to stay at home and make dinner for the boyfriend?
In this book, I use the word “ordinary” strategically to move away from the clinical, diagnostic, and deeply moralistic connotations of the word “normal.” This is not to say that “the ordinary” does not share some of its meaning with the word “normal,” as both imply a sense of order. In its earliest usage, for example, the word “ordinary” referred to an imposed order, “something done by rule or authority” (Williams 1983, 225). However, these meanings represent only half the story. The ordinary is far more capacious, more than an expression of regulatory or disciplinary power. For cultural theorist Raymond Williams (1989), the ordinary is inherently “good.” “Culture is ordinary,” he writes, “an interest in learning or the arts is simple, pleasant and natural. A desire to know what is best, and to do what is good, is the whole positive nature of man” (7). Likewise, philosopher Stanley Rosen (2002) suggests the ordinary revolves around doing “the right thing,” determining between better and worse, and striving to “respond correctly to things, experiences, events, and so on, as they actually are” (263).17
Ordinariness is also about being in connection and communication with others, sharing space and time with them. It is about existing on a field of social interaction as an intelligible and recognized person. It hinges on recognition, to be recognized in public space (and virtual space) without issue. Ordinariness is about participating in the communication and cultural rituals that allow us to feel communion with others, to feel part of something greater than ourselves. It is about being “together in fellowship,” a fellowship organized around “the celebration of shared even if illusory beliefs” (Carey 1992, 43).
At the most basic level, the ordinary was less about the “normal” (and normative) and more about “the everyday” for the participants in my study. Their desire for the ordinary was essentially an aspiration for the rhythms and affordances typically granted in everyday life. Ease, comfort, and mindlessness. Communication, ritual, and routine. The ability to be both someone—to be recognized and affirmed—and no one—to be left alone and ignored. These are some of the gifts of everyday life.
Indeed, as Felski (1999) maintains, the everyday has no “intrinsic political content,” nor is it ideologically “reactionary” (31). Rather, it is a site of potentiality, a “bloom space” (Seigworth and Greg 2010, 9). It is a deeply sensual world where our dreams, fantasies, feelings, and emotions germinate and launch. The everyday is where we experience pleasure and pain, love and loss, silence and boredom. In its spaces, we engage with technology to “extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within” (Turkle 2011, 307). Even the seemingly frustrating and colorless characteristics of everyday life have an alternative side. Although the incessant and predictable routine of the everyday can feel monotonous, it can also provide comfort and pleasure. Everyday life offers simple and basic joys, luxuries, and conveniences. These are not just the purchased pleasures of consumer society, but deeply human moments: spontaneous conversations with strangers at a bar or leisurely walks down Main Street.
Perhaps the greatest gift of everyday life is the way it affords us the ability to move through it without much thought or trouble, to operate in the world in taken-for-granted ways. Indeed, an everyday life defined by constant struggle and laborious thought is essentially unworkable and unlivable. However, the taken-for-grantedness of everyday life is unequally distributed, more easily accessible to some than others. For the individuals who shared their stories with me and who defy the gender binary, battle stigma, and face systematic disenfranchisement, the rhythms and routines of the everyday are not simply granted. They are hard-won, practical accomplishments, the end result of individual and collective labor.18 This struggle for the ordinary, a struggle increasingly being waged in and through media culture, is what this book is about.
In attending to questions of ordinariness, this book redresses some of queer, cultural, and critical theory’s greatest liabilities: their general lack of engagement with everyday experiences, the theoretical impasse they create through the queer/normal binary, and the reductive framework of politics-as-resistance that underpin their epistemic and methodological ground. Throughout the book I develop the notion of the ordinary by examining the quotidian side of transgender life. I focus on those lower, mundane, and quieter dimensions often overlooked or dismissed by researchers and theorists. I root my inquiry in the microphysics of participants’ everyday lives—while not losing sight of the larger questions. I also investigate what “ordinary representations of transgender people” in media culture look like and mean to the participants in my study. Over and again they expressed a desire to see people not defined by their transgender identity, but rather as people who, as they said, “happen to be” transgender. Rather than dismissing this as a desire for assimilation or normativity, I take this sentiment seriously and theorize it as aspirational, as a hunger for everyday life possibilities. I consider participants’ wish to “be” ordinary and their struggle to accomplish ordinary status.
In line with Scannell (2014), I conceive of “being ordinary” as the ability to “matter-of-factly be in a world that allows me to be about my everyday concerns, whatever that may be, in ways that are essentially unproblematic” (22; emphasis in original). Accordingly, I explore how media encounters can make a sense of the ordinary more or less out of reach for participants, and the ways they use technology in struggling for and achieving a sense of everydayness. Finally, I complicate the queer/normal binary and discuss the ways participants think about and merge the forces of queerness and normality in their everyday lives and in their interactions with media culture. I argue that they envision
