In the chapters that follow, I explore how participants have engaged with media culture to construct identity, preserve self, and try to achieve everydayness. Underlying these practices was an essential tension, one characterized by the pull of queerness and ordinariness, sameness and difference, closeness and distance, stability and instability, and outsiderness and insiderness. The question about how to come to terms with these seemingly contradictory forces manifested throughout my fieldwork. Indeed, this question is so central to transgender life that it has emerged in other ethnographic work. In his study on female-to-male (FTM) transgender people living in San Francisco, Boston, and New York, Rubin (2003) found that “the tension between the ordinary and the unconventional structures every element of their lives” (3). This tension was equally a concern for me as I tried to make sense of and write about it. I wrestled with how to analyze participant data in new ways, ways that were nuanced and that refused to reduce their thoughts and experiences to false consciousness or mindless assimilation. In this way, this book highlights two struggles for the ordinary. The first concerns the work that participants in my study performed, using media to access the taken-for-granted rhythms and affordances of everyday life and to thrive in a world created without them in mind. The second struggle for the ordinary was my own as I tried to find a vocabulary suitable for talking about ordinariness and queerness in the same breath. My goal is to do justice to both.
Overview
Chaz Bono. Orange Is the New Black. Caitlyn Jenner. More than 50 gender identity options on Facebook. Transparent. “Bathroom bill” controversy. In recent years, a new trans visibility has emerged in media culture. But since the mid-twentieth century, transgender visibility proliferated across various cultural sites, albeit slowly and unevenly. This visibility was made possible through the unfolding of specific historical developments: the construction of gender as a non-binary category, the expansion of transgender discourse, and the sociopolitical mobilization of the transgender community throughout the twentieth century; the rise of gay-themed media content during the 1990s, which set the stage for transgender representations; and the growth of interactive communications technologies that provided space for transgender voices to flourish. The first chapter examines transgender visibility amid these historical developments. In doing so, it provides the macroscopic context for the book, the larger picture against which the stories of the participants in my study play out.
After establishing this context, the second chapter turns to media and the ideology of transgender impossibility they generate. It examines how participants interpreted popular media representations in terms of transgender violence, dehumanization, and delegitimization. I argue that these themes emerge in participant interviews not only because they frequently appear in media, but also because they are fundamentally at risk in the everyday lives of trans people. Remaining safe, maintaining personhood, and being taken seriously are all at stake in living a trans life. They inform the interpretive frameworks and evaluative criteria participants employ in media encounters and transform the notion of transgender everydayness into an object of desire. I analyze transgender ordinariness and everydayness as a site of hope and possibility, and maintain it is exactly the everyday that participants felt was woefully missing from media representations of transgender and what they wanted to see.
Chapter 3 moves from impossibility to possibility, exploring the active construction of self in the face of media power. It delineates how the ability to acknowledge and articulate a possible transgender self emerges through meaningful interactions with media discourses and communication technologies. According to participants, media generate the ability to imagine a trans life and to author plausible stories of self-transformation. Paying close attention to the role of images and language, the chapter reveals how the Internet provides resources that help participants think and talk about their identities and everyday experiences in new and pragmatic ways.
Chapter 4 explores the strength required to achieve trans subjectivity and the affective toll media reception can take on trans audiences. It highlights what I term “resilient reception” or the strategies of adaptation, methodologies of survival, and tactics of preserving self that study participants employ in coping with the affective disruptions and disempowering messages they encounter from media and society. This focus moves us beyond studies of audiences that singularly take into account their ideological and political interactions with media.
Chapter 5 renders visible transgender individuals’ struggle for the ordinary, or the constant and deliberate work devoted to achieving the uneventful and common inclusions and affordances of everyday, associative life. For study participants, routine daily tasks such as running errands or using a public restroom were often complicated and potentially risky endeavors. To manage, navigate, and overcome these challenges, participants turned to media. However, while the affordances of media were helpful for participants, this chapter also explores their limitations.
The conclusion of the book advances the idea of the “queerly ordinary,” a theoretical attempt to move beyond the “normal/queer” binary. The queerly ordinary is a hybrid form of self and life-making that exists as a little bit queer and a little bit ordinary. I argue that this is how study participants think about themselves and their gender identities. The queerly ordinary is what they want to see represented in media, what they use technologies to achieve, and in the end, it is how they live their everyday lives.
1
We Can No Longer Hide in Plain Sight
From the Cultural Margins to the Tipping Point
“The days of that brown wrapper are definitely over,” explained Allyson, a white trans woman in her late fifties from the Midwestern United States. Throughout the 1980s, Allyson received a monthly newsletter published by the local cross-dressing organization. It was mailed to her home wrapped in brown paper to conceal its contents. Each time she saw the newsletter sitting in her mailbox, she shuddered with excitement. Flipping through its pages made her feel part of something bigger than herself, and made her look forward to the organization’s next meeting. To ensure the safety and anonymity of its members, the cross-dressing organization operated under a veil of secrecy. Mailed correspondence was camouflaged, meeting times and locations circulated by word of mouth, and there were rules about how members should and should not communicate outside the walls of group meetings. Given the group’s covert nature, Allyson felt fortunate to have found it. She remembered, “At the time, finding support groups was a major issue for everyone. It took so much effort and many whispers. I found out about the group I went to through word of mouth. It was all very secretive.” She continued to explain her experiences with the group. “It met once a month at a hotel. The manager there was understanding and gave us a room to change in … I was married at the time and had to hide it from my wife. But I think she might have known. When we would have dinner parties and such, I would end up in the kitchen talking to the women. That’s where I fit in the best.”
For Allyson, as well as for many trans people living through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, transgender organizations and their newsletters were some of the only connections they had to a sense of community and their sole source of trans visibility. “There was nothing out there,” Allyson insisted, “an occasional something on TV, but that’s it.” This was, as many of my participants called it, the “pre-Internet age,” the mid- to late twentieth century, the era of the mass media dominated by print, radio, film, and television. This media environment was structured around a broadcasting model, where media texts were produced by a small group of elite creators and imparted to a mass audience. Space was finite. There was only so much radio-frequency spectrum available, only so many books that could stock bookstore shelves. Production costs and barriers to entry were high. Audiences were conceptualized as a “mass” (Nightingale and Ross 2003) and overwhelmingly imagined by the media industries as white, heterosexual,