Struggling for Ordinary. Andre Cavalcante
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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 through the “interdependency of humanity and technology” (Deuze 2012, xii). Its inquiry does not limit its focus to one particular media form, genre, or narrative. Rather, it examines the “media environments” of transgender individuals, or the ensemble of communications technologies available to them and utilized in the everyday.4 Cutting across historic space and time, the book examines the media environments of both older and younger transgender people. It addresses what it was like to be transgender in a world when it was generally unseen and unknowable—before cable TV, Netflix, and the Internet. It highlights the realities of living in a more traditional, less diverse media environment, defined by scarcity and technological differentiation. At the same time, it also reveals the social impact of technological change as media have become increasingly ubiquitous, accessible, interactive, and defined by “convergence” (Jenkins 2006), a process in which “consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” (3).
In exploring how transgender individuals use media across time (across historic time and across the span of their individual lifetimes), I draw out the similarities among and differences between “old” and “new” technology, emphasizing what they make (and fail to make) possible for users. In this way, I adopt a “practice theory” of media (Couldry 2012), conceptualizing media and technology within the context of their everyday use. Such a “practice” approach understands media in terms of “actions that are directly oriented to media; actions that involve media without necessarily having media as their aim or object; and actions whose possibility is conditioned by the prior existence, presence, or functioning of media” (Couldry 2012, 35; emphasis in original).5 I situate transgender individuals’ everyday media use alongside other life experiences and practices, and at the juncture of various micro- and macroeconomic, political, and social forces that shape their world. In doing so, I aim to generate a theoretical architecture for considering those quieter, less heroic, and less politically conspicuous forms of media use, which typically go unnoticed by researchers.
“He Knows the Ground Rules”
“This is Andre Cavalcante. He is a scholar researching media and transgender issues. I’ve allowed him to observe