Struggling for Ordinary. Andre Cavalcante
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Midwest and San Francisco. Although trans people of color are represented in the study, my sample skews white. My sample also consists of those who answered my research call and felt comfortable enough talking about themselves in detail and allowing me to observe their world. Moreover, as anthropologist David Valentine (2007) illuminated in his ethnography, the category “transgender” hails certain kinds of individuals and, like all social categories, includes and excludes. His work showed that the working class, people of color, and those with limited education are less likely to be familiar with the language of transgender and may not identify with the category. Despite these conditions, “transgender” has mobilized an array of gender differences under its umbrella, and the term’s gravitational center, its connective tissue, “is the defense of the right of each individual to define themselves” (Feinberg 1996, xi). This act of self-definition, however, first requires the realization that transgender identity is possible.
Possible Self, Possible Life
One of the first themes to emerge as I began my fieldwork, and one that would recur throughout, was the question of possibility. At some point in their life, every participant in my study questioned whether trans life and identity was possible, and if so, how. Although they searched, they typically failed to find transgender people in their local community, in their religious organizations, shopping malls, and social events. In their immediate, everyday world, transgender was largely defined in and through invisibility and erasure.7
Moreover, participants were also aware of the structural challenges and systematic disenfranchisement that come with living openly as a trans person. For example, the 2009 “National Transgender Discrimination Survey” concluded that the transgender community experiences twice the rate of unemployment as the general population, endures almost universal harassment on the job, and experiences a homeless rate of about one in five.8 Violence against transgender people is also alarmingly high. Studies conducted by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) conclude that violence disproportionately impacts transgender individuals—particularly transgender women and transgender people of color. In 2013, 72% of all LGBTQ homicides were trans women and 67% were trans women of color. Transgender individuals were also seven times more likely to experience physical violence when dealing with law enforcement than the general population.9
It is no surprise then that the participants in my study struggled against an ideology of transgender impossibility, an entrenched perception that transgender is essentially abject, undesirable, and untenable. This dilemma of possibility—the question of being “real” and viable—lies at the core of queer experience. According to Judith Butler (2004), “the thought of a possible life is only an indulgence for those who already know themselves to be possible. For those who are still looking to become possible, possibility is a necessity” (219). Possibility must loom on the horizon before individuals can take the first steps toward transgender life and subjectivity. My research reveals that media and communications technologies can both impede and/or support this stride.
Media are arbiters of possibility. As instruments of power/knowledge (Foucault 1980), they franchise what is and is not possible. They borrow from the architecture of daily life and, according to Silverstone (1994), furnish the “metaphors and myths of the stuff of everyday experience and discourse” (167). Media help determine the extent to which identities are legitimate, sanctioned, and “real.” They set the parameters of everyday life and suggest who is (and is not) deserving of one.10 Importantly, media and technology are not the only arbiters of everyday possibilities. Educational institutions, medical authorities, religious organizations, market logics, and the state, for example, are equally important forces. Each mobilizes power and exhibits its own force relations in structuring the normative patterns of the world. However, in this book my focus is on media and the ways their publicity, accessibility, and everydayness set the terms for transgender possibilities.
Throughout contemporary Western history, popular media have overwhelmingly constructed being trans and having an everyday life as a binary opposition. In traditional media such as film and television, transgender figures bear the burden of hyperbole and can only live extraordinary lives punctuated with extreme violence, loneliness, or martyrdom. Even with greater diversification, the same often holds true for newer, emergent media. Consider, for instance, the short-lived 2010 iPhone photo application “Peek-A-Boo Tranny.” The Apple Store’s description of the product read: “Girlfriend, you may think that picture you’re taking is super cute, but wait until one of our fierce tranny gals jumps in and makes it a party!” The application altered digital photos by embedding a clownish picture of a transgender woman—typically holding a lollipop with a frothy expression on her face—into the background. “Peek-A-Boo Tranny” staged a kind of gender minstrelsy, turning transgender identity into a cartoonish caricature. Infantilizing and trivializing, the application was a troubling appropriation of the transgender body for non-transgender audiences. Faced with pressure from LGBT organizations such as GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and the Bilerico Project, Apple eventually removed the application from its iTunes store (Simon 2010). Sprung from the dark underbelly of digital media culture, “Peek-A-Boo Tranny” is exactly the kind of imagery that undergirds the ideology of transgender impossibility.
At the same time and equally as important, media are more than engines of impossibility. They are also precious resources of self and life-affirmation. For the participants in my study, encounters with media culture cultivated deep aspirations and feelings of hope and possibility. In looking to become possible and in imagining transgender futures, they turned toward media, securing comfort, communion, and glimmers of self-recognition. Across “old” and “new” technologies, and even in the most unlikely of places such as The Jerry Springer Show or comic books, their media use showed them that trans subjectivity was viable and available.
Figure I.1. Image of the “Peek-A-Boo Tranny” app.
Indeed, since the early twentieth century, the products of popular media have been the most widely available platforms of queer, transgender, and gender-nonconforming visibility (Doty 1993). Although they have often relied on well-worn clichés and stereotypes, these representations have been accessible features of a commonly shared cultural landscape. Queer audiences have, for example, reveled in Marlene Dietrich’s cross-gender performance in the 1930 film Morocco; delighted in the gay-male melodrama of the 1970 film The Boys in the Band; became captivated by the shocking drag of Divine in John Waters’s 1972 film Pink Flamingos; heralded Julie Andrews playing a woman disguised as a man working as a female impersonator in the 1982 film Victor/Victoria; and howled at the campy absurdity of TV personality Pee Wee Herman throughout the 1980s. As MTV became a cultural lightning rod, they relished the androgyny of Boy George, Grace Jones, Prince, and Annie Lenox. They cheered when Ellen DeGeneres announced her lesbianism on network television in the 1990s; laughed at the antics of the openly gay character Jack in the sitcom Will & Grace (1998–2006); and ached from the pain and suffering depicted in the transgender themed film Boys Don’t Cry (1999). As cable television became increasingly competitive and boundary pushing in the 1990s, queer audiences watched the gay-casted makeover show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003–2007), and tuned into Showtime’s queer-themed dramatic series Queer as Folk (2000–2005) and The L Word (2004–2009). In recent years, they have rooted for their favorite drag queen contestant on Ru Paul’s Drag Race (2009–present) and took to streaming video to follow lesbian and transgender characters on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black (2013–present) and transgender parenting on Amazon’s Transparent (2014–present).
Even in times of representational drought, audiences have actively queered media texts by recoding the dominant meanings embedded in them to fit their own sensibilities.11 In their imaginations, they turned straight characters gay and bisexual (Jenkins 1992), and transformed men into women. Despite periods of censorship, for example during the years of the Hollywood Production Code, queer and gender variant images still routinely slipped through the cracks of the film industry’s institutional matrix (Lugowski 1999). Indeed, according to Doty (1993), queerness is not peripheral to media and popular culture, but endures as one of its defining elements.
Importantly, for those living on the margins of society, queer media