Struggling for Ordinary. Andre Cavalcante
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and activist, Leslie Feinberg, recalled the affirmation she felt encountering the Christine Jorgensen story in news media growing up. “In all the years of my childhood, I had only heard of one person who seemed similarly ‘different,’ ” notes Feinberg (1992). “I had no other adult role model who crossed the boundaries of sex or gender. Christine Jorgensen’s struggle became a message to me that I wasn’t alone” (6–7).
Offering the promise of queer and transgender possibility, media representations can be profoundly transformative as an outlet for self-discovery. As Stuart Hall (1990) maintains, identity is created “within, not outside, representation” (222). It is an ongoing process of suturing the self to historical and cultural discourses (Hall 1990), and media provide the raw materials (the needle and thread) for its construction. For instance, film theorists have long maintained that characters on the “big screen”—as they perform for us and gaze in our direction—invite opportunities for audiences to participate in fantasy, desire, and identity play.12 Interfacing with figures on screen, queer audiences strategically adopt multiple subject positions, formulate attractions, and engage in various identifications. Beyond film, media such as television, magazines, websites, books, comics, online video, mobile technologies, and social networking platforms all function as nerve centers for “queer identity work” (Gray 2009), for the process of experimenting with, formulating, and extending the limits of queer and transgender identities. Media are ideal tools for queer identity work because they can be consumed secretly and confidentially, in safe spaces, and during times of one’s choosing. They can be collected, saved, and archived in personal media libraries. They can be appreciated over and over again and easily shared and circulated within communities.
Media and communications technologies lend themselves to “tactical” practices of self and life-making. According to social theorist Michel de Certeau (1984), in navigating the structures, organizations, and power relations of everyday life, individuals employ an ensemble of tactics. Tactics are those creative, local, and surreptitious “ways of making do” that work with and against an imposed order (29). As “an art of the weak” (37), they are devices and maneuvers intended to circumvent, challenge, and creatively refashion the world, allowing individuals to carve out their own trajectory through the everyday.
The people who shared their stories with me used media and technology in tactical ways.13 They turned to digital technologies to cultivate an understanding of their identities and to achieve the common inclusions and routine affordances of everyday life from which they were often excluded. They used mobile applications to help locate gender-neutral bathrooms and visited websites to learn how to talk about themselves. They participated in discussion forums to vent and let off steam. Leveraging the dialectical tensions of everyday life, the participants in my study utilized media to close the distance between transgender and everydayness that same media helped establish.
Struggling for Ordinary
“I’m not transgender and I’m not gay. Those were alternative lifestyles,” explained Lisa. “But after coming to the support group and learning about what it means to be queer, and getting involved with the transgender community, I realized I actually was those things.” Lisa is a white trans woman in her late fifties from the Midwest who volunteers every week at the LGBT community center where Trans Chat meets. Before she began attending the group, Lisa felt lost. She identified as what she called “the typical woman trapped in a man’s body,” and struggled with social isolation. Yet, in volunteering at the community center, attending the weekly Trans Chat meetings, and exploring transgender and queer identities online, she eventually adopted a new vision of herself and forged a new life trajectory, a queer life trajectory. “I now live how I want to live … I’m not trapped in anything. I’m a transgender woman and I’m queer … My wife was also trans, she was non-operable and I was post-op. This is my big queer life.”
As Lisa’s words underscore, one of queer thought’s leading contributions has been its ability to help individuals creatively imagine and boldly practice a “different way to be human” (Wilchins 2004, 4). Queer discourse augments our vision and shines light onto previously unseen identity possibilities. It “cranes like an approaching wave of potentiality” (Muñoz 2009, 185). It complicates borders and unsettles divisions between gay and straight, male and female, and masculine and feminine. It endorses an unsettled and fluid model of identity, undermining the notion of a unified and stable self. More broadly, queerness offers an interpretive frame and a strategic posture that stands against what a culture conceives of as “normal” (Epstein 1996; Halperin 1995).14 According to Michel Foucault (1995), normalization is pernicious in that it creates stringent rules; differentiates individuals according to dominant norms and averages; hierarchizes individual traits, abilities, and bodies; offers a “constraint of a conformity that must be achieved” (183); and marks rigid boundaries of social acceptability and worth.
In the everyday world, normalization works against LGBTQ individuals in the form of violence, discrimination, and systematic oppression. But it also works on them, absorbing and assimilating them into its value systems. Duggan (2003) refers to this as homonormativity, charging that it generates a “demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture” (50). Echoing this critique, Warner (1999) argues the trouble with normal is that rather than taking up the mantle of cultural difference, political liberation, and social disruption, it compels queer people to “stay at home and make dinner for our boyfriends” (70).
Indeed, queerness is anything but the desire to stay at home and make dinner for the boyfriend. This kind of quiet and ordinary domestic scene, it would appear, is its antithesis, perhaps 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