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Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category

Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category Paperback / softback - 2007

by David Valentine

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Description

Paperback / softback. New. Presents an examination of the emergence and institutionalization of "transgender" as a category of collective identity. This book analyzes the reasons for and potential consequences of this difference - between how some of the gender variant people conceive of themselves and how they are perceived by service providers and others.
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Details

  • Title Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category
  • Author David Valentine
  • Binding Paperback / softback
  • Edition [ Edition: Repri
  • Condition New
  • Pages 320
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, NC
  • Date 2007-08-01
  • Illustrated Yes
  • Features Bibliography, Illustrated, Index, Table of Contents
  • Bookseller's Inventory # A9780822338697
  • ISBN 9780822338697 / 0822338696
  • Weight 0.95 lbs (0.43 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.01 x 6.31 x 0.77 in (22.89 x 16.03 x 1.96 cm)
  • Themes
    • Sex & Gender: Gay
    • Topical: Lgbt
  • Library of Congress subjects Gender identity, Transgenderism
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2007006304
  • Dewey Decimal Code 306.768

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From the publisher

Imagining Transgender is an ethnography of the emergence and institutionalization of transgender as a category of collective identity and political activism. Embraced by activists in the early 1990s to advocate for gender-variant people, the category quickly gained momentum in public health, social service, scholarly, and legislative contexts. Working as a safer-sex activist in Manhattan during the late 1990s, David Valentine conducted ethnographic research among mostly male-to-female transgender-identified people at drag balls, support groups, cross-dresser organizations, clinics, bars, and clubs. However, he found that many of those labeled "transgender" by activists did not know the term or resisted its use. Instead, they self-identified as "gay," a category of sexual rather than gendered identity and one rejected in turn by the activists who claimed these subjects as transgender. Valentine analyzes the reasons for and potential consequences of this difference, and how social theory is implicated in it.

Valentine argues that "transgender" has been adopted so rapidly in the contemporary United States because it clarifies a model of gender and sexuality that has been gaining traction within feminism, psychiatry, and mainstream gay and lesbian politics since the 1970s: a paradigm in which gender and sexuality are distinct arenas of human experience. This distinction and the identity categories based on it erase the experiences of some gender-variant people--particularly poor persons of color--who conceive of gender and sexuality in other terms. While recognizing the important advances transgender has facilitated, Valentine argues that a broad vision of social justice must include, simultaneously, an attentiveness to the politics of language and a recognition of how social theoretical models and broader political economies are embedded in the day-to-day politics of identity.

From the rear cover

"David Valentine had the good fortune to be conducting anthropological fieldwork in New York at the precise moment when a new term, 'transgender, ' was first coming into widespread use. Now we have the good fortune of sharing his ethnographic insight into this new category's emergence. "Imagining Transgender" offers a provocative on-the-ground account of this important shift in Western notions of gender identity and sexuality. The book is sure to stir debate in the emerging field of transgender studies, as well as in other disciplines that concern themselves with this timely topic."--Susan Stryker, coeditor of "The Transgender Studies Reader"

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About the author

David Valentine is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.

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