Imagining transgender

an ethnography of a category

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David Valentine: Imagining transgender (2007, Duke University Press)

302 pages

English language

Published 2007 by Duke University Press.

ISBN:
978-0-8223-3853-6
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OCLC Number:
84838412

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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 …

5 editions

Subjects

  • Transsexualism
  • Transsexuals -- Social conditions
  • Transsexuals -- Identity
  • Transsexualism -- Research
  • Anthropology