Books at Duke University Press

Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category
David Valentine

320 pages (August 2007)
7 illustrations, 3 tables

Cloth - $84.95	0-8223-3853-X
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3853-6]

Paperback - $23.95	0-8223-3869-6
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3869-7]

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.

“There is a paucity of ethnographically based work on transgender, and David Valentine’s book is a major contribution not only ethnographically but also historically and theoretically. Valentine is concerned with a range of value and political questions, committed explicitly to humane positions without being ideological or propagandist.”—Esther Newton, author of Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas

“The definitive study that documents the rise and spread of ‘transgender’ as a category and a field of knowledge, activism, and power but also as a mechanism for disenfranchisement, discrimination, and violence. Deeply learned, wonderfully accessible, and ethnographically rich, this remarkable book sets a new benchmark not only for all future work on transgender but also for how we might think about gender, sexuality, identity, and politics more generally.”—Don Kulick, author of Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes

“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

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

See Reviews

2007 Ruth Benedict Award
   SOLGA
Finalist, 2008 Lambda Literary Award (non-fiction category)

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Part I: Imagining Transgender
Introduction 3
1. Imagining Transgender 29
Part II: Making Community, Conceiving Identity
Introduction to Part II: Reframing Community and Identity 68
2. Making Community 71
3. “I Know What I Am”: Gender, Sexuality, and Identity 105
Part III: Emerging Fields
Introduction to Part III: The Transexual, the Anthropologist, and the Rabbi 140
4. The Making of a Field: Anthropology and Transgender Studies 143
5. The Logic of Inclusion: Transgender Activism 173
6. The Calculus of Pain: Violence, Narrative, and the Self 204
Conclusion: Making Ethnography 231
Notes 257
Works Cited 277
Index 299