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  • Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of Category
  • Nomvuyo Nolutshungu (bio)
David Valentine’s Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of Category, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007

After decades of writing, activism, and community building, what does the category “transgender” mean? In Imagining Transgender, David Valentine questions what is left out, what remains, and on what foundation the category rests. Using mapping, participant observation, and interviewing to discern the meanings of transgender at its apex in the late 1990s, his book continues the work of transgender history, research (and its critique), and activism. He turns the lens of inquiry on the creation of these fields, asking, in effect, What is transgender?

The book’s connections between and disruptions of gender, identity, sexuality, and class send the reader spinning as Valentine consciously forces a confrontation between knowing oneself and external legibility. His descriptions of outreach to populations framed as “transgender” in circumstances where there are few who identify transgender, or of the struggle in identifying people as transgender, poke fun at the paradoxes of identity categories while clarifying the risks (in terms of care, recognition, and access to institutional power) of falling out of those categories.

The passage, in the fall of 2007, of the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and the debates around it brought the high politics of “LGBT” ownership and the politics of categorization into clear view. Currently stalled in the Senate, ENDA spent the better part of the year dividing sexual from gendered (paring down ENDA) and reinstitutionalizing and cementing what transgender means in the American political landscape in much of the same ways Valentine critiques. The book is divided into three sections, which represent transgender as descriptive and historical, as a political and identity marker, and as a scientific and political category, respectively. Valentine spends the first third of the book beginning with the rise of “transgender” and subsequent attempts to historicize it. He charts a space for the “imagination” of transgender, starting with Virginia Prince’s articulation of the term, followed by the appropriation of “transgender” as a “community” term (a sense he returns [End Page 324] to in the second section of the book) in the 1990s. He parallels this history with that of gay activism, which used emerging psychiatric divisions to distinguish sexuality from gender performance. Perhaps Valentine’s most damning critique of the “transgender” category is that it rests on foundations of normative gender privileges for mainstream (white, middle class) gays and lesbians.

In the second third of the book Valentine details his travels between support group meetings, street outreach, and social spaces as a researcher, activist, outreach worker, and volunteer. In each of the events and spaces he attends (and participates in), “transgender” has a variety of meanings. Some reject the term because of their eroticism around gender transformation. Others reject it in favor of “gay.” Still others prefer more specific terms such as “fem queen” or employ transgender as one constellation of identities. Alternately, the hospital support group Valentine attends, described at the opening of his book, understands him (as a nontransgender-identified person) as one of them (at least initially) because they are all “gay.”

Valentine also demonstrates how inclusion in the category “transgender” correlates with exposure to “mainstream” institutions and power. His parallel of Cherry, twenty years old, African American, transgender identified, and involved in social service support groups, and Mona, twenty two years old, African American, identifying as gay, woman, and “butch queen up in drags” and uninvolved in social service networks, is one of a series of instances in which Valentine shows both the institutional power and the limitations of “transgender.”

In the final section, Valentine shows that the specificity of human experience makes academic narratives that determine who or what is transgender futile and dangerous, because, similar to the practice whereby outreach workers name ball participants or sex workers “transgender,” such narratives ignore that people “know what [they are].” Not only do simultaneous attempts by transgender activists to operationalize this category perpetrate violence against excluded subjects (by flattening difference), but in their appeal to the state they ignore broader structural and, indeed, state-based violence.

Sharpest when addressing the question of what meanings surround transgender, and what...

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