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  • Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law by Isaac West
  • Anjali Vats
Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law. By Isaac West. New York: New York University Press, 2014; pp. xii + 235. $24.00 paper.

Isaac West’s Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law begins in Atlanta’s iconic Piedmont Park. Tracing the efforts of the Midtown Ponce Security Alliance and the Atlanta Police Department to violently regulate “transvestitutes” in that openly queer public space, West highlights the tendency of the neighborhood’s residents to portray trans persons as criminal noncitizens, thereby isolating them from larger LGB struggles. He starts with this example as a contrast to his project, which is based not only in a hopeful politics focused on commonalities between LGB and T struggles but also in an effort to emphasize citizenship as a powerful legal and performative concept through which those identifications can be made. In this vein, Transforming Citizenships makes two provocative central claims. First, it critiques queer studies’ tendency to valorize the antinormative, focusing instead on seemingly quotidian agentic moments. Second, it contends that citizenship is not merely a regressive concept that prevents radical equality but a potentially productive one that trans bodies routinely strategically navigate to their advantage. Citizenship, then, in West’s reading, is a daily, lived communicative process and not simply a static legal category bestowed by those in power. It is also a concept that trans persons cannot afford simply to discard in its entirety given their marginalized status. West’s reparative reading of citizenship combined with his moves to complicate binary analytics of resistance provide a powerful framework for reworking some of the reductive tendencies of queer studies and finding value in legal and rhetorical maneuvering that is often dismissed as part of a politics of respectability. In understanding citizenship as a performative concept that is articulated through daily practice, West points to possibilities for the rearticulation of the term in a manner that emphasizes not [End Page 389] sameness and homogeneity but oneness and unity, in the sense of creating a whole polity.

West’s book does an impressive job of bridging the interdisciplinary conversations in which he engages. His project is a compelling one that is likely to appeal not only to trans and queer scholars but also to those interested in rhetoric, cultural studies, and critical cultural legal studies (which West prefers to understand as part and parcel of cultural studies). The book is also likely to be of considerable interest for trans, queer, and legal activists insofar as it rethinks and mediates discussions about legal reform and politics of respectability through high-profile examples. Each of these groups can benefit from West’s thoughts on how moments of commonality and coalitionality emerge and individuals can reclaim the liminal spaces within legal regimes through their daily lived experiences.

In the first case study, West explores the experiences of Debbie Mayne, a male-to-female transsexual who is arrested after flaunting her gender identity at police. By focusing on “hidden transcripts” (39), such as the correspondences between Mayne and a physician, instead of public transcripts and legal texts, West shows how Mayne exercises agency in oppressive conditions through nuanced “performative repertoires” or “embodied practices of movement, action, emotionality, and identity” (54). In essence, Mayne emerges as an agentic subject who advances and withdraws her defiant attitude as is advantageous to her. For instance, while it is productive for her to engage legal authorities with trans identity, it is not helpful for her to reveal the conditions of her arrests to the doctor specializing in trans issues with whom she is corresponding. Ultimately, West reveals through Mayne that although legal recognition is not the be-all-end-all for activists, it is nonetheless a material reality that marginalized subjects must navigate. Resistance, then, is not simply a question of being with or against the law, but a complicated process of oppositional maneuvering that requires maintaining the integrity of self-identity in the face of interpellative regimes.

The second case study posits the bathroom as an important site of public cultural negotiation, particularly for queer and differently abled bodies. Through examination of the tactics of activist group...

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