Struggling for Ordinary: Media and Transgender Belonging in Everyday Life by Andre Cavalcante (review)

Beginning in the 1930s magazines and newspapers, in stories of "sex reversals," "sex changes," and "sexual metamorphoses," captured the attention of mainstream America: so Joanne Meyerowitz shows in How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States.¹ What differentiated these stories from previous tales of lone individuals discovered living as a gender other than the one they had been assigned, was that quoted medical doctors affirmed the possibility of bodily change—for anyone.² In this new iteration of transformation narratives, the media recast ordinary trans lives into extraordinary examples of a transformed life potentially achieved by all. These media texts provided a potential spark of recognition; others could now envision sex change as a real possibility. Together, Meyerowitz's How Sex Changed and C. Riley Snorton's recent Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity analyze a treasure trove of archival print and image media made from the 1930s to the 1990s, and yet we know little about how readers and viewers in the complex modern media environment experience the operation of recognition vis-à-vis transgender representations across genres and mediums.³ A number of complicating factors have arisen since the 1990s: the term "transgender" has united and also eclipsed other identities related to gender divergence and sexual diversity; transgender social justice movements have consolidated around the world, although persecution and violence remain endemic; and, finally, the internet has come to play an outsized role in everyday life, including by democratizing cultural production and shaping media consumption habits. How exactly do media serve as a spark of recognition for today's generation of transgender-identified people? What do they see in available media texts? How do they integrate those media texts into their self-conceptions and narratives? These questions relate to the problem of how to evaluate the different affordances of media to enable trans people to survive and thrive, where "affordances" attends to the properties that enable and shape people's interactions with objects.

Andre Cavalcante's book Struggling for Ordinary: Media and Transgender Belonging in Everyday Life approaches these questions about media's role in the lives of trans individuals through ethnographic studies of participants in the midwestern United States and the San Francisco Bay Area during the deepest years of the recession, between 2008 and 2011. Through the prism of his subjects' everyday interactions with media texts and communication technologies, Cavalcante shows "how media made a sense of ordinary life more or less within reach" for these participants even though they were from different racial communities, generations, regions, and economic backgrounds.⁴ A decade after Cavalcante began his research, the media landscape and political atmosphere in the United States has shifted again to daily coverage of transgender erasure by the Trump administration. The book's historical focus on a time, not so long ago, when trans people faced a dearth of representation and what little representation there was evoked negative tropes, has much to teach us now about what Cavalcante identifies as the "tactics" of the weak (from Michel de Certeau) and strategies for developing resilience in the face of significant adversity.⁵

The book studies today's crossover generations of trans people who have lived through a sea change in media technologies and are digital natives. In the book, then, "pre" and "post" no longer primarily refer to surgical status but correlate to eras before and after the availability of the internet as a research tool, community center, and space of exploration. In this regard, Struggling for Ordinary is a welcome addition to other books in the growing field of transgender internet studies, such as Tobias Raun's Out Online: Trans Self-Representation and Community Building on YouTube.⁶ However, as a communications scholar and self-identified white gay cisgender man, Cavalcante is not participating in these digital communities; rather, through in-person observation...