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

In his historically informative book, Struggling for Ordinary, Andrew Cavalcante tracks trans [in]visibility from the early part of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first—following its gradual move from the margins into America's cultural mainstream via changes in technology, be it the internet, social media, or streaming services. For Cavalcante, these changes "not only engage our mind but also our bodies, our sense, and emotions," and he sees them as tools to gauge the ways in which trans and gender variant participants in his study adapted their everyday lives concomitantly (126).

Cavalcante opens his book with an excellent chapter on the history of trans visibility—exposed as overwhelmingly pathological, dehumanising, violent, and/or tragic—in written media, television, activism, film, and the internet from the 1930s to the present. He discusses the ways in which the cultural perceptions and representations of trans and gender-variant people have culminated in a veritable "tipping point" in terms of their cultural identity and acceptance within society more generally and the impact these changes have had on the gender normative American psyche. This historical overview also provides a strong basis for the chapters that follow in which Cavalcante sensitively approaches and shares participants' lived experiences of growing up prior to and during a period of increasing trans visibility via in-depth interviews as they identify media portrayals that had the greatest impact on their lives. He documents how early trans images, such as Christine Jorgensen, represented unrealistic and unobtainable lives for gender-variant people and the ways in which the participants wrestled with these images and their meaning, while at the same time incorporating these representations into their everyday lives. Cavalcante notes, as trans and gendervariant visibility increased over time, participants slowly began to view these images not as impossible attainments but as tools that could be used to enhance solidarity, identity, and hope and as a way to focus activism towards their acceptance as ordinary in the broader American culture.

Cavalcante describes his methodology as following the "ethnographic tradition" and embeds his research in the theoretical framework of queer theory, interviewing participants and gathering observational data from Trans Chat meetings at the Midwestern LGBT community center between 2008 and 2012. Throughout his book, Cavalcante features a selection of thirty-five semi-structured, in-depth interviews—highlighting the individual lived experience, a central pursuit of oral historians—with "a diverse group of self-identified transgender people" (10). Cavalcante uses these interviews and his observational studies to explore the types of images painted of trans individuals over time and their effects on trans lives by including chapters on specific themes arising from participants' interviews: visibility, "transgender impossibilities and the desire for everydayness," representations of possible lives for trans individuals, resilience and resistance, struggling for the ordinary, and finally "a negotiated space, one where queerness and ordinariness are not diametrically opposed, but rather layered on top of one another, remixed and combined in unpredictable and even contradictory ways … queerly ordinary" (67, 171).

Power and disempowerment in the lives of trans people is a major thread weaving its way through this book. Cavalcante acknowledges his place of power and privilege as a researcher and his bias as a cisgender man, while navigating and negotiating his own experience of power as a gay man within the LGBT community and a heteronormative society. As Cavalcante discusses, his participants experience power in many ways: for some, there is power in their white privilege, their ability to pass as male or female without being read ('clocked') by cisgender people, their educational attainment, and/or their socioeconomic status. Those participants of color interviewed could not pass, were less educated, and/or had a lower socioeconomic status; they often had fewer choices and, as Cavalcante states, "inhabit[ed] a place of instability and marginality. Whereas many embraced this marginal space...