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>> 37 1 Performative Repertoires of Citizenship On November 14, 1955, Debbie Mayne, a male-to-female transsexual, started her lunch break with a walk through Los Angeles’s Pershing Square, a popular cruising area for gay men.1 Dressed in men’s clothing, she entered the men’s bathroom. After exiting the bathroom, Mayne walked across the square and approached G. H. Nelson, a vice officer described in one newspaper account as “an old acquaintance.”2 Mayne informed Nelson that she had undergone gender confirmation surgery and stated her intention to start dressing as a woman. Taking Mayne at her word, the vice officer arrested her for “masquerading as a man.”3 Less than a month later, on December 6, Mayne, dressed in women’s clothing, returned to Pershing Square to use the women’s bathroom. Upon her exit, Mayne searched out and found Nelson to ask him the following question: “Here I am. How do you like me as a female?” Nelson responded by arresting Mayne for “masquerading as a woman” and “outraging public decency.”4 Wanting to simplify an already complex situation, the city prosecutor combined the charges and scheduled one hearing. At the hearing, Judge Ben Koenig ordered Mayne to undergo a series of examinations with a county jail physician to help him determine Mayne’s sexual status . The physician’s report recounted Mayne’s medical history, but it stopped short of declaring Mayne a woman: “The examiner feels this defendant has made considerable strides in superficial transformation of secondary sex characteristics. However, surgery, electrolysis, hormones and apparel have not produced a woman but clearly an emasculated male.”5 After reading the physician’s findings, along with affidavits from other medical experts, Koenig rendered his decision on February 14, 1956. In an opinion crafted without the use of any pronouns, Koenig 38 > 39 out “hidden transcripts” or “discourse that takes place ‘offstage,’ beyond direct observation of powerholders” challenging contextually dependent configurations of cultural conventions.13 Attention to hidden legal transcripts, the dialectical and “silent partner of a loud form of public resistance,” illuminates the radical instability of legal language, institutions , and cultures and the corresponding opportunities for counterhegemonic articulations of legal subjectivities.14 In Mayne’s case, archival materials present us with a public transcript of her ordeal via press reports and court documents. The public transcript , to varying degrees, flattens the complexity of the situation to a simple matter of a transsexual’s arrest for using a public bathroom. However, textual traces allow us access to hidden transcripts that paint a different picture. The hidden transcript, including Mayne’s correspondence with and between her friends and acquaintances, reveals a resistant rather than a passive subject, and one who actively sought out a confrontation with the law. Mayne’s correspondence provides concrete evidence of the operation of agency in a world of legal constraints, an especially fertile site for reconsidering the capacious flows of discourse and action that may go unnoticed when we assume public actions reflect an implicit agreement with the cultural codes of legibility. Taking this dynamic relationship into account, I suggest that agency must be understood as a “performative repertoire,” or as embodied practices enabled by and negotiated through the logics of subjective recognition .15 When formulated in this manner, in a way similar to Dwight Conquergood’s thinking on the subject, we can understand how performative repertoires allow “subordinate people [to] skirt patrols, elude supervisors, pilfer the privileged, and make end runs around occupying authorities.”16 The emphasis of performativity stresses these repertoires as embodied practices that have varying degrees of legibility. Accordingly , agency is not completely born anew in response to a rhetorical act and/or situation but is instead a psychic reservoir constantly and dialectically renewed against the accumulation of one’s experiences. Exploring agency in this way is relevant especially for those of us interested in what it means to articulate one’s self as a citizen when legal recognition is not guaranteed or expected and where recognition might require more complex negotiations of one’s identity than can be encompassed by critical vocabularies such as passing, assimilation, or homo-/ 40 > 41 Contesting Agency The study of everyday negotiation of citizen subjectivities with and against the law is often met with skepticism, if not outright hostility, especially when situated within discussions of agency and resistance.19 Michael McCann and Tracey Marsh suggest that the idea that “citizens can think for themselves is hardly pathbreaking.”20 Their concern centers on “the...

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