Jody--Hanhardt

            Hanhardt (2013) approached her archival research by “looking ‘backward,’” beginning with current events, looking for their backstory, and telling the development through a series of case studies.  “Thus, this book is not a history of gay neighborhoods per se but an urban history of the encounters between gay and neighborhood in U.S. cities and social movements over the past fifty years,” (4, emphasis in original).  This statement makes a significant methodological intervention, moving the analytic frame from a specific material space to the relationship between an identity category and a spatial concept.  This methodology is similar to Abu-Lughod’s (1991) methodology of studying concepts, not people.

            In a paper that may become my dissertation project, I’m looking at the history of transgenderism as a social category in the U.S.  I argue that current diagnoses reflect the more general trend of biomedicalization, making a break with previous eras that marked transgenderism as a disorder, or that characterized gender non-conformity as sexual perversion.  The simultaneous construction of transgender bodies and subjects by biomedicine, and rejection of these same bodies by the State, creates a state of exception that relegates transgender individuals to a “borderlands” (Anzaldua 1987).  Incorporating Hanhardt’s (2013) approach into future work on this project will entail looking at the relationship between transgender and institutions of health and medicine.  Her approach of looking backward is fitting to this project because my starting point is the “administrative violence” (Spade 2011) of the current hodge-podge of laws governing transgender individuals’ ability to change the gender marker on their documents, and the continuing insistence on gender intelligibility to be eligible for many State resources.  I hope that by looking backward at the development of both the State’s and biomedicine’s current relationship to the category transgender, I can uncover the ways in which this category functions today as well as how the State and biomedicine use categories to discipline bodies and dole out resources.  In order to closely examine these relationships, it may be helpful to use Hanhardt’s case study approach, focusing in on particularly salient events, places, and times. This project would likely incorporate either an organizational ethnography of the Howard Brown Health Center, or in-depth interviewing with individuals who access trans-related health care there.  This could serve as one of my case studies.  However, I’m left with several questions about this method.  How should one go about choosing cases?  What is the advantage of the case studies method?

Anzaldu ́a, Gloria. 1987. La Frontera/Borderlands: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. “Writing Against Culture” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present edited by Richard G. Fox. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Hanhardt, Christina. 2013. Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Spade, Dean. 2011. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law. Brooklyn, NY: South End Press.