A Queerly Ordinary Conclusion

Struggling for Ordinary exhibits how transgender participants are engaging with media culture to cope with, integrate into, and simultaneously disrupt the shared everyday world. In showing how queerness plays out on the ground, within the actual lives of trans people, the book aims to square queer theory with lived experience by documenting how queerness and ordinariness are not mutually exclusive. Rather, transgender individuals live very queer and very ordinary lives simultaneously. The conclusion theorizes this hybridity as the “queerly ordinary,” defining what the concept means and what’s at stake in its usage. It interrogates the “ideal queer subject,” a figure who embodies the apex of queer theoretical aspiration, and then shifts focus toward examining “lived queerness,” or how individuals mobilize and enact queerness in ways that work for them within the limitations and structures of their world. Finally, the conclusion elucidates the queerly ordinary as an expression of lived queerness, and explores how it can help us understand transgender experience with media and everyday life. Ultimately, the queerly ordinary is what the trans people in my study wanted to see represented in media, what they used technologies to achieve, and in the end, it is how they lived their everyday lives.

You Have to Be Really Strong

This chapter argues that media are affective technologies. It examines the various affects—or the sensations, feelings, and embodied experiences of intensity—that media transmit and the practices trans audiences deploy to manage them. The chapter highlights the various methodologies of adaptation and survival participants deployed in coming to terms with media’s disempowering messages and the affective turbulences they generate. In constructing self-protective armors, protecting their integrity, and thickening their skin, this chapter foregrounds how participants rebound and rebuild their sense of self that media discourses threatened to erode. I call this audience practice “resilient reception.” This chapter defines resilient reception, explains how it is both similar to and different from “resistance,” and offers a new way for thinking about audience experiences with media. Resilient reception conceptualizes audience practices as developing within everyday life’s temporal flow and moves us past the “moment of reception”—or that actual, bounded occasion when one consumes media. Audiences are not simply affected by media within the context of a single viewing moment, but continuously and ceaselessly struggle with the messages of media culture, contending with its influence over their self-worth, integrity, and emotional life on a daily basis.

We Can No Longer Hide in Plain Sight

This chapter offers a brief history of transgender visibility in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries across film, television, news, print, popular music, websites, and digital culture. It focuses on key moments and decisive historical junctures. It also explores various historical processes that stirred alongside this visibility such as the construction of gender as a non-binary category, the expansion of transgender discourse and communication networks, and the growing collective consciousness and political mobilization of transgender people throughout the twentieth century. Finally, chapter 1 interrogates what some call the current “transgender tipping point” and draws out its politics of visibility.

Introduction

The introduction contextualizes and previews the book’s primary aims and arguments. It discusses the book’s methodology, its focus on everyday life, its relevance to queer and transgender thought, and its engagement with theories of media and audiences. Opening with the life story of Margie, a white transgender woman in her early sixties, and her experiences with media, the introduction underscores the many influences of technologies of communication on the everyday lives of transgender individuals. In chronicling the experiences of people like Margie, Struggling for Ordinary offers a portrait of how transgender individuals lived with media toward the latter part of the twentiethand the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury. This was a time before the recent wave of transgender visibility in our culture, before what Time magazine called the “transgender tipping point.” It was before Caitlyn Jenner and her reality TV show, before Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, Amazon’s Transparent, and the current transgender reality television boom. Situated during this historic moment, during a time of growing but uneven and scattered access to transgender representation and communication networks, Struggling for Ordinary offers a snapshot of how transgender audiences made their way toward identity and ordinary life.

I Sort of Refused to Take Myself Seriously

While there are some notable exceptions, transgender figures in media have historically been represented in terms of supreme Others: as freaks, deceivers, monsters, mammy figures, martyrs and victims, and selflessly superhuman. This chapter explores the experience of encountering these kinds of representations and how participants make sense of the ideologies of transgender impossibility they convey. It examines four ideologies of impossibility of particular concern to those who shared their stories with me, including (1) the delegitimization of transgender identity, (2) the dehumanization of transgender people, (3) the articulation of transgender experience within violence and victimhood, and (4) the disregard for transgender everydayness. Rather than dismissing it as assimilationist, I conclude the chapter by taking seriously participants’ desire to see representations of individuals who “happen to be” transgender.

We’re Just Living Life

This chapter examines why the ordinary and the everyday emerged as such potent themes in my fieldwork. It renders visible transgender individuals’ struggle for the ordinary, or the constant and deliberate work devoted to achieving the common inclusions and affordances of everyday life. In this way, the chapter theorizes everyday life as an ongoing, practical accomplishment. For the participants in my study, the rhythms and routines of the ordinary and everyday were elusive and often out of reach. Daily tasks such as running errands or using a public restroom were often complicated and potentially risky endeavors. To manage, navigate, and overcome these challenges, participants turned to the affordances of digital media. This chapter explores and celebrates the simple pleasures of everyday life—sociability, anonymity, recognition, mobility, having a day out, etc.—and shows the digital strategies that trans people used to achieve them.

I Want to Be Like a Really Badass Lady

This chapter delineates how participants craft a possible transgender self through meaningful interactions with media discourses and narratives. Media generate the ability to imagine a transgender life and to author plausible stories of self-transformation. The chapter pays special attention to how the Internet in particular helped participants acquire an accessible and practical transgender vocabulary. Learning how to speak about gender identity and one’s self in sophisticated ways was one of the most important milestones in participants’ everyday lives. Transgender themed websites, social networks, and Internet communities were so central to participants’ understanding of a possible transgender self that many talked about their lives and identities in terms of “pre” and “post” Internet.