David Valentine's Imagining Transgender Identity

It is the subscript of David Valentine’s Imagining Transgender – an ethnography of a category that catches the eye and clues us in to the important turn his work takes across its three hundred some odd pages. Unlike other academic works up through the time of this publication (2007) that have tended to align the transgender experience with queer-studies (Feinberg 1997, Wilchins 2004) or autobiographical/ “insider” narratives (Boylan 2003/2013; Bornstein 1993), Valentine’s research instead interrogates the problematic disciplinary/State construction of the transgender identity itself. In comparing such bounded epistemic-classification against the often contradictory personal definitions of trans*-community members he encounters as an outreach
(Not surprisingly, there are many). I held out hope Valentine would more pervasively document the experiential impacts of his argument on the participants; there are fleeting inferences but not hardly enough. Given its original publishing date, perhaps it is time for the obligatory re-issue? I was surprised by the many awkward moments Valentine shared (including but not limited to being spotted taking notes during participant observation and, perhaps most poignantly, using tone-deaf drag humor to compliment a trans* sex-worker he recognized [cite].) Although wince-worthy, these snapshots also illuminate the difficulties of finding firm ethnographic footing in a field defined by its fluidity. Equally frustrating (although I cannot see how it could have been avoided given his methodology) was the choice to use drag ballroom events as field-sites, a move that can worrisomely give credence to those anti-trans* forces who already argue the transgender experience as little more than a removable accessory and therefore a personal choice not worth legal and constitutional
Yet by arguing against the potentially catastrophic rigidity of categories that disciplines seem to demand (and that ethnographies can potentially break down [246-253]), Imagining Transgender invites us to consider a number of provocative suggestions: That ethnographers need not think of themselves as beholden to the potential shackling dogmas of their disciplines, that indeed such myopic visions tend to miss the details of larger systems and worldviews; and that, ultimately, transgender can be more than just an institutional category but rather a prescient analysis through which “all modern subjects are engaged in this same process of disaggregation, reintegration, refinement, and education of the self” (246). It is, for scholars and activists and activist-scholars all, an argument worth listening