Identity, Community, and Everyday Activism Among Cisgender People with Trans-Identified Partners

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Identity, Community, and Everyday Activism Among Cisgender People with Trans-Identified Partners Syracuse University SURFACE Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Sociology - Dissertations Affairs 2011 Intimate Allies: Identity, Community, and Everyday Activism Among Cisgender People with Trans-Identified arP tners Avery Brooks Tompkins Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/soc_etd Part of the Gender and Sexuality Commons Recommended Citation Tompkins, Avery Brooks, "Intimate Allies: Identity, Community, and Everyday Activism Among Cisgender People with Trans-Identified arP tners" (2011). Sociology - Dissertations. 67. https://surface.syr.edu/soc_etd/67 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Sociology - Dissertations by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSTRACT This dissertation blends traditional ethnographic data from interviews and observations with digital ethnographic data from blogs and YouTube videos to present stories of identity, community, and activist-oriented experiences from white cisgender women who are partnered with trans-identified people on the FTM spectrum. The project addresses the following broad questions: How does being the cisgender partner of a trans person inform complexities around the ability to articulate sexual identity? How are cisgender partners finding community and organizing themselves into new forms of community when they often lack language with which to describe their relationships? In what ways are cisgender people allies to the trans people with whom they partner, and how is being an ally connected to forms of everyday resistance and educational advocacy? How does technology play a role in articulations of identity, experiences of community, and the ways that partners participate in activism? This work queers sociology by illustrating and considering the potential consequences of normative categories of gender and sexuality in relation to everyday lived experience. This project brings out the tension for many cis partners between a desire to belong by using normative categories of identity, coupled with a complex need to also resist those categories. Relatedly, I examine how the problems of identity for cis partners impact their access to various identity-based communities, and I instead argue for a queer politics of affinity. Further, this work calls for a broadening of what constitutes “activism” in order to consider the everyday actions and advocacy work that partners engage in as contributing to and encouraging social change around trans issues. Accordingly, my work contributes not only to the fields of queer and trans studies, but also to a sociology of gender and sexuality that takes queer and trans studies seriously in terms of theoretical contexts and analyses. Intimate Allies: Identity, Community, and Everyday Activism Among Cisgender People with Trans-Identified Partners By Avery Brooks Tompkins B.A. University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire, 2003 M.A. Syracuse University, 2004 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Graduate School of Syracuse University May 2011 Advisor: Jackie Orr Committee: Andrew London, Prema Kurien, Vic Muñoz, Rob Pusch Copyright 2011 Avery Brooks Tompkins All rights reserved. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract i Title Page iii Copyright Notice iv Table of Contents v Dedication vi Acknowledgements vii Preface ix Chapter One 1 Introduction: Historical and Theoretical Contexts and Conversations Chapter Two 39 Doing Ethnography in a Postmodern Era: Technology, Reflexivity, and the Politics of Sociological Methods Chapter Three 72 Languages of Identity: The (Queer) Politics of Naming Chapter Four 115 (Re)Imagining Community Chapter Five 167 Activisms in Everyday Life: Advocacy as Partner Allies Chapter Six 209 In Closing: The Promise of Queer Sociology Appendices 223 References 229 Biographical Note 245 vi To all who appreciate fancy genders. vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to my advisor and mentor, Jackie Orr, who has been the most enthusiastic, supportive, and critically engaged cheerleader I could have ever hoped for. I am delighted to call you a friend and colleague. I couldn’t have done this without you. I’d also like to thank my other committee members for their support and feedback on my work: Andrew London, Prema Kurien, Rob Pusch, and Vic Muñoz. Thanks to Jonathan Massey for graciously agreeing to chair my defense. My undergraduate advisors, Melinda Miceli and Jeff Erger, recognized and nurtured my potential early. Thank you both for believing in me and continuing to be my mentors. Importantly, the final year of work on this dissertation was supported by the Department of Sociology at Syracuse University through the Dissertation Fellowship, which is awarded to one graduate student annually. Thank you to the many friends and colleagues who have supported me and engaged in the always interesting, and sometimes difficult, conversations related to my work: Lauren Adamski, Daniel Bernard, Chase Catalano, SJ Creek, Stephanie Crist, Jaime Ethan, Susan Fitzgerald, Sarah Foley, Mel Goodwin, Peter Ibarra, Amanda Kanekuni, Reese Kelly, Karen Macke, Bryan McKinney, Shae Miller, Erin Rand, KJ Rawson, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Kylan de Vries, Tre Wentling, and Melissa White. I’d also like to thank everyone who shared their experiences by participating in this project and the many people who have publicly shared their experiences elsewhere so that those stories could be included here. viii My students from Introduction to Sociology (Fall 2009) and Social Problems: Bodies and Identities in US Culture (Spring 2010) at Syracuse University showed me how much teaching can contribute to change. I can only hope that the future classrooms I walk into are such amazing spaces of engagement and critical thought. You all made it a pleasure to teach each and every class. I also want to thank Jackie Orr, Reese Kelly, and Gail McGuire for inviting me to teach pieces of this dissertation in their classrooms. Susan Fitzgerald is a wonderful friend and has offered shelter and to care for my pets at any time - thank you for this. Without you, there is much I would have missed out on - professionally and personally. Peter Mack has been my summer reset button. Thank you for hiking hundreds of miles and filtering thousands of liters of water with me. There is no one else I’d rather share a freezer bag of rehydrated food with. Many thanks to Dr. Melissa A. Johnson, Samuel Lurie, Stephanie Crist, KJ Rawson, and Erin Rand for helping me embody more of myself. Robert Tompkins, Lorraine Tompkins, and Sarah Tompkins have provided remarkable support, acceptance, and encouragement - I cannot thank any of you enough. Thank you to Susannah Brooks for the Dissertation Support Kit during the final months of writing and revisions. BCL, you really know how to make a boy sparkle… thank you for reveling in my fanciness. You will always be the first in so many ways and I am incredibly grateful to have you in my life. ix PREFACE “Everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects, impacts suffered or barely avoided. It takes everything we have. But it also spawns a series of little somethings dreamed up in the course of things.” - Kathleen Stewart from Ordinary Affects, 2007:9 - My first semester in college I took an Introduction to Sociology course where I had to write a 10-page research paper on any topic I wanted to write on, as long as I discussed it from the theoretical perspectives that we had talked about in class. I was 18 years old and the paper that I wrote about the social construction of gay and lesbian communities wasn’t very good (it was 1999 and I used the word “homosexual” over 60 times in the essay), but my professor, Jeff Erger, noticed that I had found my own way to Seidman’s (1996) groundbreaking book published three years prior, Queer Theory/ Sociology. That book was the first academic book I purchased, followed by Nardi and Schneider’s (1998) edited volume, Social Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Reader. I began my inquiry into queer sociology through those texts and in an Introduction to Sociology course that was taught by a professor (now friend and colleague) who knew nothing about me except that I had used peer-reviewed sources in my essay instead of websites and magazine articles like the other students. Jeff told me to wait a year and then take his upper-level course, a course in symbolic interactionism and the social construction of reality. I spent that year in a smoky coffee shop across the river, teaching myself LGBT studies and queer theory. When I finally got into Jeff’s upper-level course, he asked me to write a longer, better version of my paper from my freshman year, using what I had learned in the new course. I narrowed the focus for the x new essay and discussed the intersections of lesbian identity with community while doubling the length of the paper (it was the year 2000 and I used the word “homosexual” just twice, only when discussing Plummer’s (1975) theory of “homosexual” identity development). I was 19 years old and my academic career in queer sociology began when Jeff asked me to do research with him and another professor, Melinda Miceli, based on that essay. Ten years later, I sit at my desk on the verge of finishing my PhD in Sociology. I have spent ten years immersed in LGBT studies, queer theory, and trans studies from various disciplinary perspectives - having only been able to take one course in LGBT studies in 2005, during my final year of coursework for my graduate program. My history of getting to today with this project was nurtured by friends, advisors, and colleagues who saw the importance of queer sociology with me from the beginning.
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