Abstract
What was it like to live as a transgender person in a media environment before Caitlin Jenner, Orange Is the New Black, Transparent, and the current transgender reality TV boom? Struggling for Ordinary answers this question by examining the role of media and technology in the everyday lives of transgender people before what some call the “transgender tipping point” in popular culture. It offers a snapshot of how transgender individuals made their way toward identity and a sense of ordinary life by integrating available media into their emotional, cognitive, and everyday experiences. Informed by in-depth interviews and participant observation with transgender communities over the course of four years, the book offers a careful and richly detailed account of transgender media use and world-making. It explores how media and technology operate as arbiters of possibilities, how they franchise what is and is not possible. Struggling for Ordinary shows how transgender people turn to both old and new technologies to cultivate an understanding of their identities and to achieve the common inclusions and routine affordances of everyday life from which they are often excluded. The book also looks at the emotional and affective toll media use takes on transgender individuals, along with their resilience in the face of media disempowerment. Finally, the book complicates the queer/normal binary—recognizing the ways transgender and queer everyday life is “queerly ordinary,” a hybrid of sameness and difference, assimilation and resistance, and ordinariness and queerness.
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