rough draft essay

THE FIGURE OF THE TRANSWOMAN OF COLOR THROUGH THE LENS OF "DOING GENDER" Author(s): SALVADOR VIDAL-ORTIZ Source: Gender and Society, Vol. 23, No. 1 (February 2009), pp. 99-103 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20676756 Accessed: 28-04-2016 05:33 UTC

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THE FIGURE OF THE TRANSWOMAN OF COLOR THROUGH THE LENS OF

"DOING GENDER"

SALVADOR VIDAL-ORTIZ American University

Ioften visit my birth family in Manati, a mid-size town in Puerto Rico. For over 20 years, I have driven on a main road (before the expressway

was built) that connected the West and the North parts of the Island. At the

outskirts of town, there is often a voluptuous woman-with low hips, dark hair, tight jeans, and more often than not smoking a cigarette. She stands by the side of the road in what seems to be a small pathway to a house. She cruises the passing cars, but sometimes just stands there-waiting to be noticed. Growing up queer in Manati, I have noticed this woman many times in the last two decades; although I have never spoken to her, I learned long ago that she is a transwoman. Recently, Mom and I drove by, and I checked to see if she was still there. With the rise of the AIDS epi demic since the 1980s, and my (erroneous) assumptions about sex work and HIV risk, I have wondered if she is still alive. "Oh she is still there,"

says my mom. And I see her. I try to understand why she signifies so much in my imagination, how she reassures me by being alive, why I need to see her standing there. This transwoman signifies to me the figure of the transwoman of color. Who do you imagine her to be? What is your figure of the transwoman of color?

This vignette illustrates both my assumptions about what the reader might (not) know, as well as my own position vis-a-vis "trans" people. As a nontranssexual queer man, I hold a set of readings on gender (West and Zimmerman 1987) that shape how I view nontranssexual women and men, and transpeople. As a professor from a U.S. ethno-racial minority group, I also bring an understanding about the varied raced (and classed) experiences--in general, and of transpeople in particular. The figure of the transwoman of color helps illustrate the extent to which the "doing gen der" framework has dealt with transgender/transsexual people.

GENDER & SOCIETY, vol. 23 No. 1, February 2009 99-103 DOI: 10.1177/0891243208326461 ? 2009 Sociologists for Women in Society

99

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100 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2009

The success of "doing gender" is praiseworthy. West and Zimmerman moved discussions from "gender role" and "gender display" to the accomplishment of gender in a relational way. The sociological project of shifting from "matters internal to the individual" and toward "interactional and . . . institutional arenas" (West and Zimmerman 1987, 126) is a par ticularly salient one for transpeople, whose gender identity is often con ceived alternately as the achievement of their "true selves," or as a mental disorder (see Bryant 2006). This is not because transpeople "do gender" more than anybody, or excel at gender attributions, but because so many readings in U.S. society explain social norms (and perceived deviance) as individual attributes. The interactional constitution of gender permits us to recognize the manner in which these discursive practices oversimplify the lived experiences of transpeople.

The "doing gender" framework also drew attention to the constitution of gender through work, both paid and unpaid. But this situation is com plex for transwomen, many of whom are immigrants and women of color. One way of advancing a doing gender analysis with attention to racial, transnational, and migratory experiences of nonwhite women would be to reconsider the notion of labor, and the types of labor that feminist projects have put forth as permissible work. The line between culturally permissible work and "deviant" labor is often blurred for women of color, depending on their treatment in the socioeconomic system, whether as second-class citizens, colonial subjects, or undocumented immigrants. Since the 1970s, feminist debates have excluded prostitution from women's labor possi bilities in ways that do not recognize the increased globalization and deployment of a female work force-often outside middle-class parame ters of "decent" employment. "Doing Gender" reflects these parameters too; it was a product of its time.

Of course, not all transwomen engage in sex work (indeed, this is an effect of the figure as a floating imaginary-I do not know if the transwomen

to whom I refer to is a sex worker). But West and Zimmerman might have indirectly given us a lot of insight into why the social positioning of transwomen is so visible in sex work. As West and Zimmerman argue, gen der displays are not optional--that is, people rarely have the "option of being seen by others as female or male" (1987, 130). We operate within institutionalized constraints and, whether we do gender successfully or not, are held accountable. Often, transwomen are not given employment in for mal economy jobs (and unlike transmen, might not retain their jobs as they transition-Schilt 2006; Vidal-Ortiz 2002). Such negative assessments reduce their possibilities to work outside street economies like sex work.

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Vidal-Ortiz I THE FiGURE OF THE TRANSWOMAN OF COLOR 101

Many sex workers have a sense of agency in their decision making about sex work, as recent community research work demonstrates (e.g., Alliance for a Safe & Diverse D.C. 2008). Furthermore, the experiences of racialized sexualization and racialized femininities connect transwomen

of color to other women of color. Other women of color face stereotypes that include the (perceived) hyper-masculine African American woman, the hyper-sexualized Latina teenager, or the "exotic" Asian massage par lor worker; they endure the subsequent negotiations that surround these images. These assumptions of racialized sexuality are also imposed on transwomen of color. Ironically, such stereotypes may also provide transwomen of color with work that other employers have denied. These job opportunities may reify transgender stereotypes but open up the labor market to them at the same time. No site can simply be considered a site of oppression. Though "doing gender" makes a significant contribution in its focus on the interactional/institutional, it does not fully explore ques tions of resistance and agency (Pascale 2007). Research focusing on

marginalized populations may require that both agency and institutions are intertwined in a more explicit way than West and Zimmerman offered in "doing gender."

The use of Agnes (and Garfinkel's work [Garfinkel 1967]) in "doing gender" did not really attest to any aspect of moving beyond a represen tation of transgender as manipulative, or as waiting to be discovered. We need to expand the "doing gender" notion beyond West and Zimmerman's use of the transsexual imagery (which, in many examples, is centered on surgery and transition), and into everyday lived experience beyond surgi cal "reconstructions." For example, both Risman (1982) and Connell (2009 [this issue]) criticize the discussions of "true" transgender identities because scientists based them on transsexuals who came to gender iden tity clinics requesting sex change operations.

Similarly, I continue to hear academics use the phrase "the transwoman of color" in ways and contexts that worry me. Taking note of the lack of transwomen of color on a panel or as part of a film becomes a need to demand politically correct forums. The transwoman of color becomes a singular figure in those moments, a utensil to reference at will. This is an additive approach that fails to consider the structural arrangements and discursive practices that locate the transwoman of color in such a compli cated site. I wonder if this is truly a concern about the invisibility of transwomen of color, or the speaker's positioning as an ally. We could, however, take a different approach: for instance, through first-person accounts in films on the struggles of transwomen in prison (Baus, Hunt,

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102 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2009

and Williams, 2006), or about taking hormones from the streets without medical supervision (Beauty on the Black Market 2008). The figure of the transwoman of color is very much alive, in ways (and as part of patterns) that resignify a figure (Cho 2008; Clough 1992), but do not reconstitute it. Such a figure is always there, as a threat, as excessive (as excess), or as a nonwoman (to some) (Ferguson 2004; Namaste 2000; Stryker 2008).

My question/invitation/provocation at the end of the opening vignette is not an innocent one. I am bringing you, the reader, into the project of disclosing what your figure of the transwoman of color is. Does she inhabit the streets? Is she a sex worker? Can you imagine her being your co-worker at the local university? Can you hear her theorizing from her own experience-and accept it? Or see her working on something com pletely unrelated to her identity or experience? And yet my goal is not to play a hierarchy of oppressions, but to build on the need to see the prob lematics associated with the figure-especially when common referents are about how this figure is raped, killed, "discovered," or confronted as "not being" what she desires to be.

To challenge this figure that we all (in one way or another) reproduce would mean to move the analysis from categorically measuring sex/gen der relations, to more actively incorporating sexuality--a project West and Zimmerman (1987) only began. Such a project would not only trouble notions of public and private displays of insignia, but also, the relation between sexuality and racialization; political economy and migration; gender, militarization and colonization; even the relation between women, gender, and sexuality. To think about "doing gender" today is also to con sider globalization, flows of people and migrations (and labor in venues other than the ones we privilege), to generate an analysis beyond the fig ures that emerge in the process.

REFERENCES

Alliance for a Safe & Diverse D.C. 2008. Move along! Policing sex work in Washington, D.C. Published by Different Avenues, Inc. http://www .differentavenues.com.

Baus, Janet, Dan Hunt, and Reid Williams. 2006. Cruel and unusual (documen tary). Reid Productions, LLC. http://www.cruelandunusualfilm.com/.

Beauty on the Black Market. 2008. In the life (TV program segment). http://www.inthelifetv.org/html/episodes/52.html.

Bryant, Karl. 2006. Making gender identity disorder of childhood: Historical lessons for contemporary debates. Sexuality Research and Social Policy 3 (3): 23-39.

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Vidal-Ortiz / THE FIGURE OF THE TRANSWOMAN OF COLOR 103

Cho, Grace M. 2008. Haunting the Korean diaspora: Shame, secrecy, and the for gotten war. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Clough, Patricia T. 1992. The end(s) of ethnography: From realism to social crit icism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Ferguson, Roderick A. 2004. Aberrations in Black: Toward a queer of color cri tique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Garfmkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

?amaste, Viviane . 2000. Invisible lives: The erasure of transsexual and trans gendered people. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Pascale, Celine-Marie. 2007. Making sense of race, class, and gender. New York: Routledge.

Risman, Barbara. 1982. The (mis)acquisition of gender identity among transsex uals. Qualitative Sociology 5 (4): 312-25.

Schilt, Kristen. 2006. Just one of the guys? How transmen make gender visible at work. Gender & Society 20 (4): 465-90.

Stryker, Susan. 2008. Transgender history, homonormativity, and disciplinarity. Radical History Review 100:144-57.

Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador. 2002. Queering sexuality and doing gender: Transgender men's identification with gender and sexuality. In Gendered Sexualities, edited by Patricia Gagn? and Richard Tewksbury. New York: Elsevier Press.

West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. Doing gender. Gender & Society 1 (2): 125-51.

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