Intimate Allies: Identity, Community, and Everyday Activism Among Cisgender People with Trans ...

256 Pages·2015·1.03 MB·English

by  Avery Brooks Tompkins

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Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public
Sociology - Dissertations
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2011
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Avery Brooks Tompkins
Syracuse University
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Tompkins, Avery Brooks, "Intimate Allies: Identity, Community, and Everyday Activism Among Cisgender
People with Trans-Identified Partners" (2011). Sociology - Dissertations. 67.
https://surface.syr.edu/soc_etd/67
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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