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Transgender Communication Studies Transgender Communication Studies Histories, Trends, and Trajectories Edited by Leland G. Spencer and Jamie C. Capuzza LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Transgender communication studies : histories, trends, and trajectories / edited by Jamie C. Capuzza and Leland G. Spencer. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4985-0005-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4985-0006-7 (electronic) 1. Transgenderism. 2. Transgenderism on television. 3. Transgender people--Identity. 4. Interpersonal communication. I. Capuzza, Jamie C., editor. II. Spencer, Leland G., editor. HQ77.9.T7154 2015 306.76'8--dc23 2014047128 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Acknowledgments Like any project, this book emerged neither ex nihilo nor entirely and exclusively from the meritorious efforts of our collaboration. We owe our intellectual communities a profound debt of gratitude for their contributions to our lives and to this work. This collection would not exist, of course, without the generative thinking, hard work, and determined effort of our contributors. While we’ve both heard horror stories about the hassles of doing an edited collection, we feel fortunate to regard those tales as mostly mythical in our experience with this volume. Our authors did excellent work and happily and punctually revised to make it even better. We’re thankful and proud of the result. We appreciate the tirelessness, promptness, and enthusiasm of Alison Pavan and Emily Frazzette at Lexington Books. They’ve answered many questions and helped us tremendously along the way. We thank Karen Teal for going above and beyond her responsibilities to draft an initial version of the volume’s reference list and we thank Joshua Hamburg for his assistance finalizing the references. Leland: I thank many faculty colleagues, administrators, and support staff at Miami University not only for intellectual generosity but also for practical assistance at every step of this project. Everyone should have as supportive and creative a department director as Louise Davis. Departmental colleagues Michelle Abraham, Michelle Buchberger, Caryn Neumann, Madhu Sinha, and especially Jeff Kuznekoff have listened tirelessly as I’ve talked about this project. Deans Cathy Bishop-Clark and Moira Casey and my faculty mentor Theresa Kulbaga have offered support and advice from the project’s inception. Whitney Womack Smith encouraged me to apply for internal funds and explained how. G Patterson lent both ear and expertise as I struggled through a challenging part of writing the introduction. I’m particularly grateful for the many members of the faculty who attended my campus seminar talk based on the book’s introduction and shared inspiring observations and questions. I couldn’t survive without expert administrative support from Amy Depew. The indefatigable staff of Miami’s libraries deserves more thanks than words can ever convey. I gratefully acknowledge Jim Oris and Vanessa Gordon in Miami University’s Office for the Advancement of Research & Scholarship and the Committee on Faculty Research for a grant that defrayed costs associated with this project. Beyond Miami University, I thank many friends and family members too numerous to list for their ongoing support and longsuffering patience with my enthusiasm for my work. Joshua Trey Barnett and Mary Alice Adams read initial drafts of my content chapter and provided invaluable feedback. I’ve admired Jamie Capuzza since I took her Introduction to Communication class at Mount Union in 2004; working alongside her on this project has been an absolute delight. Finally, I thank Jason Rutledge and our beloved miniature schnauzers Tobi and Bruiser; they love me even when I work too late and leave piles of books and articles all over the house. Jamie: Working on this project was made even more meaningful for me because it provided an opportunity to work with Leland. I can still remember exactly where he sat (the front row, of course) in that Introduction to Communication course. I am proud of this book, but I am just as proud that our relationship matured from student and teacher to professional colleagues and that Leland will continue to make important contributions to the field during what I am sure will be an illustrious career. I thank Jodi Kirk for her willingness to share both her intellect and her heart; her friendship, concern for social justice, and humanity both grounded and inspired me to pursue the book contract. I thank my partner, Ben Ghiloni, for his everlasting patience and encouragement during this project. Your idealism, adventurous spirit, open- mindedness and devotion have made the last 25 years better than I could have imagined and have made me a better person. Introduction Leland G. Spencer IV Centering Transgender Studies and Gender Identity in Communication Scholarship Checking my Facebook newsfeed on a quick break from preparing for classes to begin in August 2014, I read with delight that the city of Cincinnati had recently approved the addition of transgender surgery benefits to the municipal health insurance package. Cincinnati Enquirer journalist Sharon Coolidge (2014) reported that the change would make the city a more desirable employer and would likely earn Cincinnati a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign Municipality Index. Cincinnati’s change in policy followed a similar shift by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in May 2014. Coolidge’s laudatory article noted that Cincinnati joins San Francisco, Seattle, Berkley, and Portland as well as private employers Procter & Gamble and US Bank in providing transgender inclusive health coverage; the article further framed this development as one in an ongoing arc of Cincinnati’s efforts to become more inclusive of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people (2014). Transgender Communication Studies: Histories, Trends, and Trajectories aims, in part, to do the same kind of work for the field of communication. This collection, the first of its kind in the communication discipline, asks students and scholars of communication to think seriously and thoroughly about gender identity on its own terms. The “T” too often tacked onto the end of “LGBT” demands a spot at the center of communicative and rhetorical analyses. The earliest communication research ostensibly about LGBT lives focused primarily on gay men, but scholarship about transgender lives has grown substantially in the last few years. The steady growth of scholarship about transgender communication has brought us to a critical juncture in the field where we must assess past research and plot a clear vision for the future. The specific goals of this book include synthesizing existing research from across varied communication sub-disciplines, making original contributions to transgender scholarship in communication studies, and proposing appropriate future research agendas for students and scholars of transgender communication. In this introduction, I begin by considering definitional possibilities. Then I offer overall observations about communication scholarship centered on transgender lives, including the development of the field to the point where a collection such as this can and should emerge. I then explain guidelines we as editors invited all of this collection’s contributors to follow for consistency throughout the volume but also as a natural extension of our axiological commitments; we hope our readers share the ethical commitments that underlie our expectations of this collection’s contributors and apply the same principles in their own scholarship. Finally, I preview the organization of the book’s chapters. Before proceeding to a definitional explication, I want to acknowledge the joy of editing this volume collaboratively with Jamie Capuzza. While I drafted this introductory chapter, readers will notice frequent references throughout to “we editors.” I invoke the first person plural with Jamie’s blessing to explain reflexively and consciously the choices we made throughout the process of proposing and editing this collection. I introduce us both in more detail below. DEFINITIONS: WHAT CAN TRANSGENDER MEAN? Nearly every book or article about transgender lives—whether from within or beyond the communication discipline—begins with a discussion of the definition of transgender. Beginning with definitions makes sense regardless of a work’s topic. Indeed, readers expect scholarly monographs, edited collections, and textbooks to start by explaining the terms and concepts that inform and shape the work ahead. Paradoxically, advanced study in an area necessarily complicates the assumptions and terminology otherwise regarded as basic in the field. In transgender studies (within and beyond communication), the work of definition always vexes. Most articles begin with definitions but also with reflections on the difficulty and contingency of defining “transgender.” I will not repeat excellent arguments made in other places, but I echo both the need for and impossibility of defining this work’s central terms. The need confronts us: for this collection to have coherence, we must know what its most important terms mean. The impossibility haunts us: among scholars, students, activists, practitioners, service providers, media producers, the general public, and countless others, wide varieties of opinions and uses for “transgender” (and several related terms) circulate. Some differences in use seem subtle or inconsequential; others encourage, offend, or inspire heated debate. As I proceed, I do so with reflexive humility, constantly aware of the need for and the impossibility of definition. I recognize and ask readers to understand that universal agreement about terminology eludes us all, but such a challenge need not frustrate our attempts to learn and understand. Instead, we should embrace the range of possibilities these terms offer us. Rather than asking what transgender means, we might ask, “What can it mean?” Of the many articles and books I have read that attempt to address the question of definition, nearly all of the most recent works cite Susan Stryker’s definition from her 2008 book Transgender History: Because “transgender” is a word that has come into widespread use only in the past couple of decades, its meanings are still under construction. I use it in this book to refer to people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, people who cross over (trans- ) the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain gender. Some people move away from their birth-assigned gender because they feel strongly that they properly belong to another gender in which it would be better for them to live; others want to strike out toward some new location, some space not yet clearly defined or concretely occupied; still others simply feel the need to get away from the conventional expectations bound up with the gender that was initially put upon them. In any case, it is the movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place—rather than any particular destination or mode of transition—that best characterizes the concept of “transgender” that I want to develop here. (2008, p. 1) Stryker’s definition underscores the performative character of transgender. Rather than a static identity classification or political label, transgender, for Stryker, describes a subject-in-movement. Not quite a verb and certainly not a noun, transgender remains an adjective in Stryker’s use—but not one that relies on rigidity or fixed identity. In addition to citations to Stryker, another theme that emerges in definitions treats transgender as an umbrella term for any gender expression, identity, or presentation that varies from what we might understand as normative. The umbrella metaphor figures cross-dressing, transsexuality, trans (by itself or as a prefix to any number of more specific terms), trans* (with an asterisks to represent a multiplicity of identities), genderqueer, and other terms as subcategories of transgender. If the umbrella metaphor holds, the relationship between transgender and any other term might analogize to that of a square and a rectangle. Just as all squares are rectangles (but not all rectangles are squares), so are all persons who identify as transsexual transgender (though not all transgender folks are transsexual). The coherence of the umbrella metaphor finds itself quickly in crisis, though. What about a person who identifies as genderqueer because s/he believes the concept of transgender relies on a system of gender and sex binaries that s/he rejects? S/he might then identify as specifically genderqueer—and decidedly not transgender. (Astute readers will note that even my choice of both gendered pronouns in the awkward “s/he” in the previous sentence reveals the challenges of genderqueer identities for the politics of naming and language use more broadly.) Complications and exceptions abound and will productively demand our attention in classroom and conference discussions as well as the pages of academic books and journals for some time to come. At least some chapters in this collection contribute to and confound the ongoing construction of meaning (or possible meanings) in even seemingly basic terminology. For that reason, we have made the decision as editors not to insist on a closed, firm, or unyielding definition of transgender or any related term. Many authors in this collection explain the terms they use and justify those terms’ appropriateness for the arguments in their chapters. Many authors stick with transgender and use it consistently with Stryker or as an umbrella term as described above. Other authors prefer more specific terms like trans (by itself), transman and transwoman, or transsexual. As editors, we pushed