David Valentine's Imagining Transgender Analysis

It is the subscript of David Valentine’s Imagining Transgender – an ethnography of a category that clues in readers to the important fascinating turn his work takes across its three hundred some odd pages. Unlike other academic works up through the time of its publication (2007) which have tended to align a particular transgender experience with queer-studies (Feinberg 1997, Wilchins 2004), autobiographical/ “insider” narratives (Boylan 2003/2013; Bornstein 1993), or social service primers (Lev 2004), Valentine’s research instead interrogates the disciplinary/State construction of the transgender identity itself. By comparing such bounded epistemology against the often contradictory personal definitions of those trans*-community members he encounters as an outreach volunteer for the Gender Identity Project of the LGBT Center in New York City, Valentine reveals a startling gap between institutional classification of transgender and individuals’ sense of gender that without adequate reflexivity the trans*-woman or trans*-man, reader (cis or trans*) and even the anthropological ethnographer risks …show more content…
From this point that institutions rely too heavily on codified identities, leading them to re-identify populations in ways that counter individual’s meanings (124), all informed by a “politics of accommodation” that informs a “theoretical split…(that is) problematic in that they are unable to account for…(trans) subjectivities” (CITE). Valentine picks up this tension is the crafting of his own ethnography, an ‘impulse to open up transgender for both theoretical and political purposes, and the recognition that in some cases, the work of many of my activist informants aims to do just the opposite”