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This book applies a framework of 'trans vitalities' through an ethnographically-anchored exploration of trans coalitional labor and activism in Washington, DC. Specifically, it considers how trans social justice work at the local level exemplifies why and how the notions of 'trans community' or 'trans rights' must be reconfigured. Trans vitalities, as a framework developed in this volume, functions in three particular ways: 1) to disrupt and rethink what valuable, viable, or quantifiable quality of life looks like; 2) to shift our understandings of community towards 'coalition'; and 3) as a methodological, theoretical, and application-based set of tools that integrates a radical trans politics and community-based approach towards addressing trans lives. Trans Vitalities incorporates one-on-one interviews, community map-making projects, and an analysis of the DC Trans Needs Assessment, produced through trans coalitional labor.
An accessible case study for both how to research trans-specific topics and how to apply a framework of trans vitalities, this book is valuable reading for those who research or instruct on LGBTQ topics as well as activists, policy makers, and law makers.
List of contents
Introduction: Tracing entangled trans desire lines—vitalities and geometries of motion
Chapter 1 Trans studies and anthropologists studying ‘trans people’
Chapter 2 Washington, DC: depicting trans spatialities
Chapter 3 Mapping as method: articulations of bodies in place
Chapter 4 Mapping ideology and embodied practices: approaches to documenting and discussing lived experience
Chapter 5 Measuring vitalities
Chapter 6 Towards a generative politics of life: trans vitalities through spatialities of social justice
About the author
Elijah Adiv Edelman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rhode Island College, USA. Edelman’s work focuses around—and is anchored in—models of trans coalitional justice across the United States and Global South.
Summary
This book applies a framework of ‘trans vitalities’ through an ethnographically-anchored exploration of trans coalitional labor and activism in Washington, D.C. It considers how trans social justice work at the local level and exemplifies why and how the notions of ‘trans community’ or ‘trans rights’ must be reconfigured.
