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The first famous transgender person in the United States, Christine Jorgensen, traveled to Denmark for gender reassignment surgery in 1952. Jorgensen became famous during the ascent of postwar dreams about the possibilities for technology to transform humanity and the world. In Mobile Subjects Aren Z. Aizura examines transgender narratives within global health and tourism economies from 1952 to the present. Drawing on an archive of trans memoirs and documentaries as well as ethnographic fieldwork with trans people obtaining gender reassignment surgery in Thailand, Aizura maps the uneven use of medical protocols to show how national and regional health care systems and labor economies contribute to and limit transnational mobility. Aizura positions transgender travel as a form of biomedical tourism, examining how understandings of race, gender, and aesthetics shape global cosmetic surgery cultures and how economic and racially stratified marketing and care work create the ideal transgender subject as an implicitly white, global citizen. In so doing, he shows how understandings of travel and mobility depend on the historical architectures of colonialism and contemporary patterns of global consumption and labor.
Sommario
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Provincializing Trans 1
Part I
1. The Persistence of Trans Travel Narratives 29
2. On Location: Transsexual Autobiographies, Whiteness, and Travel 59
3. Documentary and the Metronormative Trans Migration Plot 03
Part II
Interlude 135
4. Gender Reassignment and Transnational Entrepreneurialisms of the Self 137
5. The Romance of the Amazing Scalpel: Race, Labor, and Affect in Thai Gender Reassignment Clinics 174
Epilogue: Visions of Trans Worlding 207
Notes 221
Bibliography 245
Index 269
Info autore
Aren Z. Aizura
Riassunto
Aren Z. Aizura examines transgender narratives about traveling for gender reassignment from 1952 to the present, showing how transgender fantasies about reinvention and mobility are racialized as white and often rely on violent colonial global divisions.
