Recent theorizations of trans embodiment have brought attention to the ways neoliberalism limits the productivity of nonnormatively gendered bodies. This article deals with the discursive framing of embodiment and sexual desirability among trans men and other transmasculine persons negotiating Internet-mediated homoerotic spaces. Micro-level analysis of discourse structure and macro-level analysis of socio-political context together show how trans men navigate homonormative sexual economies by linguistically recuperating their bodies' sexually productivity. Instead of undermining claims of embodied masculinity and homoerotic value, potential sites of exclusion-i.e., trans genitals-become sites of flexible accumulation that enhance rather than detract from their bearers' desirability.
The mayorally instituted and police-enforced Prostitution Free Zones in Washington, DC, serve as a tool of nation-state disciplinarity, wherein many transgender women of color, viewed as ideologically suspect, are profiled as "sex workers," facing police harassment and arrest. This article explores here how this process is not merely about sex work but rather about discourses that are evoked in the displacement of the always-already displaced-racial, sexed, and gendered "others" through interviews with activists and trans community members, as well as District of Columbia government publications.
Studies of queer and trans suffering, resilience, care, and vitalities are invariably also investigations into the difficult and painful articulations of lives that feel worth living and deaths that feel okay dying. The notion of resiliency, referring to a conditional state of overcoming difficult situations, neglects to fully encompass our understandings of risk, vulnerability, and life. This article explores the ways in which Washington, DC–based trans activists discuss shared coalitional labor as constituting that which renders viable life—or, in some cases, what they describe as deaths worth dying—in a contemporary moment that is distinctly violent. While health researchers have long noted the beneficial role that a coalition serves in better representing needs in research, this article focuses on how individuals meet their needs not through solitary and normative resilience strategies but within and through spaces of coalitional action. This approach to radical care and viable life encourages us to rethink how a necropolitics of trans life—lives marked as morally suspect and intrinsically disposable—coexists with a notion of trans vitalities that this article develops. Ultimately, embracing the concept of trans vitalities is not simply a refusal or disavowal of projects of normalization or the commodifiability of trans rights but, rather, a vigilance toward the violently homogenizing expectations of the heterogeneity of lived experience.
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