Flailing at Feminized Labor: SOFFAs, 1990s Trans Care Networks, Stone Butch Blues, and the Devaluation of Social Reproduction

Abstract

Around 1998, the term “significant other” or “significant others, friends, family, and allies” started to circulate in English-language trans communities to describe cis people's labor in supporting trans people through transition. One newsletter, Your SOFFA Voice, published letters, essays, and poetry by and for SOFFAs. Your SOFFA Voice could be understood as what Cait McKinney calls information activism, attempts at creating political collectivity through DIY communication and publication methods. While the poems, stories, and manifestos of Your SOFFA Voice were undoubtedly expressions of genuine experience, they also read as expressions of “bad” liberal feminism, preoccupied with the domestic and intimate and obscuring political questions other than personal identity. Historicizing the intimate, domestic themes of this 1990s archive in relation to earlier trans/butch/femme representations of 1960s bar culture and working-class solidarities—particularly in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues—helps contextualize them in relation to multiple historical events: the expansion of feminized administrative and clerical labor markets on one hand; and on the other hand, the withdrawal of the welfare state and the absorption of the radical political imagination into homonormative lesbian and gay rights organizing, and the institutionalization of 1960s-70s feminist, queer, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous campus protest into liberal diversity and inclusion initiatives in the 1990s and 2000s. This analysis helps us ask questions about trans care now: how and why intimate partnerships are made to bear such utopian desires for community building and care while also constituting a crucible for much of the mess, tension, and dysfunction of trans care, and whether understanding trans people as autonomous and self-determining is a viable alternative.