Struggling for Ordinary. Andre Cavalcante
is not to say that “the ordinary” does not share some of its meaning with the word “normal,” as both imply a sense of order. In its earliest usage, for example, the word “ordinary” referred to an imposed order, “something done by rule or authority” (Williams 1983, 225). However, these meanings represent only half the story. The ordinary is far more capacious, more than an expression of regulatory or disciplinary power. For cultural theorist Raymond Williams (1989), the ordinary is inherently “good.” “Culture is ordinary,” he writes, “an interest in learning or the arts is simple, pleasant and natural. A desire to know what is best, and to do what is good, is the whole positive nature of man” (7). Likewise, philosopher Stanley Rosen (2002) suggests the ordinary revolves around doing “the right thing,” determining between better and worse, and striving to “respond correctly to things, experiences, events, and so on, as they actually are” (263).17
Ordinariness is also about being in connection and communication with others, sharing space and time with them. It is about existing on a field of social interaction as an intelligible and recognized person. It hinges on recognition, to be recognized in public space (and virtual space) without issue. Ordinariness is about participating in the communication and cultural rituals that allow us to feel communion with others, to feel part of something greater than ourselves. It is about being “together in fellowship,” a fellowship organized around “the celebration of shared even if illusory beliefs” (Carey 1992, 43).
At the most basic level, the ordinary was less about the “normal” (and normative) and more about “the everyday” for the participants in my study. Their desire for the ordinary was essentially an aspiration for the rhythms and affordances typically granted in everyday life. Ease, comfort, and mindlessness. Communication, ritual, and routine. The ability to be both someone—to be recognized and affirmed—and no one—to be left alone and ignored. These are some of the gifts of everyday life.
Indeed, as Felski (1999) maintains, the everyday has no “intrinsic political content,” nor is it ideologically “reactionary” (31). Rather, it is a site of potentiality, a “bloom space” (Seigworth and Greg 2010, 9). It is a deeply sensual world where our dreams, fantasies, feelings, and emotions germinate and launch. The everyday is where we experience pleasure and pain, love and loss, silence and boredom. In its spaces, we engage with technology to “extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within” (Turkle 2011, 307). Even the seemingly frustrating and colorless characteristics of everyday life have an alternative side. Although the incessant and predictable routine of the everyday can feel monotonous, it can also provide comfort and pleasure. Everyday life offers simple and basic joys, luxuries, and conveniences. These are not just the purchased pleasures of consumer society, but deeply human moments: spontaneous conversations with strangers at a bar or leisurely walks down Main Street.
Perhaps the greatest gift of everyday life is the way it affords us the ability to move through it without much thought or trouble, to operate in the world in taken-for-granted ways. Indeed, an everyday life defined by constant struggle and laborious thought is essentially unworkable and unlivable. However, the taken-for-grantedness of everyday life is unequally distributed, more easily accessible to some than others. For the individuals who shared their stories with me and who defy the gender binary, battle stigma, and face systematic disenfranchisement, the rhythms and routines of the everyday are not simply granted. They are hard-won, practical accomplishments, the end result of individual and collective labor.18 This struggle for the ordinary, a struggle increasingly being waged in and through media culture, is what this book is about.
In attending to questions of ordinariness, this book redresses some of queer, cultural, and critical theory’s greatest liabilities: their general lack of engagement with everyday experiences, the theoretical impasse they create through the queer/normal binary, and the reductive framework of politics-as-resistance that underpin their epistemic and methodological ground. Throughout the book I develop the notion of the ordinary by examining the quotidian side of transgender life. I focus on those lower, mundane, and quieter dimensions often overlooked or dismissed by researchers and theorists. I root my inquiry in the microphysics of participants’ everyday lives—while not losing sight of the larger questions. I also investigate what “ordinary representations of transgender people” in media culture look like and mean to the participants in my study. Over and again they expressed a desire to see people not defined by their transgender identity, but rather as people who, as they said, “happen to be” transgender. Rather than dismissing this as a desire for assimilation or normativity, I take this sentiment seriously and theorize it as aspirational, as a hunger for everyday life possibilities. I consider participants’ wish to “be” ordinary and their struggle to accomplish ordinary status.
In line with Scannell (2014), I conceive of “being ordinary” as the ability to “matter-of-factly be in a world that allows me to be about my everyday concerns, whatever that may be, in ways that are essentially unproblematic” (22; emphasis in original). Accordingly, I explore how media encounters can make a sense of the ordinary more or less out of reach for participants, and the ways they use technology in struggling for and achieving a sense of everydayness. Finally, I complicate the queer/normal binary and discuss the ways participants think about and merge the forces of queerness and normality in their everyday lives and in their interactions with media culture. I argue that they envision themselves and navigate the world in “queerly ordinary” ways.
In the chapters that follow, I explore how participants have engaged with media culture to construct identity, preserve self, and try to achieve everydayness. Underlying these practices was an essential tension, one characterized by the pull of queerness and ordinariness, sameness and difference, closeness and distance, stability and instability, and outsiderness and insiderness. The question about how to come to terms with these seemingly contradictory forces manifested throughout my fieldwork. Indeed, this question is so central to transgender life that it has emerged in other ethnographic work. In his study on female-to-male (FTM) transgender people living in San Francisco, Boston, and New York, Rubin (2003) found that “the tension between the ordinary and the unconventional structures every element of their lives” (3). This tension was equally a concern for me as I tried to make sense of and write about it. I wrestled with how to analyze participant data in new ways, ways that were nuanced and that refused to reduce their thoughts and experiences to false consciousness or mindless assimilation. In this way, this book highlights two struggles for the ordinary. The first concerns the work that participants in my study performed, using media to access the taken-for-granted rhythms and affordances of everyday life and to thrive in a world created without them in mind. The second struggle for the ordinary was my own as I tried to find a vocabulary suitable for talking about ordinariness and queerness in the same breath. My goal is to do justice to both.
Overview
Chaz Bono. Orange Is the New Black. Caitlyn Jenner. More than 50 gender identity options on Facebook. Transparent. “Bathroom bill” controversy. In recent years, a new trans visibility has emerged in media culture. But since the mid-twentieth century, transgender visibility proliferated across various cultural sites, albeit slowly and unevenly. This visibility was made possible through the unfolding of specific historical developments: the construction of gender as a non-binary category, the expansion of transgender discourse, and the sociopolitical mobilization of the transgender community throughout the twentieth century; the rise of gay-themed media content during the 1990s, which set the stage for transgender representations; and the growth of interactive communications technologies that provided space for transgender voices to flourish. The first chapter examines transgender visibility amid these historical developments. In doing so, it provides the macroscopic context for the book, the larger picture against which the stories of the participants in my study play out.
After establishing this context, the second chapter turns to media and the ideology of transgender impossibility they generate. It examines how participants interpreted popular media representations in terms of transgender violence, dehumanization, and delegitimization. I argue that these themes emerge in participant interviews not only because they frequently appear in media, but also because they are fundamentally at risk in the everyday lives of trans people. Remaining safe, maintaining personhood, and being taken seriously are all at stake in living a trans life. They inform the interpretive frameworks