Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category » (New Edition)

David Valentine is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.

An ethnography in which the author’s fieldwork with transgendered and transsexual individuals in New York City demonstrates the creation and confusion of gender identity labels.

List of Illustrations     ix
Acknowledgments     xi
Imagining Transgender
Introduction     3
Imagining Transgender     29
Making Community, Conceiving Identity
Introduction to Part II: Reframing Community and Identity     68
Making Community     71
"I Know What I Am": Gender, Sexuality, and Identity     105
Emerging Fields
Introduction to Part III: The Transexual, the Anthropologist, and the Rabbi     140
The Making of a Field: Anthropology and Transgender Studies     143
The Logic of Inclusion: Transgender Activism     173
The Calculus of Pain: Violence, Narrative, and the Self     204
Conclusion: Making Ethnography     231
Notes     257
Works Cited     277
Index     299