Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People - Softcover

Namaste, Viviane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226568105 ISBN 13: 9780226568102

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2000

Synopsis

Invisible Lives is the first scholarly study of transgendered people—cross-dressers, drag queens and transsexuals—and their everyday lives.

Through combined theoretical and empirical study, Viviane K. Namaste argues that transgendered people are not so much produced by medicine or psychiatry as they are erased, or made invisible, in a variety of institutional and cultural settings. Namaste begins her work by analyzing two theoretical perspectives on transgendered people—queer theory and the social sciences—displaying how neither of these has adequately addressed the issues most relevant to sex change: everything from employment to health care to identity papers. Namaste then examines some of the rhetorical and semiotic inscriptions of transgendered figures in culture, including studies of early punk and glam rock subcultures, to illustrate how the effacement of transgendered people is organized in different cultural sites. Invisible Lives concludes with new research on some of the day-to-day concerns of transgendered people, offering case studies in violence, health care, gender identity clinics, and the law.

About this title

About the Author:

Viviane K. Namaste has a Ph.D. in semiotics from the Université du Québec à Montréal. She coordinates a community-based transsexual health care project of CACTUS- Montréal, and is involved with different advisory committees and research initiatives related to prisons, transsexual health, HIV, prostitution, and harm reduction.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0226568105
• ISBN 13: 9780226568102
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320