The Struggle for the Ordinary: Media Culture, Transgender Audiences and the Achievement of Everyday Life.

Abstract

From the 1980s to the early years of the 21st century, media has increasingly incorporated the stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals. This dissertation, “The Struggle for the Ordinary: Media Culture, Transgender Audiences, and the Achievement of Everyday Life” presents a qualitative exploration into the complex relationship - a circuit of cultural influences - between media culture, transgender identity formation, and everyday life. It accounts for the social, cultural and political processes that have resulted in a swelling of transgender media visibility, and what is at stake in these representations for transgender individuals. It develops from and extends the scholarship on media audiences and audience reception, which seeks to understand how ‘real’ people in the ‘real’ world interact with media to establish meaning in their everyday lives. Informed by in-depth interviews and participant observation within the transgender community, this investigation considers how transgender audiences locate empowering messages and resources for identity work from within media culture. I illustrate how, in playing a primary role in study participants’ construction of a transgender self, media carries the potential to expedite the process of self-realization and/or frustrate and delay it. Media engagements have significant influence over study participants’ interpersonal relationships, feelings of belonging, and sense of personal security. Informed by de Certeau’s (1984) theory of everyday “tactics,” I argue study participants employ strategies of creative adaptation, methodologies of survival and “ways of making do” (de Certeau, 1984, p. 29) in navigating a conflicting and often hostile media environment. This dissertation also illuminates transgender individuals’ struggle for the ordinary, or the constant and deliberate work devoted to achieving the common and routine inclusions, rhythms, and affordances of everyday life. In accord with the doctrines of ethnomethodology, I argue “the ordinary” is an achievement, a social accomplishment that requires conscious effort and creative labor. My dissertation extends the ethnomethodological tradition by emphasizing the role of communications technologies in accomplishing the ordinary.