Trans(Formative) Relationships: What We Learn About Identities, Bodies, Work and Families from Women Partners of Trans Men.

Abstract

Sociology has made tremendous strides over the past forty years in documenting the lives, experiences, and communities of those who are lesbian and gay. Progress toward inclusion of those who are transgender and transsexual, however, has been much slower. Furthermore, existing sociological research on these populations tends to focus exclusively on transgender individuals, extracting people from their actual social relationships and communities. I argue, however, that it is sociologically imperative to resituate transgender lives in their social contexts and to engage in more focused sociological exploration of the experiences of the significant others, friends, family and allies of transgender individuals.

Following a three-article format, based on in-depth qualitative interviews with fifty women partners of trans men across (primarily) the United States and Canada, my dissertation examines the following three substantive questions: 1) What does it mean to “queer” normativity through identity work practices? 2) What are the personal and interpersonal effects of a trans partner’s body dysphoria on a woman partner’s body image and on her experiences of sexual and non-sexual relationship intimacy? 3) What do narratives from women partners of trans men, on the performance, structure and division of household labor and emotion work within their relationships, reveal about “doing gender” and “women’s work” within contemporary families?

In these articles, I extend existing sociological studies of emotion work, identity work, gender, sexuality, LGBTQ communities, the body, and the family to discern how the various forms of work and partnering in which women partners of trans men engage is both similar to, and distinct from, that performed by women in heterosexual and lesbian relationships. Furthermore, I explore explanatory frameworks with which women partners of trans men engage to explain the work they do in their relationships, highlighting their particular connection to Third-Wave feminist ideals of free will, choice, queer politics, and individuality. These rich narratives present possibilities for expanding sociological understandings of identities, bodies, work, and families on our shifting, twenty-first-century social landscape.