At the same time, the park (especially at night) is thought of as a site where male
against female violence occurs (Little 2005; Chan and Rigakos 2002; Pain 1997).
Public parks are contested zones because they are accessible by numerous social
groups who make different use values of the locale. Even Christopher Park in New
York, iconic in gay communities, is neither stably queer or heteronormative (Conlon
2004). Instead, it is through contestation that space becomes produced or
intelligible as belonging to one or another social group and the conduct associated
with them. It is not only ‘private’ and ‘public’ that are constituted through such
regulation and surveillance. It is through surveillance that ‘homosexuals’ as so-
called sexual deviants become intelligible as governance objects
to organizations
like the NCC. Examining the textual organization of surveillance practices and the
work of surveillance agents
(Walby 2005), in this paper I focus on how the NCC as a
governance agency mobilizes against and monitors people with diverse
sexualities
.>
Constant observation and the assigning of terms like “trans”
by the dominant mainstream erases the lived experience of the
victims
LeBlanc 10
UNQUEERING TRANSGENDER? A QUEER GEOGRAPHY OF
TRANSNORMATIVITY IN TWO ONLINE COMMUNITIES by Fred Joseph LeBlanc Master
of Arts in Gender & Women’s Studies Victoria University of Wellington 2010 P27-30
A
nita shows the complications of lived experience upon the transgender category
and the limits of transgender as an identity.
Anita knows she is “gay” and “a man,” but she also
knows that everything she does is “like a woman” and is therefore read as
transgender.
In fact, in his field work at the New York Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center and the
surrounding areas,
Valentine found many people on whom the transgender category
would be placed, but identified as gay men and saw their gender variance as part of
their (homo)sexuality
– and this was not limited to male-bodied women.
Jade, an older female-
bodied individual who identifies as a “mother,” “lesbian,” and a “man,” found the
word transgender not representative of her experienc
e because “the word ‘trans’ was only used
in ‘transsexual,’ meaning you were flipping over, changing your organs” (ibid.) Valentine considers that this is not
merely a mis- or non-education issue and that some gay-identified people would adopt the transgender label and
abandon their gay identity if they were better informed of it. Rather,
for many gender-variant people,
personal experiences cannot be accounted for so easily by the categories
homosexuality or transgender; both sexual and gendered experiences exceed the
boundaries of their categories.
Impacts
Bare Life
Bodies become occupied by the state, subjected to
surveillance, ID numbers, passes, and permits. This leads to
unthinkable despair and a state of bare life.
