Aesthetic Citizenship: Living with Gender Dysphoria in the American South Restricted; Files & ToC

Abstract

Situated within legal anthropology, medical anthropology, and queer studies, my dissertation analyzes the changing and morphic nature of gender dysphoria as it is evoked for different purposes and moves between spaces of discourse in and around Atlanta, Georgia. I investigate the processes by which citizenship is constructed in relationship to gender dysphoria, historical, medical, and normative. I do this through an analysis of what I call aesthetic citizenship, which I define as the ways in which certain aesthetic presentations and behaviors of gender reify state claims of citizenship around morality, beauty, imagined form, race, and idealized gender identity. This type of embodied and gendered citizenship is raced in the American context, and I analyze the ways in which gender dysphoria is the subjective, affectual, and internalized experience of such normative influences for people in my field site. My work makes four key interventions. First, I analyze gender dysphoria and racialization in explicit connection in trans* people’s experiences, as well as in non-trans or cis experience. Next, I investigate gender euphoria as a mode of resistance to gender dysphoria’s normative experience. Third, I discuss the aspects of gender dysphoria that make it so difficult to see with the outside eye, and the ways in which medical practitioners have discursively tried to domesticate gender dysphoria and attendant transition conceptually via standardization and historical understandings of medicalized normative categories of aesthetic personhood. Finally, I analyze the judicial imaginaries about gender dysphoric people animating from the Georgia General Assembly. In sum, this work asserts that gender dysphoria can be considered a theory of citizenship in the American context, tied though not determined by structures of power that frame the normative processes of engendering and racialization.

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About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Anthropology
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Anthropology, Cultural Gender Studies American Studies
Keyword	trans studies legal anthropology American south queer anthropology medical anthropology
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Kristin Phillips, Emory University Rachel Hall-Clifford, Emory University
Committee Members	David Nugent, Emory University V Varun Chaudhry, Brandeis University Elias Capello, Savannah College of Art and Design

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