| Operating at the intersection of rhetoric, law, and everyday life, I examine how transgender individuals and groups invoke and modify the law in their everyday activities as they demand to be recognized as full and equal citizens. As a corrective to rhetorical critique that restricts itself to official legal texts, this dissertation engages a variety of texts including advocacy campaigns, city council meetings, mass-mediated representation of transgender college students, coalitional politics between transgender and disabled activists, and archival research to offer a fuller picture of the range of subjectivities enabled by quotidian negotiations of the law. In looking at the practice of rhetorical legal cultures outside of the courtroom, I suggest that the law and notions of legality are one way that transpeople manage their relationships with strangers. As transpeople articulate themselves and others through legalistic discourses, their identities and the law undo each other in the sense that neither is a stable entity; rather, each is continually modified as they are employed. This line of analysis allows me to make two interventions into current discussions about citizenship. First, this performative perspective of law and culture moves us away from making totalizing assessments about the normative force of citizenship, especially in relation to queer bodies. Instead, claims to citizenship must be examined with an eye toward the contextualized and contingent ways in which this category is a site of contestation and invention. The second intervention asks us to find sources of agency outside of the logics of official state recognition to navigate cultural difference. If we understand legal discourses as a generative opportunity for unruly legal subjects, we can see better how the most important site of legal change may not be in the courtroom, but in the practices of our everyday lives. |
