| This dissertation examines the ways various surveillance mechanisms have been deployed in relation to transgender and gender-nonconforming bodies and populations in the context of Western modernity. Bridging the emerging fields of surveillance studies and transgender studies, I ask how transgender studies might be useful in better understanding surveillance and security practices, and how surveillance studies might further illuminate the regulation of gendered and racialized bodies in the U.S. and at U.S. borders.;At its heart, this dissertation aims to show how transgender and gender-nonconforming bodies are inextricably bound up with questions of nationalism, state security, and military and government constructions of safety. The chapters examine surveillance sites ranging from identification documents to biometrics programs, and from medical surveillance of reproduction to airport X-rays. While focusing on surveillance mechanisms that are particularly linked to the global War on Terror, I also contextualize these practices in histories of bodily classification, militarization, and shifting constructions of deviance. Simultaneously, I trace genealogies of gender-nonconforming figures that have served as objects of scrutiny in contexts ranging from medicine and law to immigration checkpoints.;Importantly, this dissertation rethinks the very category of "transgender," engaging the fact that bodies may be read as gender deviant in relation to racial, religious, and/or national appearance, or through perceived class status, disability or sexual practices. I ask how certain trans-identified bodies, able to comply with dominant standards of dress and behavior (themselves grounded in ideals of whiteness, citizenship, class privilege and compulsory heterosexuality), may be legible to surveillance mechanisms not as transgender, but as properly gendered and non-threatening. At the same time, I consider the ways contemporary surveillance technologies produce and make visible particular understandings of transgender bodies. Finally, I argue that if surveillance practices assume normative bodies, then gender-nonconforming bodies may confound, hamper, or render illegible those practices, offering insight into potential counter-surveillance tactics and forms of resistance. In this way, rather than continuing to position trans and gender-nonconforming bodies as objects of curiosity and scientific scrutiny, I use the critical lens of transgender studies to examine ruptures and inconsistencies in state, medical, media and legal surveillance practices. |
