Overview

The first famous transgender person in the United States, Christine Jorgensen, traveled to Denmark for gender reassignment surgery in 1952. Jorgensen became famous during the ascent of postwar dreams about the possibilities for technology to transform humanity and the world. In Mobile Subjects Aren Z. Aizura examines transgender narratives within global health and tourism economies from 1952 to the present. Drawing on an archive of trans memoirs and documentaries as well as ethnographic fieldwork with trans people obtaining gender reassignment surgery in Thailand, Aizura maps the uneven use of medical protocols to show how national and regional health care systems and labor economies contribute to and limit transnational mobility. Aizura positions transgender travel as a form of biomedical tourism, examining how understandings of race, gender, and aesthetics shape global cosmetic surgery cultures and how economic and racially stratified marketing and care work create the ideal transgender subject as an implicitly white, global citizen. In so doing, he shows how understandings of travel and mobility depend on the historical architectures of colonialism and contemporary patterns of global consumption and labor.

Full Product Details

9781478001218

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Reviews

""Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty and professionals."" -- N. B. Rosenthal * Choice * ""Destabilizing formulaic transnational mobility stories that rely on an epic departure-and-return script, Aizura offers a powerful challenge to consider the wild movements of minor mobilities and the potentiality of staying in place."" -- Emmanuel David * TSQ * ""[This] book evokes a pondering of how Transgender Studies as a field will move itself forward. Aizura’s own urging to give a voice to transgender people who straddle the margins of privileged trans-normativity reiterates the field’s mission of breaking new paths for inclusivity, intersectionality, and independence from myopic visions of what being transgender means today."" -- Muriel Vernon * Medical Anthropology Quarterly * ""Mobile Subjects is intentional and thoughtful in its application of interdisciplinary research. . . . Through his multi-method and intersectional approach, Aizura brings forth a conversation that simultaneously accounts for the impact of gender, race, and class on seeking out and obtaining gender reassignment technologies, as well as the varying policies, practices, and vernacular inherent to transnational study."" -- Jacob Barry * Journal of Critical Race Inquiry * “Mobile Subjects provides new insights relevant and challenging for those interested in a range of topics and methodologies. This is a required read for our times...."" -- Lars Olav Aaberg * newbooks.asia * “... [S]cholars in a wide range of fields will find this book useful.... Mobile Subjects exemplifies what can be done when trans studies is integrated with science, technology, and society studies, and more ‘traditional’ gender studies theories, such as queer theory, transnational feminisms, and Marxist theory.” -- K.S. Shindle * Catalyst * “Mobile Subjects is a complex, wide-ranging, and powerfully provocative exploration of how gender reassignment has been and continues to be shaped by physical and metaphorical tropes of movement....” -- Isaac Gagné * American Ethnologist *

Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty and professionals. -- N. B. Rosenthal * Choice *

[This] book evokes a pondering of how Transgender Studies as a field will move itself forward. Aizura's own urging to give a voice to transgender people who straddle the margins of privileged trans-normativity reiterates the field's mission of breaking new paths for inclusivity, intersectionality, and independence from myopic visions of what being transgender means today. -- Muriel Vernon * Medical Anthropology Quarterly * Destabilizing formulaic transnational mobility stories that rely on an epic departure-and-return script, Aizura offers a powerful challenge to consider the wild movements of minor mobilities and the potentiality of staying in place. -- Emmanuel David * TSQ * Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty and professionals. -- N. B. Rosenthal * Choice *

Author Information

Aren Z. Aizura is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota and coeditor of The Transgender Studies Reader 2.

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