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Whose imagination? Complicating attempts in locating the transgender community.

Article Excerpt
Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. By David Valentine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 302 pages. Softcover, $22.95.

Whether he is discussing the serenity of his bicycle rides between field sites in New York City or reflecting upon the grisly murder of the woman to whom the book is dedicated, David Valentine's central concern remains the same: "transgender," as it is institutionally recognized and deployed, is not as solid a category as commonly regarded. Valentine's goal is precisely what he lays out in the title of this text; throughout the book he struggles with who and what "transgender" is expected to reference, as well as how it is used. Although he admits that transgender has and remains a powerful and transformative mode of identity for many, he maintains that it fails to fully encompass all those who it is intended to include. Ultimately, he argues that "transgender" does less to represent lived experience of gender variability than it serves to reflect a White middle-class understanding of gender and sexuality, all at the detriment of those who are expected to fall within the category but do not actively identify as such.

Through both new essays and several reprinted articles, Valentine clearly lays out for the reader the themes his book inspects, while admitting to the relative absence of other themes. Valentine divides his book into six chapters: the rise of transgender as a collective term, how gender and...

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