Andre Cavalcante, Struggling for Ordinary: Media and Transgender Belonging in Everyday Life

Abstract

Andre Cavalcante’s choice to foreground the voices and experiences of his informants in Struggling for Ordinary: Media and Transgender Belonging in Everyday Lifeis therefore a wise one. The book’s theme is less “the ‘normal’(and normative) and more about the ‘everyday’”(p. 21), a frequently overlooked aspect of queer being that Cavalcante explores through ethnographic observation and interviews with trans participants in the Midwest. His approach follows the idea that queerness is a reorientation that suffuses even the most straightforward actions (Ahmed, 2006)—but it raises the question, Does queerness always need to be disruptive? For many of Cavalcante’s informants, the tension is between these radical expressions of trans identity and doing something as mundane as, for example, making dinner. This division between the ordinary and what might be called the queer extraordinary(the usual focus of research) manifests inmedia, whose history, production, and consumption form the book’s entry point into trans life.