Date of Award

1-1-2017

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Sociology

Content Description

1 online resource (iii, vii, 180 pages)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Steven Seidman

Committee Members

Glenna Spitze, Barbara Sutton

Keywords

Embodiment, Families, Relationships, Sexuality, Trans, Transgender, Transgender people, Couples, Relationship quality, Gender identity, Gender nonconformity, Intimacy (Psychology), Domestic relations

Subject Categories

Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies | Sociology

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore the gendered, sexual, and embodied negotiations of the social world by thirty-five partners of transgender people as their significant other experienced various aspects of gender transition. This research shows the ways that people peripheral to a gender transition can be intimately impacted by it. Participants in this study demonstrated shifted understandings of their own and their partner’s gender and sexuality (i.e. Jason Cromwell’s (1999) transsituated perspective), as well as shifted understandings of gender and sexuality on a structural level, thus expanding our understanding of transgender studies by addressing how the perspectives of intimate partners of transgender people are shaped by trans experience. Through this shifted perspective, participants gained tools and coping strategies for navigating the social world. Participants were also able to articulate new and refigured understandings of bodies through their investigation of their own and their partner’s embodiment, suggesting connections between personal experience and acquired standpoint knowledge that complicate sociological embodiment perspectives.

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