Papers by Sonny Nordmarken
Queering Gendering: Trans Epistemologies and the Disruption and Production of Gender Accomplishment Practices
Feminist Studies, 2019
This article argues that gender minorities disruptively and productively intervene in the interac... more This article argues that gender minorities disruptively and productively intervene in the interactional gender process. Rather than conforming to gender norms in order to be perceived appropriately, these individuals introduce a new gender paradigm and re-socialize others to use self-designated gender pronouns. Individuals who appear gender-ambiguous evoke what I term “gender anomie,” preventing others from ascribing a gender to them.
Contesting Lyme Disease
The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment, 2019
In this chapter, the author examines his embodied experience with Lyme disease to chart how power... more In this chapter, the author examines his embodied experience with Lyme disease to chart how power and knowledge within the dominant biomedical framework were produced via engagement with medical providers. Analyzing the medical governance of Lyme disease through actors’ everyday decision-making practices, the author shows how, in failing to accurately diagnose and treat his sick body and depriving him of treatment, credentialed health care providers reproduced culturally dominant, institutionalized, yet inadequate formations of medical power-knowledge. The author’s experience of this disease illustrates how the manufacture of disease categories and their ascription regulates bodies that do not fit into established categories. Analyzing data from his own life in light of medical science research, the author advances an analytical autoethnography and dissenting embodied knowledge, legitimizing the diagnostic category of chronic Lyme disease, and introducing two concepts—contested disease and contested care—to theorize the complex phenomenon of Lyme disease.
Transfiguring desire: Divining the origin of species
Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2016
In this piece, we combine autoethnographic and poetic methods/genres to examine intimate and soci... more In this piece, we combine autoethnographic and poetic methods/genres to examine intimate and social experiences we have had as two transmasculine queers with complex sexual and gender histories in an intergenerational relationship. If queerness/transness is a “species,” our title, playing on Darwin, promises an answer to oft-asked problematic questions of queer/trans origins. Refusing to address this question, we instead turn Darwin on himself and examine intimate moments in our lives to show how we have experienced the constant formation and personal evolution of desire and identity. Tracing memories reaching back 28 years for one of us and 58 years for the other, we describe our shifting desire and embodiment and locate ourselves in lesbian, gay, trans, and queer histories. We next investigate how illness, disability, and age difference inflect and shape the ways we understand and relate to each other and intersubjectively make meaning in our present relationship. Our inquiry illustrates our complex positionalities, examines how “dyke legacies” are embodied in our affection and interdependence, and challenges biologized, cisnormative assumptions. Thus, a knowledge formation starting from embodied trans-trans intimate lives can challenge the naturalness and intransigence assumptions in dominant notions of gender, heterosexuality, bodies, relationality, identity, and kinship.
Orlando: Observances
Feminist Studies, 2016
This article is a compilation of nine brief first-person accounts of spontaneously organized obse... more This article is a compilation of nine brief first-person accounts of spontaneously organized observances in and outside the United States after the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Comparing two events held on the same evening in Tucson, Arizona—one, which resembled a rally, and the other, which was more of a vigil—I illustrate the emotional tenor and political discourse produced at each.
Intimate Citizenship
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 2016
Microaggressions
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2014
One of 86 essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, this... more One of 86 essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, this article identifies and illustrates some typical microaggressions, or commonplace, interpersonally communicated, demeaning messages related to a person’s perceived marginalized status, experienced by trans people. Illustrating microaggressions, a key operation of interactional inequality, reveals the distinct ways that gender normative domination as a dynamic system of power takes shape in trans people’s everyday lives.
Limiting Transgender Health: Administrative Violence and Microaggressions in Health Care Systems
Health Care Disparities and the LGBT Population, 2014
In collaboration with Reese Kelly, we unpack how medical workers’ compliance with gendered offici... more In collaboration with Reese Kelly, we unpack how medical workers’ compliance with gendered official procedures of care provision and social norms diminish trans people, restrict their access to care, and discourage them from seeking treatment
Becoming Ever More Monstrous: Feeling Transgender In-Betweenness
Qualitative Inquiry, 2014
In this autoethnography, I elaborate an analysis of interpersonal aspects of transgender life by ... more In this autoethnography, I elaborate an analysis of interpersonal aspects of transgender life by narrating my everyday interactions living in a gender-ambiguous body as I begin a sexed transition from female to more masculine. I analyze my affective experiences in moments when I am in geographic and gendered transit, encountering social rejection, and connection. Analyzing my fundamentally relational transgender journey in light of the monster’s life in Shelley’s Frankenstein, I show how indignities I encounter in everyday life feel and how my transgender positionalities are complex. Following Susan Stryker, I proclaim “monstrosity” a tool of resistance and reconnection that can help us build connections across difference—that people of all genders might see ourselves in each other, and that, together, we might work against gender injustice and social distance, and toward a deeper kind of intimacy and freedom for us all.
Book Reviews by Sonny Nordmarken
Book Review: The Remarkable Rise of Transgender Rights by Jami K. Taylor, Daniel C. Lewis, and Donald P. Haider-Markel
Gender & Society, 2019
The Remarkable Rise of Transgender Rights explores how, despite its small size, lack of resources... more The Remarkable Rise of Transgender Rights explores how, despite its small size, lack of resources, and political marginalization, the transgen-der movement has successfully changed US public policy over the past two and a half decades. Analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data, including national surveys, case studies, and interviews with activists and government officials, the authors present new findings alongside contex-tualizing research to explain how trans-inclusive policies were achieved as well as how opponents challenged them. They provide a clear introduction to national, state, and local processes of policy change in the United States, and how these routes have been pursued. The book explains (1) the development of the trans movement; (2) public opinion toward trans people and trans-related policies; (3) how trans policy changes have been made in legislative, judicial, and executive venues and via direct democracy ; and (4) the key policy issues of identity documents, discrimination, health care, education, and criminal justice. The book's scope and depth offer readers a comprehensive introduction to the current trans policy landscape. It provides extensive overviews of not only past battles over trans rights and the current state of trans policy, but also the trans movement's development and recent public opinion toward trans people. As such, the book might be described as a "policy history" text. The breadth of topics is impressive, yet rather than cohesively advancing one main idea, the majority of the chapters loosely support it. Nonetheless, the authors use extensive literature and data to convincingly argue that forming transgender advocacy organizations and gaining inclusion in the more robustly organized gay and lesbian advocacy community to form a broader LGBT coalition were key steps to making trans policy changes.
Book Review: Gender Reckonings: New Social Theory and Research, edited by James W. Messerschmidt, Patricia Yancey Martin, Michael A. Messner, and Raewyn Connell
Gender & Society, 2018
Review: Califia Women: Feminist Education Against Sexism, Classism, and Racism, by Clark A Pomerleau
Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 2014
Public Sociology by Sonny Nordmarken
Bodies of Exception and Transactional Microaggressions
The Academic Feminist: Sonny Nordmarken on building stronger movements through intent
Uploads
Papers by Sonny Nordmarken
Book Reviews by Sonny Nordmarken
Public Sociology by Sonny Nordmarken