Legislation and litigation aimed at ending discrimination against transgender people has been both critiqued as eliding the structural roots of discrimination and celebrated as an important visibility project that helps to highlight the struggles trans people face. Approaching law as an ongoing interaction where meaning unfolds, I investigate what is being made visible through transgender anti-discrimination law and how it might variously impact trans and gender justice movements in the future. I analyze three different articulations of transgender anti-discrimination law, attending to the rhetorical configurations of sex, identity, and discrimination that emerge in them and the political and ethical implications of those configurations. Ultimately, I argue that this rhetorical mapping complicates how we understand identity to function within anti-discrimination law and, more importantly, that it highlights the ethical possibilities that lurk beneath simple understandings of anti-discrimination law. / Ph. D. / Lawsuits and laws aimed at addressing discrimination against transgender people have become front-page news. As such, anti-discrimination law is a primary lens through which the American public is coming to learn about transgender people and the political advocacy being carried out on their behalf. While some advocates have championed this development, others have argued that anti-discrimination law does little to address inequality and to protect the most vulnerable. In this dissertation, I use rhetorical theory to analyze how various instances of anti-discrimination law position transgender people, their identities, and the problem of discrimination. Through this analysis, I show how anti-discrimination law can both foreclose and invite further inquiry into the roots of discrimination. Ultimately, I argue that anti-discrimination law cannot solve the problem of inequality but that it <i>can</i> draw attention to our ethical responsibilities toward each other.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/85364 |
| Date | 21 April 2017 |
| Creators | Collins, Laura Jane |
| Contributors | English, Hausman, Bernice L., Powell, Katrina M., Labuski, Christine, Pender, Kelly E. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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