Locating Sex: the Rhetorical Contours of Transgender Anti-Discrimination Law

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Rhetoric and Writing

Department dc:contributor.department

English

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Collins, Laura Jane

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Hausman, Bernice L.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Powell, Katrina M.
• Labuski, Christine
• Pender, Kelly E.

• rhetoric
• law
• gender
• Transgender
• anti-discrimination law

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:10717

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/85364