Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List

Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until August 07, 2027

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Coalitions at the Crossroad: Midwest Transgender History, 1945-2000

Ellison, Joy
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0877-1005
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu165816486473889

Abstract Details

2022, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
The emergence of a nationwide transgender community in the United States is popularly understood as a new phenomenon. However, a small but growing body of scholarship demonstrates that transgender communities have long existed and played important roles in shaping changing conceptions of sex and gender, as well as color and race. Historians Joanne Meyerowitz and Susan Stryker describe the emergence of transgender communities following World War II, centering their accounts in large coastal cities. Coalitions at the Crossroads: Midwestern Trans Movements, 1945-2000 adds significantly to this research by documenting the lives and political mobilizations of transgender people in the Post-War Midwest, focusing on transgender women of color and the role of transphobia in maintaining racialized hierarchies. Using oral history interviews to contextualize cultural and archival sources, I chart the history of transgender movements as lived by transgender people and expressed in writing, art, and performance. I argue that, in contrast to activists in California and New York, transgender people in the Midwest formed long-lasting coalitions with lesbians and the women’s movement based on shared feminist principles. In response to violence and geographic dispersal, transgender Midwesterners organized distinctive regional networks and participated in both gay cultural spaces and Third World mobilizations. Midwestern transgender feminist coalitions contributed significantly to the shift from a “gay and lesbian” movement to a national LGBT political consciousness. Coalitions at the Crossroads disputes the assumption that transgender women are newcomers to feminism, demonstrating that their movements have long been intertwined with larger feminist and racial justice struggles.
Daniel Rivers (Committee Co-Chair)
Treva Lindsey (Advisor)
Jian Chen (Committee Member)
Guisela Latorre (Committee Member)
439 p.
African Americans; History; Womens Studies
transgender, queer, LGBT history, feminism, feminist history, social justice movements, Black studies

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Ellison, J. (2022). Coalitions at the Crossroad: Midwest Transgender History, 1945-2000 [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu165816486473889

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Ellison, Joy. Coalitions at the Crossroad: Midwest Transgender History, 1945-2000. 2022. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu165816486473889.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Ellison, Joy. "Coalitions at the Crossroad: Midwest Transgender History, 1945-2000." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2022. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu165816486473889

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu165816486473889
© 2022, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.