Pose:

Deconstructing Fragility, Identity, and Transphobia

Abstract

This paper sets out to theorise one possible origin of transphobia in relation to the current round of increasingly politically driven attacks on trans people’s human rights. To do this, it attempts – drawing on sections of the US television series Pose – to establish a new characterisation of the sociocultural and affective roots of transphobia. I argue that to understand some forms of transphobia, we need to conceptualise identification as a process rather than identity as a substantive and understand how this process leads to trans people exposing the fragilities in some cis people’s identities, producing an irrational transphobic hatred. The argument developed here represents an attempt to deploy social activity method in a specifically queer sociological approach, creating a “deformance” of the data relating to identification processes and the implications and consequences of this analysis.