Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses how transgender social movement activists strategically address social devaluation by leveraging “biopolitical biographies” to make demands for biomedical recognition through technoscientific progress, health care access, and new biomedical classifications.

Paper long abstract:

The notion of "biography" forms a critical analytic tool in medical sociology (Charmaz 2002). STS scholars are also interested in biographies and the way they fit—or fail to fit—within classification systems (Bowker and Star 1999). Yet less is known about how biographies are tactically deployed by those for whom classification is a problem. This paper thus examines how transgender social movement activists mobilize biographies biopolitically and strategically to influence knowledge production in ways conversant with their political demands. This paper looks empirically to transgender activism in Buenos Aires and New York that mobilizes a 'popular epidemiology' (Brown 1997) of reduced life chances as a problem requiring more robust forms of biomedical legibility and recognition. Drawing from ethnographic interviews and participant observation, I discuss how in these settings 'biopolitical biographies' comprise a salient mode of political and ethical redress to make apparent to experts the gamut of forces that differentially harm marginalized gender non-normative subjects. I examine how biopolitical biographies center issues that are typically excluded from the biomedical purview, such as racialized criminalization, economic marginalization, and sexualized violence. Ultimately, the paper argues that studying the mobilization of biopolitical biographies reveals some of the dynamics that lead to otherwise unlikely shifts in what counts as 'good' biomedical knowledge, practice, and care.