Viviane Namaste - Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and...

2000, Canada, English, Viviane Namaste,

Full title: "Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People" by Viviane Namaste.

"Invisible Lives is the first scholarly study of transgendered people - cross-dressers, drag queens and transsexuals - and their everyday lives. Through combined theoretical and empirical study, Viviane K. Namaste argues that transgendered people are not so much produced by medicine or psychiatry as they are erased, or made invisible, in a variety of institutional and cultural settings.

Namaste begins her work by analyzing two theoretical perspectives on transgendered people - queer theory and the social sciences - displaying how neither of these has adequately addressed the issues most relevant to sex change: everything from employment to health care to identity papers."

"Namaste then examines some of the rhetorical and semiotic inscriptions of transgendered figures in culture, including studies of early punk and glam rock subcultures, to illustrate how the effacement of transgendered people is organized in different cultural sites. Invisible Lives concludes with new research on some of the day-to-day concerns of transgendered people, offering case studies in violence, health care, gender identity clinics, and the law."

Viviane K. Namaste is a Canadian feminist professor at Concordia University in Montreal. Her research focuses on sexual health, HIV/AIDS prevention, and sex work. She holds a Concordia University Tier 3 Research Chair in HIV/AIDS and Sexual Health, and her primary area of research is HIV/AIDS prevention. In 2011, she received the Outstanding Book Award for her book Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. 

According to Wikipedia, in 2013, Viviane Namaste was called as an official intervenor in a hearing at the Supreme Court of Canada on whether the ban on solicitation, prohibition of brothels and criminality of making a living from prostitution violates the Charter of Rights.

In the Grey Center bio, we can read that "She has commented that research that maintains the gender binary can exclude communities. Her research examines the involvement of public health in HIV prevention among swinger groups in Montreal, Quebec. Namaste has been noted for criticizing Judith Butler in her work Undoing Gender by discussing how transsexuality intersects someone's identity and how it attributes to the treatment of transsexuals and more specifically their murder."

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Photo by Concordia University

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