About this item
Highlights
- Examining trans- healthcare as a key site through which struggles for health and justice take shape Over the past two decades, medical and therapeutic approaches to transgender patients have changed radically, from treating a supposed pathology to offering gender-affirming care.
- About the Author: Christoph Hanssmann is assistant professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of California, Davis.
- 336 Pages
- Social Science, LGBT Studies
Description
About the Book
"Based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and Buenos Aires, Care without Pathology shows how trans- health activists have taken on the project of depathologization. Christoph Hanssmann situates trans- health as a crucible within which sweeping changes are taking place-with potentially far-reaching effects on the economic and racial barriers to accessing care"--Book Synopsis
Examining trans- healthcare as a key site through which struggles for health and justice take shape
Over the past two decades, medical and therapeutic approaches to transgender patients have changed radically, from treating a supposed pathology to offering gender-affirming care. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and Buenos Aires, Care without Pathology moves across the Americas to show how trans- health activists have taken on the project of depathologization.
In New York, Christoph Hanssmann examines activist attempts to overturn bans on using public health dollars to fund trans- health care. In Argentina, he traces how trans- activists marshaled medical statistics and personal biographies to reveal state violence directed against trans- people and travestis. Hanssmann also demonstrates the importance of understanding transphobia in the broader context of gendered racism, ableism, and antipoverty, arguing for the rise of a thoroughly coalition-based mass mobilization.
Care without Pathology highlights the distributive arguments activists made to access state funding for health care, combating state arguments that funding trans- health care is too specialized, too expensive, and too controversial. Hanssmann situates trans- health as a crucible within which sweeping changes are taking place--with potentially far-reaching effects on the economic and racial barriers to accessing care.
Review Quotes
"A bold ethnography of twenty-first century trans health care movements in New York City and Buenos Aires, Care without Pathology untangles the thicket of political distortion to reveal the urgency and innovation of championing trans health care as a public good and a social need. A vital book for grasping a revolutionary movement that propagates access to care and justice."--Nayan Shah, University of Southern California
"Demonstrating how grassroots movements are disrupting social and biomedical power structures, [Care without Pathology] is an essential contribution to research on depathologisation efforts in trans care."--LSE Reviews
"A theory-laden but horizon-expanding work of qualitative research, Care Without Pathology will be most useful to scholars in sociology, anthropology, and gender, sexuality, and women's studies. Students studying political and health sciences and interested in working with marginalized populations are another potential audience for this work."--CHOICE
"Hanssmann's work offers a compelling critique of existing healthcare systems and advocates for a transformative approach to care that moves beyond pathologization."--H-Net Reviews
"Care Without Pathology contributes profound empirical and theoretical insights about social movements, human rights, health policy, bioethics, global transgender health, and the social construction of biomedicine in and beyond the United States."--American Journal of Sociology
About the Author
Christoph Hanssmann is assistant professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of California, Davis.