Epidemiologic Rage: Empirical Biography and Trans- Health Militancy in Buenos Aires and New York

Department: Gender and Sexuality Studies

Date and Time: November 28, 2018 | 12:00 PM-1:30 PM

Event Location: Humanities Gateway 1010

Event Details


Please join us November 28th for “Epidemiologic Rage: Empirical Biography and Trans- Health Militancy in Buenos Aires and New York.” This talk will be given by San Francisco State University Professor Christoph Hanssmann.

This talk will examine how trans- health-based social movements have refashioned notions of "risk" to enact major regulatory shifts in the public provision of trans- health care. It looks ethnographically to activism in Buenos Aires and New York City that led to the passage of Argentina's Gender Identity Law and the repeal of New York State's Medicaid exclusion prohibiting reimbursement for gender-affirming care. Tracing transgender health's focal shift from individual pathology to structural inequity, this talk will describe how activists developed and used "empirical biographies" to define racialized state abandonment as a fundamental health risk. These community-based studies—which blended quantitative and narrative data—had a considerable effect on trans- health politics in the United States and Argentina. Such a statistical turn, however, has produced contradictory effects. At one level, it has obscured some of the differential conditions of imperilment that trans- people experience. At another, it has directed attention to the markedly racialized, sexualized, classed, and gendered forms of subjugation that materialize in transnational landscapes of trans- health. In addition to providing insight into trans- health's rapid transformations, these findings also relate more generally to how population health and social movements approach questions of state violence.

This event is free and open to the public.

This browser does not support PDFs. Please download the PDF to view it: Download Poster.