The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia

by Gayle Salamon

Overview

What can the killing of a transgender teen can teach us about the violence of misreading gender identity as sexual identity?

The Life and Death of Latisha King examines a single incident, the shooting of 15-year-old Latisha King by 14-year-old Brian McInerney in their junior high school classroom in Oxnard, California in 2008. The press coverage of the shooting, as well as the criminal trial that followed, referred to Latisha, assigned male at birth, as Larry. Unpacking the consequences of representing the victim as Larry, a gay boy, instead of Latisha, a trans girl, Gayle Salamon draws on the resources of feminist phenomenology to analyze what happened in the school and at the trial that followed. In building on the phenomenological concepts of anonymity and comportment, Salamon considers how gender functions in the social world and the dangers of being denied anonymity as both a particularizing and dehumanizing act.

Salamon offers close readings of the court transcript and the bodily gestures of the participants in the courtroom to illuminate the ways gender and race were both evoked in and expunged from the narrative of the killing. Across court documents and media coverage, Salamon sheds light on the relation between the speakable and unspeakable in the workings of the transphobic imaginary. Interdisciplinary in both scope and method, the book considers the violences visited upon gender-nonconforming bodies that are surveilled and othered, and the contemporary resonances of the Latisha King killing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479892525
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	03/20/2018
Series:	Sexual Cultures , #10
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Gayle Salamon is Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in LGBT Studies in 2011.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

I Wednesday Morning 1

II Latisha 6

III Not Why, But How 9

IV Critical Phenomenology 15

V Race Under Erasure 19

VI A Note on Names and Pronouns 22

1 Comportment 25

I Dressing, Telling, Passing 25

II In Full Swing 30

III Passing: Age and Race 37

IV The Banal Arts: Erwin Straus and the Phenomenology of Walking 40

V Looking at and Looking for "Homosexuality in America" 49

VI The Turn 58

2 Movement 63

I Breaking the Typicality of the World 63

II The Simple Click of Her Heel on the Ground 66

III The Shock of Gender 68

IV Gesture and Meaning 80

V Aggression, Projection, Horizon 87

VI Suicide 96

3 Anonymity 103

I Everyone and No One, or the Paradox of Phenomenology 103

II Otherness and Common Sense 107

III "Lawrence King, A Human Being" 113

IV Sedimentation and Basal Anonymity 121

V Anonymity and Gender 126

VI An Ending 130

4 Objects 135

I The Dress and the Boots 135

II True Size 139

III Ultra-Things 144

IV Phenomenological Ethics 147

V If Something Wasn't Done Soon 150

VI Retroactive Crossing-Out 153

Coda: Two Days in February 161

Acknowledgments 171

Notes 175

Works Cited 183

Index 191

About the Author 201

Editorial Reviews

"Undertakes exactly the kind of parsing, original thinking, attention to detail, and care for its subject that the act of violence at the story's core aimed to hollow out.Salamon's combination of courtroom reportage and phenomenological thinking feels fresh here, as her book bends the conventions of academic discourse to witness enmeshed bodies moving in real time space and time."

Maggie Nelson

" The Life and Death of Latisha King is no ordinary true-crime narrative, but a hard-hitting philosophical investigation into gender and its cultural depiction."- Foreword Reviews

"This beautifully crafted work in slow and critical phenomenology allows us to understand the fatal consequences of skewed gender perception. Salamon takes us through the trial of Latisha King, murdered by a classmate who understood transgendered expression as an aggressive assault. Paying close attention to how the participants in the murder trial discuss and enact their normative passions about how the body should appear, Salamon shows us how phenomenological description that open up for strong criticism modes of perception and action that bear lethal consequences for those who contest hegemonic gender norms. This book is a model of careful and thoughtful philosophy and cultural criticism, bringing to life the resources of a phenomenological tradition that can name, describe, and oppose the obliteration of queer and trans lives. This work is as electric as its slow, making us think, and teaching us to see."-Judith Butler,author of Gender Trouble

"Undertakes exactly the kind of parsing, original thinking, attention to detail, and care for its subject that the act of violence at the story's core aimed to hollow out. Salamon's combination of courtroom reportage and phenomenological thinking feels fresh here, as her book bends the conventions of academic discourse to witness enmeshed bodies moving in real time space and time."-Maggie Nelson,author of The Argonauts

“Why is there so much hate and transphobic violence in the world? Gayle Salamon’s new book is a powerful response to this question. . . points towards the difficult task of thinking about forms of difference and the violence that often attends them, and suggests that examining how gender is differently perceived is a crucial step beyond acknowledging that transphobic violence exists.”- Medical and Health Humanities

“[Salamon] turns our perspective on the trial away from its grueling examination of the gender non-conformity of Latisha King and onto the gendered embodiments of the teachers and attorneys instead."- Lambda Literary

"With transness facing the threat of possible governmental erasure, I can think of no book more important than Gayle Salamon’s The Life and Death of Latisha King. . . . Salamon brilliantly renders how gendered violence, trans erasure, and what the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl calls 'retroactive crossing out' can produce a transphobic imagination."- The Paris Review

From the Publisher

"With transness facing the threat of possible governmental erasure, I can think of no book more important than Gayle Salamons The Life and Death of LatishaKing. . . . Salamon brilliantly renders how gendered violence, trans erasure, and what the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl calls 'retroactive crossing out' can produce a transphobic imagination."

The Paris Review

"The Life and Death of Latisha Kingis no ordinary true-crime narrative, but a hard-hitting philosophical investigation into gender and its cultural depiction."

Foreword Reviews

"Although the author’s primary focus is to carefully study the perception of a brown trans body, delicate passages describing testimonies of Latisha’s skill and confidence while gliding in high-heeled boots or a supportive teacher gifting her a green prom dress conjure the child’s stunning personhood in a visual field beyond the court proceedings."

The Drama Review

"This beautifully crafted work in slow and critical phenomenology allows us to understand the fatal consequences of skewed gender perception. Salamon takes us through the trial of Latisha King, murdered by a classmate who understood transgendered expression as an aggressive assault. Paying close attention to how the participants in the murder trial discuss and enact their normative passions about how the body should appear, Salamon shows us how phenomenological description that open up for strong criticism modes of perception and action that bear lethal consequences for those who contest hegemonic gender norms. This book is a model of careful and thoughtful philosophy and cultural criticism, bringing to life the resources of a phenomenological tradition that can name, describe, and oppose the obliteration of queer and trans lives. This work is as electric as its slow, making us think, and teaching us to see."

Judith Butler

"Gayle Salamon's writing in The Life and Death of Latisha King is sparse, giving a sense of stillness and quiet as if every word of the text were heavy with the weight of mourning. Short sentences and simple wording bring the point to the surface,[1] laying bare a reality that readers cannot but contend with … As a work of critical theory and philosophy, the book continues Salamon's earlier Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (2010) and makes an important contribution to scholarship in feminist, queer, and trans studies that engages with phenomenology (including by scholars such as Beauvoir, Bettcher, Butler, Diprose, Heinämaa, Stryker, Weiss, Young). Insofar as the book is a personal account of Salamon's experience during the trial and her processing of that experience, it can also be at home alongside works such as Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015) and Claudia Rankine's Citizen (2014) … The balancing between the heaviness of loss and mourning, and the hope and love that sustain Salamon's account, is noteworthy."

Hypatia

"[Salamon] turns our perspective on the trial away from its grueling examination of the gender non-conformity of Latisha King and onto the gendered embodiments of the teachers and attorneys instead."

Lambda Literary

"Why is there so much hate and transphobic violence in the world? Gayle Salamons new book is a powerful response to this question. . . points towards the difficult task of thinking about forms of difference and the violence that often attends them, and suggests that examining how gender is differently perceived is a crucial step beyond acknowledging that transphobic violence exists."

Medical and Health Humanities