Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America

In Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America, sociologist Miriam J. Abelson offers a gripping contribution to conversations about masculinity, transgender experience, and the effects of place on identities. Abelson draws on 66 in-depth qualitative interviews in order to highlight the experiences of transgender men outside of the northern cities and coastal urban enclaves that provide the backdrop for most of the American sociological literature on LGBTQ life. The trans men in the sample were aged 19 to 55 years and lived in rural, suburban, and urban areas across the American West, Midwest, and Southeast. Three key contributions of Men in Place lie in its expansion of transfeminist scholarship; attention to our geographic imaginaries; and updating of our understanding of masculinities in the contemporary moment. The majority of scholarship focused on trans experience is not conducted by trans researchers, leading to methodological and analytical awkwardness in most cases and cissexist microaggression and rhetorical violence in others. A key strength of Men in Place is its treatment of trans people as subjects rather than objects of study. Men in Place avoids the cissexist pitfall of using transgender people as evidence of persistent gender socialization or as exemplars of the social construction of gender. As the final line of the introduction reads, ‘‘I take the perspective that trans men give us crucial insight about men as a group because, quite simply, they are men’’ (p. 24). Trans people are not often treated as taken-for-granted occupants of their gender identity, even within scholarship that uses their experiences to make larger points about gendered social processes. As a trans scholar who studies trans experience, I often find myself holding my breath while reading cis scholars’ accounts or interpretations of trans life. Abelson writes, ‘‘Due to the historical and continuing objectification of trans people in scholarship, I have often paused to reconsider whether I, as a non-trans-identified, gender nonconforming woman, should continue this project at all’’ (p. 24). I am thrilled that Abelson continued this project, as this work makes significant contributions to scholarship in transgender sociology, the sociology of space and place, and sociology of men and masculinities. Grounded in theories of doing gender, racial formation, and heteronormativity, one foundational assumption of Men in Place is that gender identity recognition is earned in social interaction through the achievement of situated normative ideals. With beautiful prose and vivid detail, the text takes us on a meticulous exploration of location as a determining factor for processes of identity, interaction, and inequality. The men in Abelson’s study rely on ‘‘geographic imaginaries’’ (p. 19) that provide them with information about their gendered, raced, and sexualized place within a particular community. These geographic imaginaries come with localized ideals for the normative practice of gender, race, and sexuality. What passes as masculinity, and who passes as a regular guy, in one region may not receive the same recognition in another. As Men in Place continuously reminds us, ideological constructs about queer and trans life beyond the coastal cities and urban enclaves of the United States operate to create a narrative of vulnerability for gender and sexual minorities in these areas. Abelson writes, ‘‘dominant discourses of rural queer and transgender life make rural trans men’s lives seem unlivable’’ (p. 198). Men in Place suggests that while this narrative acts as a powerful tool to encourage conformity to place-based norms and to discourage