• Corpus ID: 67755051

Re-Configuring Agnes : The Telling of a Transsexual ' s Story

@inproceedings{C2013ReConfiguringA,
  title={Re-Configuring Agnes : The Telling of a Transsexual ' s Story},
  author={C.},
  year={2013}
}

• C.
• Published 2013
• Sociology

I n the social sciences, researchers, interviewers, and narrators of peoples' experiences present selective recordings of subjects' voices. This paper concentrates on the portrayal of transsexual narrativeswith a particular focus on representations of one subject, Agnesas they have been selectively constituted by social scientists. Agnes, a transsexual, participated in Harold Garfinkel's research in the late 1960s, making her the first subject of an in-depth discussion of transsexuality in sociology. I contend that a number of social scientists scrutinize and evaluate Agnes's and other transsexuals' narratives for 'truth', and frame transsexuality as a window into gender construction. At the same time, however, these social scientists mold Agnes's identity to illustrate particular theoretical positions and avoid examining their own investments in their subjects. As well, they neglect to consider their own ongoing reproductions of hegemonic gender relations. In this paper, I explore how social scientists might selectively record subjects' voices while remaining self-reflexive and committed to the integrity of the interviewee.