Abstract
Laurel Westbrook is a professor at Grand Valley State University and has produced extensive scholarly work on gender, sexualities, transgender, and sexuality system during the last decade. In Unlivable Lives: Violence and Identity in Transgender Activism, Westbrook shares the reality of transgender activism. Identity, the transformation of identity, and the fight for the rights of transgender groups have, during several decades, lead to violence specifically targeting trans individuals and trans activist groups.
In 2017, Netflix launched a documentary describing the life and faith of Marsha Johnson, who is considered one of the key members of the transgender activist movement. The documentary sheds light on the struggle many trans individuals go through and introduces the impact Marsha Johnson’s death had on the trans community and the emergence of trans activism. Although the life and experiences of Marsha Johnson had been shared previously, it was through the Netflix documentary heteronormative mainstream communities were forced to engage with the risk and violence trans individuals are exposed to daily. Marsha Johnson became the face of trans violence and one of the gateways in which many heteronormative community members started to engage with the experiences of trans individuals. Westbrook’s book extends the discussion of trans violence and activism and offers an in-depth journey in the harsh reality of the meaning of violence and its implications for the trans community. Thus, Westbrook’s book highlights trans activism and trans individuals’ story but rather situates identity discourses, power relationships, and agency within the dynamic and complex social structure in the United States.
Unlivable Lives offers a comprehensive encounter of the narratives from actors in the trans activism movement and historical reenactment of events leading up to today. Westbrook conceptualizes the experiences of key trans individuals who have lost their lives to violence due to their trans identity or their involvement with trans activism. Westbrook (2021: 2) describes identity-based anti-violence activism as ‘activism done to reduce violence against a particular identity group’ and spends the main portion of the book examining the practices and implications of this phenomenon. Identity-based anti-violence activism is primarily conceptualized with transgender and trans rights throughout the book; however, Westbrook also provides a historical context of identity-based anti-violence activism related to gender, race, and other identity labels, characteristics, or roles.
The book has seven chapters that contextualize the meaning of violence against transgender individuals and transgender activists by discussing cases where transgender individuals were killed and the death was ruled as a homicide. Westbrook triangulated newspaper articles, press releases, flyers, police reports, and activist accounts to create a data set covering a total of 403 cases of transgender individuals who died due to homicide.
Westbrook starts the book by providing an overview of the concepts discussed throughout the book, the data utilized, and the organization of chapters. Then, the impact and meaning of violence used in relation to identity-based activism and key transgender figures who have initiated efforts to reduce trans activist violence are discussed. The second half of the book examines the experience of being trans through the data generated by news articles, police reports, and activist accounts and explores the transgender identity in relation to exposure to violence and the implications. The book’s final chapters highlight resolutions to violence, and anti-violence efforts are discussed from the activist perspective and from Westbrook’s perspective, which concludes the book by emphasizing that the book’s main goal is to reduce violence against trans individuals.
By analyzing triangulated data collected from multiple, Westbrooks provides a methodologically rigorous study, relevant from both a substantive and a methodological perspective. In the appendix, Westbrook offers a thorough explanation of the data used to build a database of cases of murdered transgender individuals and describes the rationale and justification for the methodological choices. Altogether the appendix offers a well-developed description of the data and methodology, which can be examined in depth by readers who are specifically interested in exploring activist studies. The only slight criticism of this section is that, as a qualitative researcher, I looked for an in-depth explanation in the methodological appendix of recruiting participants for the interviews, which was one of the essential parts of constructing the database of cases discussed throughout the book. I think by providing a more thorough explanation of the strategies used to build reports with participants would be beneficial to other scholars who aim to embark on similar projects. Activism and social movements are areas that several scholars have been starting to explore throughout the recent decades. Westbrook’s book could be a potential essential piece for these scholars and graduate or undergraduate students interested in exploring qualitative and quantitative data collection.
Overall, Westbrook’s book displays an engagement with scholarship from multiple disciplines and engages with theorists such as Michel Foucault while making practical suggestions of how to reduce identity-based anti-violence. Although the practices and implications described in most of the chapters are related to trans gender and trans rights, the Westbrook provides overall discussions and analyses of identity-based anti-violence activism, which transcends trans activism. The book succeeds in challenging the aspect of researching power structures, identity, and violence in relation to activism by engaging in practical efforts to discuss the structural embeddedness of violence and its implications for identity-based activism. Thus, Westbrook achieves a major task, highlighting the structural othering that non-normative hegemonic populations experience while engaging in practical suggestions and discussion on efforts to reduce violence in both theoretical and practical perspectives.