1 All testimony from the trial comes from my own notes, except in those instances where I cite from the official transcript.
2 Bettcher, “When Selves Have Sex.”
3 People of the State of California vs. Brandon David McInerney, case number 2008005782. Court reporter’s transcript at 80-81. Testimony of Abiam M. July 7, 2011.
4 Phenomenology, of course, does not have exclusive methodological claim to the “how.” For an insightful articulation of how versus why in trans studies, see Aizura’s Mobile Subjects.
5 Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, 32–33.
6 Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives, xiii, xv (emphasis in original).
7 For a Husserlian explication of critical phenomenology, see Aldea, “Phenomenology as Critique,” particularly her explication of “hermeneutic patience.” See also Dodd, Crisis and Reflection.
8 Zaner, The Way of Phenomenology, 202.
9 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 103.
10 Morrison, Playing in the Dark.
11 Best, “The Fear of Black Bodies in Motion.”
12 Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race, 66, 68.
13 Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 69.
14 On violence, ontology, and queer and trans lives of color, see Stanley, “Near Life, Queer Death.” See also Hayward, “Don’t Exist.”
15 Marriott, On Black Men, viii.
16 Stryker, Transgender History, 19.
1 Hernandez, “Judge Rules Teen Accused of Murder May Switch Lawyers.”
2 Foxman, “McInerney Dealt a Setback by Ventura Court.”
3 Hernandez, “Jury selection will begin Nov. 15 in McInerney murder trial.”
4 Boldrin, court reporter’s transcript, July 8, 2011, 9.
5 Boldrin, court reporter’s transcript, July 8, 2011, 26.
6 Boldrin, court reporter’s transcript, July 8, 2011, 30.
7 Corbett, Boyhoods, 195.
8 Corbett, Boyhoods, 196.
9 Hernandez, “Days before Trial, McInerney Attorneys Say They Have No Defense.”
10 Hernandez, Raul. “School Shooting Described at McInerney Hearing.”
11 Husserl, Ideas 1 S75, p. 167.
12 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 244.
13 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 232.
14 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 232.
15 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 232.
16 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 232.
17 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 233.
18 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 233.
19 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 233.
20 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 235.
21 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 234.
22 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 236.
23 Of course, such a conflation of uprightness with human-ness can have pernicious implications. For a consideration of Straus from a critical disability perspective, see Abrams, “Is Everyone Upright?”
24 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 236.
25 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 239.
26 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 238.
27 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 240.
28 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 241.
29 Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 241.
30 Rodriguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings, 103.
31 Straus, 241. In a footnote to this comment, Straus notes that “the root is Latin, clino, to bend. It is interesting to see how greatly language is shaped in accordance with expressive phenomena.”
32 Welch, “Homosexuality in America,” 70.
33 Welch, “Homosexuality in America.”
34 Sinclair, court reporter’s transcript, 52–53.
35 Sinclair, court reporter’s transcript, 13.
36 Welch, “Homosexuality in America.”
37 See Salamon, “Humiliation and Transgender Regulation.”
1 Moten, In the Break, 200.
2 Moten, In the Break, 192.
3 Schütz, Collected Papers, 1:232.
4 Natanson, Anonymity, 78.
5 Zaner, The Way of Phenomenology, 43.
6 Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” x (emphasis mine).
7 This is Michael B. Smith’s choice in the translation in the Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader.
8 Richard McCleary’s English translation in Signs.
9 Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 112.
10 Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,”117.
11 Sinclair, court reporter’s transcript, 16.
12 Sinclair, court reporter’s transcript, 24.
13 Sinclair, court reporter’s transcript, 57–58.
14 Sinclair, court reporter’s transcript, 58–60.
15 Sinclair, court reporter’s transcript, 47–48.
16 Weiss, Refiguring the Ordinary, 20.
17 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 155.
18 Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 79.
19 Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 79.
20 Johnson, “Structures and Painting,” 27.
21 Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 82.
22 Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 105.
23 In Our Word is Our Bond, Marianne Constable understands law to be a matter of language (rather than merely statutes or rules), and also suggests that one of its tasks is negotiating failures of language. “Law acts through persuading hearers,” she writes. In this case, we can see the persuasive force of the legal argument made through acts of language that are eloquent and effective, even as they are wordless. See Constable, Our Word is Our Bond, 134.
24 Obama, “Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin.”
25 Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, xix.
26 Harney and Moten’s The Undercommons opens with a description, writ large, of the projection of aggression onto the aggressed by the aggressor: “In Michael Parenti’s classic anti-imperial analysis of Hollywood movies, he points to the ‘upside down’ way that the ‘make-believe media’ portrays colonial settlement. In films like Drums along the Mohawk (1939) or Shaka Zulu (1987), the settler is portrayed as surrounded by ‘natives,’ inverting, in Parenti’s view, the role of aggressor so that colonialism is made to look like self-defense. Indeed, aggression and self-defense are reversed in these movies, but the image of a surrounded fort is not false. Instead, the false image is what emerges when a critique of militarised life is predicated on the forgetting of the life that surrounds it. The fort really was surrounded, is besieged by what still surrounds it, the common beyond and beneath—before and before—enclosure. The surround antagonises the laager in its midst while disturbing that facts on the ground with some outlaw planning.” (17).
27 King, The Riot Within, 226.
28 Weiss, Refiguring the Ordinary, 102.
29 Gooding-Williams, Reading Rodney King.
30 Freud, “Contributions to a Discussion on Suicide,” 231–232.
31 Freud, “Contributions to a Discussion on Suicide,” 231–232 (emphasis in original).
32 Segwick, “Queer and Now,” 1.
33 Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” 2 (emphasis in original).
34 See Puar, “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better.”
35 Rose, “Deadly Embrace,” 21.
1 Reynolds, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” 3.
2 See Halpin, “The Philosophy of Anonymous.”
3 Cited in Natanson, Anonymity, 21.
4 Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity.
5 Though Beauvoir has historically been categorized as an existentialist, recent scholarship has traced the conceptual and historical importance of phenomenology to her work. On this question, and on the matter of Merleau-Ponty’s and Beauvoir’s shared commitment to ambiguity, see Weiss, “Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty.” On Beauvoir’s relationship to Merleau-Ponty, and his indebtedness to some of her formulations, see also McWeeny, “The Feminist Phenomenology of Excess.”
6 Natanson, Anonymity, 150.
7 Natanson, Anonymity, 92.
8 Lawlor, Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy, 3.
9 Schütz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, 77.
10 Natanson, Anonymity, 101.
11 Natanson, Anonymity, 100.
12 Natanson, Anonymity, 107.
13 Natanson, Anonymity, 107.
14 Zaner, The Way of Phenomenology, 49.
15 Natanson, Anonymity, 83.
16 Zaner, The Way of Phenomenology, 50 (emphasis in original).
17 On the matter of the sidewaysness of the queer child’s temporality, see Stockton, The Queer Child. On the matter of temporality and queerness more broadly, see Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, and Freeman, Time Binds.
18 On the matter of “anonymous life” as a mode of retreat from relation in Phenomenology of Perception, see my “The Place Where Life Hides Away.”
19 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 347.
20 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 215.
21 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 312.
22 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 238.
23 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 348.
24 See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 351.
25 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 352.
26 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 352.
27 Stoller, “Gender and Anonymous Temporality,” 85.
28 Heinamaa, “Personality, Anonymity and Sexual Difference,” 42.
29 Heinamaa, “Personality, Anonymity and Sexual Difference,” 42 (emphasis in original).
30 Heinamaa, “Personality, Anonymity and Sexual Difference,” 46.
31 See in particular “Cezanne’s Doubt” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader and “Indirect Languages and the Voices of Silence” for a discussion of style as a description of bodily practice and its relation to meaning.
32 Schütz, cited in Natanson, Anonymity, 100.
1 Andrea V., court reporter’s transcript, 69–70.
2 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 319.
3 Boldrin, court reporter’s transcript, July 28, 2011, 96.
4 Boldrin, court reporter’s transcript, July 28, 2011, 96.
5 Boldrin, court reporter’s transcript, July 28, 2011, 97.
6 Boldrin, court reporter’s transcript, July 28, 2011, 98.
7 Cunningham, Valentine Road.
8 On boys’ conceptions of bigness and smallness in the clinical scene and the relation of size to masculinity and sexuality, see “Faggot/Loser” in Ken Corbett’s Boyhoods.
9 For Plato, such determinations were crucial not just for everyday living, but also to the integrity of the social fabric. Recall that one of the reasons he wanted to banish poets from the republic is because poetry works by “gratifying our irrational side, which can’t even recognize what size things are. An object which at one moment it calls big, it might call small the next moment.” Plato, Republic, 605b.
10 Merleau-Ponty, Sorbonne, 192 (emphasis in original).
11 On Husserlian ethics, see Tom Nenon’s review of Husserliana 28, “Husserl’s Ethics?,” Peuker, “From Logic to Person,” Ferrarello, Husserl’s Ethics and Practical Intentionality, and Siles i Borràs, The Ethics of Husserl’s Phenomenology.
12 Drummond, “Phenomenology, Eudaimonia, and the Virtues,” 97. See also Drummond and Embree, Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy.
13 Marx, Towards a Phenomenological Ethics, 33 (emphasis in original).
14 Marx, Towards a Phenomenological Ethics, 33.
15 Cunningham, Valentine Road.
16 Elsewhere, I analyze a civil suit filed by Latisha’s parents after her death but prior to the criminal trial and observe that it was her improper affect as much as her transgressive gender that was targeted by her schoolmates and her parents. I argue there that “Larry becomes a target not just because he violates gender norms but because he does so without a sufficient sense of shame. See Salamon, “Humiliation and Transgender Regulation.”
17 Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis.
18 Cunningham, Valentine Road.
1 Wolff, “The Ugly Fantasy at the Heart of Anti-Trans Bathroom Bills.”
2 DeVos was reported to have had “misgivings” about the policy. Mead, “Betsy DeVos’s Spineless Transgender Bathroom Politics.”
3 Lynch, “Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch Delivers Remarks.”
4 See my “Withholding the Letter” in Assuming a Body.
5 Strangio, “What Is a ‘Male Body’?”
6 Mock, “Janet Mock: Young People Get Trans Rights.
7 Cunningham, Valentine Road.
8 Currah, “The New Transgender Panic.” For a thorough analysis, see also his forthcoming book, Not the United States of Sex: Sex Classification and Transgender Politics (New York University Press).