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Reviews
Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law by Dean Spade
ralowe's review
5.0
this is required reading, just as the angela davis quote says on the cover of this edition. being with dean on book tours and panels and such i have been exposed to dean's genius, this book gives you all the basics of critical trans studies, the book itself is an intervention, dean is awesome and brilliant! i'm excited for my association with this project of creating a culture of radical queer and trans politics that is relevant to life under state terror. dean is really good at offering strategies to get to work on. you're supposed to read this book and immediately begin using the ideas inside, if you're not already. dean provides lots of examples of how to fight the criminal punishment system and to reject business-as-usual lgbt desperate attempts at recognition. this work is defiant and anti-authoritarian. reading this dean does go to a place that feels me with grief for the vortex that has replaced a politic that connected direct support services to radical anti-authoritarian vision and passion. dean offers some ideas, but my sense of loss caused by the corporatization of dissent and the dependency on state institutions feels pretty overwhelming at times. dean offers ideas of how to organize a liberation that begins with our bodies.
koreykit's review against another edition
challenging
informative
medium-paced
5.0
Trans activism is at a crossroads: will we dismantle oppressive systems or try to be acknowledged as the "deserving" few? Spade's book explores who is harmed by assimilationist politics.
evelyn261999's review against another edition
4.0
Generally, an excellent book, which makes a further trans specific case for a revolutionary, abolitionist politics already so convincingly espoused by such activists as Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
I had a couple of minor disagreements. For example, while I agree that marriage is an inherently conservative institution and that its politics of assimilation certainly paved the way for LGBT military inclusion policies etc., I think that there is more nuance in marriage equality rising as a goal during the AIDS crisis, but I know that Spade has written about this elsewhere, so I will probably seek out his other work on the subject. I found it more odd that Spade seemed so set on portraying the repeal of anti-sodomy laws as unrevolutionary even though those laws presumably did actually help some people and would not necessarily have bolstered the racist and anti-LGBT prison industrial complex, which Spade otherwise lucidly demonstrates has been done by hate crime legislation.
In general, I will say that Spade draws an overly antagonistic line between what he calls 'gay and lesbian' activism and 'queer and trans' activism. He conceives of the former as conservative and sellout and the latter as revolutionary, even as he acknowledges that the equivalent mainstreaming of trans rights is only more visible, rather than influential among the majority of trans people, because the trans people with the most vested interests in otherwise conservative change have the most economic and political power to render visible the desire for those changes. Spade, apparently, is also broadly unaware of the neoliberalisation of identity politics among certain subsections of self-identified queer groups. All this to say that his differentiation should have been more visibly rooted in the capitulation of one side to capitalist/neoliberal concerns, rather than on the identity vectors gay and lesbian themselves, because it did feel a little patronising. Moreover, it was annoying when Spade described mainstream White gay and lesbian activists as concerned only with the one vector of oppression that affected them when the latter group, by definition, experience both homophobia and misogyny.
Also, I had a couple of stylistic disagreements: I don't think the use of the term suppression/subordination conveys anything that oppression doesn't, and I think that Latin@ is the worst of the gender neutral terms for Latin American, mostly because some screen readers struggle to comprehend it for visually-impaired people. There were a few typos, especially in the notes section, including an unfortunate instance of misgendering, but otherwise Spade's writing itself was very readable.
Overall, these criticisms are relatively minor and unconcerned with the actual thrust of Spade's revolutionary argument, which he expertly makes both a theoretical and practical case for, deliberately placing himself in a tradition of grassroots activism and abolitionist politics, using their examples as grounded activist roadmaps for his readers. While many of Spade's arguments have already been articulated, sometimes decades before, particularly by anti-racist activists, Spade himself never pretends that he isn't indebted to these thinkers and, in the context of activist writing, a reminder of these necessary theories, politics and practicalities can only be a good thing.
I had a couple of minor disagreements. For example, while I agree that marriage is an inherently conservative institution and that its politics of assimilation certainly paved the way for LGBT military inclusion policies etc., I think that there is more nuance in marriage equality rising as a goal during the AIDS crisis, but I know that Spade has written about this elsewhere, so I will probably seek out his other work on the subject. I found it more odd that Spade seemed so set on portraying the repeal of anti-sodomy laws as unrevolutionary even though those laws presumably did actually help some people and would not necessarily have bolstered the racist and anti-LGBT prison industrial complex, which Spade otherwise lucidly demonstrates has been done by hate crime legislation.
In general, I will say that Spade draws an overly antagonistic line between what he calls 'gay and lesbian' activism and 'queer and trans' activism. He conceives of the former as conservative and sellout and the latter as revolutionary, even as he acknowledges that the equivalent mainstreaming of trans rights is only more visible, rather than influential among the majority of trans people, because the trans people with the most vested interests in otherwise conservative change have the most economic and political power to render visible the desire for those changes. Spade, apparently, is also broadly unaware of the neoliberalisation of identity politics among certain subsections of self-identified queer groups. All this to say that his differentiation should have been more visibly rooted in the capitulation of one side to capitalist/neoliberal concerns, rather than on the identity vectors gay and lesbian themselves, because it did feel a little patronising. Moreover, it was annoying when Spade described mainstream White gay and lesbian activists as concerned only with the one vector of oppression that affected them when the latter group, by definition, experience both homophobia and misogyny.
Also, I had a couple of stylistic disagreements: I don't think the use of the term suppression/subordination conveys anything that oppression doesn't, and I think that Latin@ is the worst of the gender neutral terms for Latin American, mostly because some screen readers struggle to comprehend it for visually-impaired people. There were a few typos, especially in the notes section, including an unfortunate instance of misgendering, but otherwise Spade's writing itself was very readable.
Overall, these criticisms are relatively minor and unconcerned with the actual thrust of Spade's revolutionary argument, which he expertly makes both a theoretical and practical case for, deliberately placing himself in a tradition of grassroots activism and abolitionist politics, using their examples as grounded activist roadmaps for his readers. While many of Spade's arguments have already been articulated, sometimes decades before, particularly by anti-racist activists, Spade himself never pretends that he isn't indebted to these thinkers and, in the context of activist writing, a reminder of these necessary theories, politics and practicalities can only be a good thing.
richthegreat's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Outstanding, writing this well, with such strong theory and yet so approachable is so hard. A phenomenal foundational text.