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

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Miriam Abelson’s book, Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America (2019, University of Minnesota Press), is a masterpiece. It is an outstanding example of qualitative in-depth interviewing as well as feminist and grounded theory methodological approaches and analyses. Abelson’s work to travel the United States interviewing 66 diverse transgender men across the Midwest, South, and West resulted in her amassing one of the largest in-depth interview samples with this population conducted to date. In a technologically-mediated era, Abelson could have conducted these interviews using internet technologies. Instead, she painstakingly traveled thousands of miles, across four years, to ensure that she could develop rapport and potentially longer-lasting research partnerships and connections with participants. Her refusal to take research shortcuts reveals her careful attention to feminist research ethics and a desire to obtain the richest data possible for her important study.

Abelson’s book contains five substantive chapters and each reflects her commitment to conducting truly intersectional and interdisciplinary research, analysis, and empirically-based theory building. The intersections that Abelson explores focus primarily upon race, class, gender, sexuality, and space/place. Men in Place fills important gaps in the masculinities literature, which often fails to include transgender men under its examinations of masculinities. While much of the literature on transgender individuals and communities focuses on individual identity, Dr. Abelson’s work documents how geography, region, and shifting economic structures impact the lives and meaning-making processes of this understudied and culturally-marginalized group. As such, Abelson urges a more sociologically-grounded refocus—even among sociologists—for how we study, understand, and write about transgender people. For this alone, Abelson’s excellent book should make quite a splash.