By studying the social and political history of transidentities in France, Lou Bossis shows that identities are never born alone: they are also forged in struggles, solidarity and collective spaces.
Work devoted to transidentities has long been written from the institutions that produced them as objects of knowledge: medicine, psychiatry, law or sociology. The history of trans people often appears as a history of categorizations, diagnoses and regulations. With Trans and activiste. Building oneself through struggle in the 1970s and 1980s in FranceLou Bossis proposes a particularly fruitful journey: telling the story of trans people from their activist commitments.
Through the study of the mobilizations of the 1970s and 1980s, the work does not only document individual or collective trajectories ; it restores the historical conditions for the emergence of a trans political memory. Starting from the observation that this history of trans activism was on the one hand “ fragmented » but also, and even more, “ forgotten from memory » (p. 19) collective struggles LGBTIQthe author proposes to immerse us in this story by placing it in a broader historiographical movement which aims to resituate trans people in the history of social movements. Long relegated to marginal or exceptional figures, they appear here as active participants in homosexual, feminist, revolutionary or sex work struggles. By mobilizing association archives, activist press and testimonies, Lou Bossis shows that trans people have never been absent from sexual and gender emancipation movements. They constituted one of its components, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible.
An ancient story
One of the main contributions of the work lies precisely in this undertaking of historical reinscription. Contrary to certain contemporary discourses which present trans demands as recent, even unprecedented, the book recalls the antiquity of the debates, alliances and conflicts which cross the movements LGBTQIA+. The first chapter of the book, devoted to the gasoline movement (p. 33), reminds us of the revolutionary breeding ground of trans struggles (as well as the experiences of violence and discrimination, which the author calls “ daily domination » (p. 64), which marks trans existences of the time). THE FHAR (Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action) and the MLF (Women’s Liberation Movement) are thus presented through their “ interdependence and impermeabilities » (p. 39) with the nascent trans movements in the 1970s.
We also discover that current controversies around the boundaries of feminism or the relationships between homosexuality and trans identities echo the decades studied. The parallels that the author offers with current conservative movements of exclusion of trans people from the field of feminism and law – more generally called TERF For “ Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist – make perfect sense. Thus, between trans and feminist movements, “ tensions and alliances nevertheless took place » (p. 88). This historical depth undoubtedly constitutes one of the major strengths of Bossis’ work.
From activism to identification
The book is peppered with numerous illustrations – magazine extracts, posters, covers, etc. – as well as interviews and in-depth portraits of trans activists who lived through these periods. But the interest of the book goes beyond the sole archival restitution, in that it also allows us to study the processes by which a collective political subject is constituted. Because one of the questions that discreetly runs through the entire text is the following: how do we simultaneously become trans and activist?e ? Or more precisely: how do activist spaces contribute to producing forms of self-awareness, mutual recognition and collective identification ? In this regard, the title of the book is particularly illuminating. THE “ And » which connects the terms “ trans ” And “ activiste » does not refer to a simple addition of properties. It designates a process of co-construction. Activist spaces appear as places where individual experiences can be named, shared and politicized. The trajectories recounted in the work show that collective commitment is not only a consequence of trans identification ; he also participates in its formulation.
This perspective invites us to read the book as a contribution to a historical sociology of subjectification. The groups studied do not just make demands. They create categories, produce common narratives and offer interpretive resources allowing individuals to make sense of their experiences. The story told by Lou Bossis then becomes that of a sharing of experiences of marginalization and their transformation into political language. From this point of view, the chapter on “ media construction of the marginalized » (p. 155) sheds light on what constitutes the backdrop to the representations of the time: trans people presented as sick, asocial, marginal and dangerous. However, throughout the book, the author insists on the pendulum swing at work: if stigmatizing imaginations are produced towards trans people, the latter never remain passive and create, campaign, write to exist. This is particularly what the penultimate chapter offers for reading, devoted to the presence (sometimes interstitial) of trans issues in the gay and lesbian press of the 1970s and 80s in France.
This question appears with particular force when the author focuses on the words used by actors and actresses of the time. The categories of “ transvestite “, of “ transsexual » or the emerging forms of identity designation are never understood as obvious. On the contrary, they appear to be the provisional results of collective negotiations. The work thus reminds us that identities do not precede mobilizations ; they are often built within them. We also find these questions relating to identity categories and alliance strategies between transvestites, trans people (or “ transsexuals » as they called themselves then) and sex workers. And the work insists on “ daily management of clients and status » (p. 118) as a founding experience of sex workers’ engagement in trans activism, not without some tensions, again, for “ to be accepted into the movement » (p. 129). By offering a detailed description of these biographical and political tensions for reading, Lou Bossis also highlights what concerns the objective and subjective reasons for alliances and intra-group tensions.
Resources for the present
This attention to the historical construction of categories constitutes one of the most stimulating aspects of the book. It joins work which has shown how minority identities are inseparable from the social and political contexts in which they emerge. We will underline the delicacy of the author who, in several boxes (p. 23 or p. 195) devotes a few lines to the invisibility of transmasculine people, both in the archives and in the press of the time ; highlighting an exhaustive but above all ethical production, aiming not to repeat invisibilities.
The book also opens up a more general reflection on the politics of memory. Restore activist trajectoriesThe trans people of the 1970s and 1980s do not simply amount to filling a historiographical gap (“ a building of oblivion », p. 273). It is also about producing resources for the present. Faced with discourses which regularly present trans identities as a new or imported phenomenon, the work recalls the existence of a French history of trans mobilizations. Faced with current hate speech, the story presented here presents itself as a promise of dissemination “ beyond a limited number of people » (p. 272) – academics or archivists – in order to build a common history, representations, common affiliations. This transmission operation constitutes a scientific as well as a political issue.
We can certainly regret that certain dimensions remain relatively little explored. For example, territorial variations in activist experiences often appear in the background. Thus, the strong centrality of Parisian activist spaces leaves open the question of commitments developed in other geographical contexts. These limitations, however, are largely due to the state of the available archives and should be understood more as avenues for future research than as weaknesses of the work.
Trans and activiste does not only constitute a history of trans mobilizations. The book offers a broader reflection on the way in which individual experiences become collective causes, how categories are stabilized and how minority memories are constructed. In this sense, Lou Bossis’ work fully participates in the writing of a social and political history of transidentities in France. Above all, it reminds us that identities are never born alone: they are also forged in the struggles, solidarity and collective spaces that give them meaning.