Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law: Dean Spade's New Book!! Info from the press here...

webphoto of Dean Spade is by Johanna Breiding, here

To learn a bit more about Dean's forthcoming book, please read this interview, over at Guernica Magazine online.

An excerpt follows:

Guernica: Can you tell me about your forthcoming book?

Dean Spade: Yeah, it’s coming out September 2011 from South End Press. It’s a book that tries to describe what a critical trans politics looks like. We’re in this moment where there’s this gay and lesbian politics that’s really lacking in its racial and economic justice analysis and overly relies on legal reform for its strategy and doesn’t really look at people in dire need today. So this book says, okay, we have the option to focus on hate crime laws and other legal reforms or we can reframe what trans politics is and center economic and racial justice. We can realize that changing the law doesn’t change people’s lives and have an understanding of the limitations of the nonprofit form, the ways in which concentrating leadership in professionals and having nondemocratic models for organizations and movements harms and undermines the transformative change we are seeking. The book lays out those frameworks that I call a critical trans politics.

I am sooooo eagerly awaiting the release of--and opportunity to read--Dean Spade's book.
For now, we have this from the publisher...

What follows is from South End Press *here*:

Normal Life (Paperback original)

Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law
Dean Spade
Released 2011-09-15
Normal Life is the highly anticipated full-length book debut by Dean Spade, heralded as a deeply influential voice on trans and queer liberation struggles. Setting forth a politic that goes beyond the quest for mere legal inclusion, Spade illustrates how and why we must seek nothing less than the radical transformations justice and liberation require.

Normal Life

Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law

Dean Spade

Pages: 208
ISBN: 978-0-89608-796-5
Format: Paperback original
Release Date: 2011-09-15
Purchase for $16.00
This item is available for pre-ordering and qualifies for free shipping.

Description of Normal Life.

Internationally, according to the Equity Network, the average lifespan of a transgender person is 23 years.* The abysmal life chances for trans people here and globally are most often due to violence: police violence and outright murder, to be sure, but also the administration of the seemingly banal state and legal frameworks that invisibly define the most basic contours of everyday life. Within these frameworks, where being trans is not even an acknowledged possibility and the systems in place aggravate some with long lines at the DMV while imperiling the survival of many others, what guarantees can anti-discrimination, equal access, or equal protection laws actually deliver? This question is particularly critical in the current neoliberal context, with popular social movements paradoxically centered on appeals for "equality" by the most privileged within marginalized communities. But if we are to save our own lives, we must not to be sidetracked from the struggle for comprehensive justice. Rather, we must make the necessary interventions into dangerous intersectional systems of repression—and demand the most essential of legal reforms—while remaining steadfast on the path toward liberation.

Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law is the highly anticipated full-length book debut by Dean Spade, heralded as a deeply influential voice on trans and queer liberation struggles. Setting forth a politic that goes beyond the quest for mere legal inclusion, Spade illustrates how and why we must seek nothing less than the radical transformations justice and liberation require.

A trans activist, attorney, and educator, Dean Spade has taught classes on sexual orientation, gender identity, and law at the City University of New York (CUNY), Seattle University, and Harvard University. In 2002 he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a collective that provides free legal services and works to build trans resistance rooted in racial and economic justice.

* The Daily Texan Online

Normal Life | Advance Praise

"Dean Spade’s long-awaited book is a critical intervention that troubles the role of legal reform in social justice struggles. Spade’s articulation of trans politics goes beyond seeking the representation of trans people in social justice struggles, but demonstrates how activists on all fronts often unthinkingly redeploy the logics of white supremacy, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy through legal form. Spade asks not, how does the law recognize trans people, but how is the law itself the means by which gender is created and policed? This book in an invaluable resource not just for rethinking gender justice, but for rethinking how we do social justice organizing in general." ~Andrea Smith, author of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide and Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances

"Sharply political, deeply intellectual, broadly accessible, Normal Life is exactly what we need right now. Beginning with the immediate everyday needs of transgender people, Dean Spade moves on to provide a brilliantly illuminating analysis of the forces of power constraining us all. This is a must read book for everyone who cares about social justice." ~Lisa Duggan, author of Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy and Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity

"In pointing out the specific mechanisms of social power that oppress gender-variant lives, and in suggesting strategies of resistance, Dean Spade monkey-wrenches the bigger apparatuses of control that work to turn all of our bodies intro resources for nation, state, and capital. This street-smart and theoretically sophisticated little book should be required reading for all would-be radicals looking for practical ways to build a better future. " ~Susan Stryker, Associate Professor, Gender Studies, Indiana University-Bloomington

"This original, visionary, urgent, and brilliantly argued book significantly advances political theory and social movement criticism. The book's analysis of contemporary economic and legal structures clarifies the linkages between the systems of repression that all people working for justice encounter. Spade has produced an essential and exciting book for these challenging times." ~Urvashi Vaid, author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation