Dartmouth Events

Armani Beck, Post-Doctoral Fellow Society of Fellows. "And now I have male privilege!”: Trans Accounts of the Precarity of Privilege Maintenance

Male privilege is neither static nor absolute. Rather, it is fluid and precarious, and can be gained, maintained, and lost. Through discussions with 30 transgender men, transgender women, and non-binary people who have experience being perceived as both cisgender men and cisgender women, this study addresses the complexities of male privilege from a psychosocial perspective. Because privilege largely exists in the background of our lives unless we are otherwise prompted to see it, when transgender people undergo a gender transition there is a forcible foregrounding of privilege that gives them an awareness that cisgender people do not have. Talking to trans people revealed the very fundamentals of male privilege, particularly around the psychosocial and intersubjective process of privilege assignment at the micro-level when one has characteristics that are socially incompatible with hegemonic masculinity, such as queerness, non-Whiteness, shortness, fatness, and neurodivergence. This talk uses intersectionality theory as well as formal sociological theory to advance knowledge within subfields of gender, race, sexuality, inequality, and sociology as a whole to nuance taken for granted absolutes in discourse around gender inequality, as well as responding to the hot-tempered public debate over whether all men have male privilege or not.