Privates: Theorizing Private Space in Trans Care

Privates:Theorizing Private Space in Trans Care Jack Jen Gieseking (bio) From the red couch on which I write in the already too-cold winter heading into 2021, I can see into my closet where, until the 2020 summer, I kept a stack of 40 copies of Trans Care. The wee-yet-profound 72 pages of text gave me comfort, offered me instances of recognition, gifted me energy, pushed my thinking, broke me (again), made me laugh (often), and brought me to tears. Author Hil Malatino left me with a sense of gratitude not only to him for his labor and care in writing this book, but to those who cared for trans me and those webs of trans people who let me care for them. Trans care webs are expansive affectively and theoretically Malatino argues, and, I suggest, his work requires these webs be read spatially as well. Malatino argues on behalf of broadening trans studies' deep focus on embodiment to encompass care as a core trans concept. My favorite instance of the book's argument reads: "Because care isn't abstract, but only ever manifested through practice—action, labor, work—it is integral to our ways of doing" (2020, 41). The spatiality of trans infrastructure is made apparent if we read his arguments for care not just for "our ways of doing" transness, but equally for our wheres of doing transness. More specifically, a geographical throughline emerges in Malatino's repeated mention of publics and privates, among other geographical scales and the role of a trans sense of place. What, then, can the public and private geographies of Trans Care help us think further about trans space and, in turn, trans studies? What are the publics that we want to and can insert ourselves into, particularly in the reconfigured and reconfiguring COVID-19-era notions of public and private? Malatino's slim volume speaks to how trans studies is uniquely positioned to theorize, study, and further understand what private space is: a sort of embodied and networked care slipping point to mark the public-private divide. Trans Care relates back to trans studies how our research must tend to meanings of both publics and privates in the trans ability to survive and thrive. [End Page 148] Without a doubt, the where of us is always at stake. Trans geographies are eternally an exercise in mindfulness, caution, and resistance in space, whether physical or digital, imagined or real, virtual or material (cf. Doan 2010; Jenzen 2017; Rosenberg 2017; Rosenberg and Oswin 2015; Kinkaid, Parikh, and Ranjbar 2021). As a cultural geographer, I believe Trans Care beautifully illustrates how trans studies contributes to and must be further taken up in geographic thought and theory, and vice versa. Trans experiences, theories, and methods uniquely contribute to the theorization of private space, and, therefore, the ever-shifting relationship between public and private space. Much oft-cited political theory writes of discursively-produced private and public "spheres" (Habermas 1989; Fraser 1990). Many of these spheres are and/or can be spatialized. By "space," I mean a physical or digital, real or imagined, virtual and material environment in which social relations—individual or collective—can take place. In this paper, I primarily draw on social theory on work about Eurocentric public spaces to keep in step with Malatino's personal geographies that undergird his text. Transnational work on privates and publics is required to address these ideas in any truly useful manner. I admit I am a tad ecstatic to bring private space to the fore. It was Trans Care that unfastened my attachment to theorizing private space through queer and/ or feminist thinking alone. I have been pining for a way to rigorously consider private space since my co-authors and I finished selecting the readings for The People, Place, and Space Reader (2014) a decade ago. We were shocked to realize that there were no major theoretical readings on private space the likes of those written on public space. Oof. Upon further reflection—and after considerable conversation with my own care webs past and present—I realize my own passion for private space emerges from my trans experience that is saturated in...