The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia

by Gayle Salamon

What can the killing of a transgender teen teach us about the violence of misreading gender identity as sexual identity?

The Life and Death of Latisha King examines a single incident, the shooting of 15-year-old Latisha King by 14-year-old Brandon McInerney in their junior high school classroom in Oxnard, California in 2008. The press coverage of the shooting, as well as the criminal trial that followed, referred to Latisha, assigned male at birth, as Larry. Unpacking the consequences of representing the victim as Larry, a gay boy, instead of Latisha, a trans girl, Gayle Salamon draws on the resources of feminist phenomenology to analyze what happened in the school and at the trial that followed. In building on the phenomenological concepts of anonymity and comportment, Salamon considers how gender functions in the social world and the dangers of being denied anonymity as both a particularizing and dehumanizing act.

Salamon offers close readings of the court transcript and the bodily gestures of the participants in the courtroom to illuminate the ways gender and race were both evoked in and expunged from the narrative of the killing. Across court documents and media coverage, Salamon sheds light on the relation between the speakable and unspeakable in the workings of the transphobic imaginary. Interdisciplinary in both scope and method, the book considers the violences visited upon gender-nonconforming bodies that are surveilled and othered, and the contemporary resonances of the Latisha King killing.

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer, LGBT, Philosophy, Theory, Politics, Feminism

192 pages, Paperback

Published March 20, 2018

About the author

Gayle Salamon is Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in LGBT Studies in 2011.

Reviews

[Declan · Rating 5 out of 5]

(read for class) incredibly powerful, honoring portrayal or Latisha while being such a painful piece. uses phenomenology to make transphobia concrete in a way I've never really seen before. Takes extreme care to separate homophobia and transphobia from each other while showing the ways the entangle each other.

but the overall takeaway is that this was really scary, AND a text i will be recommending to others.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

A critical, but mildly outdated engagement with a court case that peeled back just how deeply transphobia has seeped into American thinking, Gayle Salamon's "The Life and Death of Latisha King" uses the coldhearted murder of trans* middle schooler, Latisha King, to make an argument about the deep fragility of trans* lives and seeks to understand the meanings underlying transphobia in the US.

Salamon does a nice, and important, job of making the argument that transphobia is a structural problem to which we all actively contribute through the ways in which we ourselves unconsciously participate in constructions of gender and the power structures that surround it. Her argument makes it clear that while a single transphobic individual pulled the trigger and killed Latisha King, it is the structures surrounding the murder that created the environment in which the murderer felt empowered to commit the atrocity - our current structures of gender and power make it clear that participating in gender in a way that is non-normative is threatening and risky behavior, and it is this structure we must all actively seek to challenge.

Nonetheless, I do have a deeper concern with Salamon's argument: to paint the picture of how gender expression and sexual orientation differ - and to then draw the conclusion that the failure to make this distinction allows for transgender individuals to be portrayed as sexually threatening - Salamon subtly has to make comments about the aggressiveness that can occur in sexual orientations. While she never (and would never) makes the claim that it is acceptable to find non-normative sexualities aggressive, her argument and line of thinking leaves open the possibility for potential bigoted readers to formulate this conclusion. And anyone with knowledge of LGBT history knows that this is a dangerous position to leave sexual minorities in given this history.

Salamon's book, though, is an important and critical contribution to transgender studies and should absolutely be read, taught, and cited.

[Cru · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just reread this for a paper and eventhough it does have some outdated "strategies", it's such a good book.
The book is such a brilliant example of applied phenomenology: the descriptive methods Salamon uses to go through the trial disclose the hidden meanings of what is spoken and unspoken, of what is said through language or fixated in objects, fragments of sound, emulation of body movement.
The ways she explores absence and presence are really on point.

The extreme focus on the difference between gender expression vs sexual orientation & gender vs. sex may not only come across as something "we have already read", but can also be dangerous from a logical point of view, because it could ALMOST be read and interpreted with homophobic rhetorics.
Still, the work is meticulous and precise.
Also I don't think the misgendering and deadnaming is necessary...! lol

In general this is a harsh read for trans people. But it does give tools to explain and describe how meaning is projected on movement, sound, bodies and how the violence of normativity operates on the most cognitive level.

[Elizabeth]

"What we see in this case, and in many instances of violence against gender-nonconforming and transpeople, is that violence justifies itself by characterizing non-normative gender as itself a violent act of aggression and reading the expression of gender identity as itself a sexual act."

[Morgan M. Page · Rating 3 out of 5]

From my full review at LambdaLiterary.org:

"Ultimately, we walk away from The Life and Death of Latisha King have learned very little about Latisha's life or death."

[Amy John-Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Salamon is thoughtful, sharp and spot the fuck on in her phenomenological account of this case. She falls short in her racial analysis not out of ignorance but out of humility. I sort of sped read this for class but excited to come back to it soon. Highly recommend for those interested in critical ahem valid phenomenology.

[Nelson Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting application of phenom to trans experience. Def a salient tool. Gayle is my professor so it’s super cool to read her writing, and I also understand all the esoteric phenomenology references because it’s everything we read in class!! Important time to read this, too, since it was written pre 2024; and also touched on phenomenons of GSS in the legal realm, which obviously timely.

[Dylan]

one of my favorite books that i've read this year. salamon brings the phenomenological toolkit to an event unlike anything i've encountered in a philosophical text before (though perhaps this betrays the shallowness of my reading!) and persuasively shows how these concepts can be used to understand social forces (or "illogics") of domination. she reveals the moral power of description as well as phenomenology's potential as a method of ideology critique through an analysis of the language and gestures of a court proceeding. it is, to my mind, written in a crisp and minimal style which finds lightness where appropriate without ever denying or ignoring the seriousness and tragedy of the subject matter: a transphobic murder of one adolescent by another. in a way, i think the book is also trying to extend phenomenology beyond the first-person perspective which its critics are so quick to problematize. this is not a book about "salamon's experience" as an observer in the courtroom; it is a book arguing for the ethical and philosophical importance of attentive description of embodied experience and action. much of it, then, is phenomenological analysis written from a kind of third-person perspective—salamon shows how one can perform this type of philosophy while decentering oneself and building solidarity. all written with a confidence and clarity which would make this book extremely useful as a pedagogical tool. marvelous.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Latisha may have thought magically about her own gender, but the myths of gender under which the adults in her life operated are much more pernicious and less attuned to the realities of gender than Latisha's fantasies. Those myths: that gender is binary, and that any deviation from that binary is wrong, and bad, and dangerous. And that it was Latisha who represented the danger and not those who sought to stop her, fully and finally.

This certainly wasn't an easy book to read. Both because of the heinous hate crime at the center of it as well as the philosophical concept that can be a bit challenging for someone like me who isn't very well-read in those things. It makes for a thorough and interesting analysis of human behavior though.

Gayle Salamon extensively analyzes a transphobic hate crime to recognize how the situation got to that point by following the philosophical thread of phenomenology which focuses on the structures of people's individual experiences and how our consciousness processes our world.
It might sound a bit abstract, as philosophy often does, but it basically looks at how something like unquestioned "common sense" can dictate destructive behavior, how the way we automatically project subjective meaning to neutral objects changes how we interact with them, and how the way we talk about things puts the blame on a victim faster than one might think.

The whole court case is pretty vile. Plenty of the quoted words from the court proceedings are shocking and makes you wonder how these teachers can even still hold a job at a school afterwards. There is unabashed victim shaming all around, sometimes under a thin veil of care. Gayle Salamon does a good job at taking their behavior apart, dissecting the biased contradictions, and showcasing how a non-existent threat can develop through biased interpreting of someone's neutral surroundings leading to a skewed attempt at "protecting" one party from another.

Rest in Power, Latisha King.

Some of the most remarkable things about Latisha King's short life was her resilience, the way that she persevered in her self-expression in the face of normative regulation and prohibition. She emerged, and persisted, in defiance of all the different forms of violence directed at her, with the aim of extinguishing her very being. She was not crushed into submission by the insistence, by family and teachers and peers, that she was impossible, that she did not exist - though all these forms of violence did exact their price.

[Kenneth Haggett · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic overview of the devastating and tragic killing of 15-year-old Latisha King, a Black trans youth in Southern California.

Salamon, who attended the trial, places court proceedings in conversation with the phenomenological tradition. In doing so, she describes how Latisha’s gender identity and expression (often referred to as her “sexual orientation” or “sexuality” by witnesses and lawyers) were framed as aggressive and, therefore, inviting of violence.

Salamon discusses the varying (phenomenological) interpretations of Latisha’s gendered embodiment, portrayed through her comportment, movement, and use of objects (i.e., high heels, earrings, makeup, nail polish, etc.). The majority of witnesses’ (including teachers and students) descriptions of her embodiment framed Latisha (and her gender expression) as “negative attention seeking,” rather than a simple signifier of her gender identity. In turn, it seems, witnesses bolster the defence’s claim that Latisha was the aggressor who invited violence from McInerney, the 14-year-old defendant and shooter, rather than McInerney as the aggressor for brutally murdering Latisha.

A fantastic but heartbreaking read that speaks to the nature of transphobia and racism in the American judicial system—and American culture more generally.

[Aidan English · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for class - first time reading a philosophy/ phenomenology book. Really interesting insight into the ways trans people are categorized as aggressors by a heterosexual society, a lie that is used to justify violence and hatred.

[pn]

this is smart as hell but the deadnaming is unjustified even though salamon tries to defend it

[Luke]

Pub 2018

[Gloria Cook · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting exploration of the language around hate crime that doesn't engage critically enough with the concepts of prison and justice

[Mills College Library]

306.768 S1599 2018